Whether you are marketing a simple product or a complicated one, a clear, concise explanation will help your prospects understand how your product can solve their problem. That’s where explainer videos come in. As a complement to a great sales deck that goes into more detail and can be customized, an explainer video provides a high-level overview of your value proposition. Having a video easily accessible to people browsing your site prevents your sales team from having to explain the basics, enabling them to dive deeper with interested potential customers.

Explainer videos can be talking heads, interspersed with product shots. But they often take the form of animations, because animated videos can be faster and cheaper to produce than shooting original footage with all of the equipment and personnel that entails. Either way, you’ll need a tight script, compelling visuals, a friendly voice over and upbeat music.

Explainer videos should less than two minutes in length, which translates into a written script of 300 words or less. Tempted to just post your script as web content and skip the video production? Unfortunately, you won’t see the same results. Videos hold people’s attention more than standard web content or blog posts. In fact, marketers who are using video are seeing an average of 49 percent faster growth in revenue, according to the latest Aberdeen report.

How could you use an explainer video? They often fall into one of these categories:

• Benefit-driven – hitting on the top three benefits of your product/service
• How-to – breaking down a process into steps
• Demo – showcasing your product in its most popular use case
• Compete – comparing your product to your competitors’
• Larger organizations also use explainer videos as a key part of internal communications for onboarding and training employees.

Here are three explainer videos developed for a variety of purposes. They might inspire you to think about how an explainer video would complement your marketing mix.