Although animated videos have gained some traction in the financial services industry, and are now recognized as a valuable, engaging format to communicate key information quickly, there is still plenty of room for their adoption, particularly when it comes to ETF issuers. As we shall see, animated videos are well-suited to a broad range of use cases and scenarios. What follows are five great ways for ETF issuers to harness animated videos:
Explainer videos: explaining foundational or complex concepts related to your funds
For investors, often one of the greatest barriers to making a decision on an investment is a lack of familiarity with the topic in question. For ETF issuers, animated videos can play a valuable role in educating investors on key topics related to particular funds. Whether it’s explaining the fundamentals of ETFs or more high-level topics such as inverse ETFs or currency hedging, animated videos can help bring seemingly dry topics to life for investors, boosting comprehension and engagement, and bringing them that much closer to investing in your ETFs.
Related: If Content is King, Video is Emperor
Who-we-are videos: walk website visitors through your company’s story, mission, and services
Nothing helps customers connect with brands better than great storytelling, and an ETF issuer’s story is no exception. A compelling origin or mission-based story, delivered via an animated video, can do wonders for customer perception of your brand as well as its products and services, and can go a long way towards building trust with visitors. This also helps reduce the “bounce” effect, where visitors land on your homepage and immediately click away. By offering visitors a simple “play” button to learn more about who you are as a company, you can offer an easy way to find out about your products and services without digging through “walls of text.”
Product-centric videos: explain key selling points of your funds
Prospectuses, fact sheets, white papers, static infographics, and investment cases all still have their important respective roles to play in helping investors gain a better grasp of an ETF. Where animated videos can come into play is as the engaging, colorful gateway to these more in-depth pieces of content. By explaining the one or two key components of your ETF from a bird’s eye view, an animated video can help overcome the initial educational barriers that might intimidate an investor from learning more about the fund in question and enable them to better understand the more sophisticated fund materials on offer.
Case study videos: a case study on how an investor could use your ETF in practice to achieve their investment goals
Sometimes a product-centric video is not enough; you have to explain potential use-cases in an easily-digestible format that helps an investor understand how the ETF in question can solve their specific problems. Case study videos can help bridge the gap between the abstract features of an ETF and the concrete benefits that these features can provide a specific investor with specific goals.
Animated videos are uniquely powerful in their ability to engage, entertain, and educate investors. By utilizing animated videos as versatile tools in a broad range of different applications, ETF issuers can further boost investor engagement, bridge difficult educational gaps, and help connect with potential customers.