How to Create an Explainer Video for Your App

How to Create an Explainer Video for Your App

72% of people prefer watching a video explaining your product rather than reading copy about it. Video explainers can often educate users quicker by showing quick visualizations explaining the product, rather than just forcing them to scroll through text explaining what the product does.

Write a Script

Write a few bullet points outlining what you want to go over. You will want to briefly explain the problem, then explain how your product solves the problem. If it helps, pretend each bullet point is a slide in a slideshow.

Then expand your bullets into sentences explaining any additional detail about those sections a user might want. Keep your language simple and informal. Read through it and make sure it isn't too short or long. Keep the length around 60 to 180 seconds.

Make sure to include a call to action at the end, so watchers know exactly what to do if they're ready to sign up.

Record the Voice Over

To easily record yourself from your computer:

You are probably your best voice actor. It's free, people like hearing from the founder, and having a personal touch to your products is usually a good idea.

However if you don't want to record the voice over yourself, hiring voice actors from Voices.com is really easy. You pretty much just upload a script, hear a few lines read by a bunch of different actors, and then hire the best one to read the full script.

Editing the Video Together

You've got a lot of options here. But I'd recommend Canva if you don't have video editing experience. There's lots of templates available for you to use and you'll only have to drag & drop in your images and change some text.

Turn each one of those sections from our bullet points earlier into its own scene with a new animation or video of your product.

Recording a Video of Your Product

If applicable, your explainer video should also show some of your actual product in action. Show people what it looks like to get value out of your product. You don't have to show everything start to finish (unless it's quick), but just show a few key features that will help your audience understand your product better.

  • On Mac: To record a screen capture, press Cmd+Shift+5 and then hit the record button.
  • On Windows: Use the Game Bar to record your screen.

Music

You'll probably want music, unless you're making a tutorial video. In which case just speech is fine.

You can buy cheap royalty free music at Audio Jungle. There is a lot of free music out there, but the quality is spotty. I wouldn't recommend going free on this one, unless you get lucky and find the perfect free track.

Animations

What would an explainer be without some animations. Canva has some animations built in, but you can find a lot of other great free animations on the Lottie Files site. Just find the one you want, and download it as a gif. Then you should be able to import that to Canva, or whatever other software you're using to edit video.

What's Next?

If you want to take your explainer video even further, you can try A/B testing a few explainer videos with a new script or new visualizations.

You can also try adapting your video for other platforms like social networks.