“Video is the future of content marketing.”

The words have almost become a mantra providing background noise as we content marketers go about our daily tasks.

The statistics are also difficult to ignore.

According to Cisco, by 2017 video will make up 69% of consumer internet traffic.   A July article posted in The Guardian noted that, “Various studies show more than half of companies are already making use of the medium – a figure that’s predicted to rise as more and more realize the possibilities. Nielsen claims 64% of marketers expect video to dominate their strategies in the near future.”

In addition, the popularity of You Tube is undeniably changing American viewing habits and has taken a massive bite out of television viewing.

So it’s no wonder content marketers feel the pressure to add video to their content marketing repertoire.

But while there are many ways to create videos that offer quality content to a niche audience, the expertise required has often been a barrier for smaller organizations on a budget.

However, that appears to be changing.  A bevvy of startups have emerged to fill this important marketing niche and one of them is GoAnimate, a do-it- yourself animated video website.

I recently took a look at GoAnimate to gauge it’s usefulness as a tool for video content creation.  Here is what I found.

Learning Curve

GoAnimate provides excellent tutorials for using its tools, both in video and text form.  It takes you by the hand and guides you as you create your first video.  It also offers more informative videos allowing you to learn in bite sized pieces while you are creating.

Ease of Use

If you know how to click, drag and drop, you can create a video using GoAnimate.  The quality of your video will depend on content marketing skills such as story telling, your ability to identify niche audience concerns and more. So while it’s an inexpensive tool for creating a relatively professional looking animated video – results will vary.

I played around with the tool for a few hours using it to create two animated videos.  The first, as you can imagine, was pretty atrocious.  But by the second, I started to be more familiar with what to do.  I must say, I’m used to a much higher level of frustration when working with video – even when I’m familiar with the tools.  So GoAnimate gets an A+ from me when it comes to ease of use.

Finished Product

So, after a couple of tries within a three hour period, here is my finished product.  While I admit I have a long way to go in learning to create a quality animated video, I’m impressed with what I was able to accomplish as a complete newbie to GoAnimate.  With a little time to brainstorm creative story lines and a little more familiarity with this tool, I think I could come up with something quite professional and effective.
Twitter Tragedy by jenisefryatt on GoAnimate

Cost

GoAnimate plans run from $39 to $250 per month, with a discount when you pay for one year up front. Features for the starting plan include unlimited video production, hosting/playback and downloads/exports. The premium plan includes project collaboration and the ability to add clickable links.

Drawbacks

While going back and making changes to videos you’ve already created is relatively easy, once you make a change to a character’s position in one scene, you have to go through each successive scene and make the same change.  If you don’t move the character to the exact position it was in previously, the character will appear to jump from scene to scene (as the characters do in my video above.)  There may be a very easy fix for this, but I didn’t find it during my 3 hours using GoAnimate.

Conclusion

GoAnimate provides easy entry into the world of video marketing for content marketers who are on a budget.  Creating a quality animated video that achieves your marketing goals with it will depend mostly on your ability to tell a compelling story that speaks to your audience.

Disclosure: GoAnimate gave me temporary access to its Business Plan features for the purposes of this review.