Use case
Marketing explainer videos, hand-drawn: product stories and landing-page videos. Explain positioning in sixty seconds.
Create your first videoA marketing explainer video makes your product's value visible before a visitor decides whether to read. Most software landing pages rely on screenshots, feature lists, and customer quotes. Those formats ask the visitor to do the interpretive work: read, connect, and form a mental model of how the product helps them. A hand-drawn animation does that work for them, showing the problem, the mechanism, and the outcome in a sequence the viewer follows without effort. explain.ink produces marketing explainer videos for landing pages, product launches, SaaS onboarding flows, and paid acquisition campaigns. The audience is product marketers, growth leads, SaaS founders, and landing-page owners who need conversion to happen before a visitor bounces.
A marketing explainer video is a short video that shows, in clear visual terms, what a product does, who it helps, and what the buyer should do next.
Marketing teams use these videos at the points in the funnel where buyers hesitate. A visitor arrives at a landing page already aware they have a problem. If the page cannot explain the solution quickly, the visitor leaves. A marketing explainer video addresses that gap by compressing explanation into sixty seconds or less.
It has the highest impact in three situations: when a product solves an unfamiliar problem and text descriptions do not transfer the idea fast enough; when paid ads bring qualified traffic that converts poorly on a text-heavy page; and when self-serve onboarding stalls because new users cannot visualize the first steps. In each case the underlying problem is the same: the offer exists but the visitor cannot see it yet.
Different conversion goals require different video structures. explain.ink covers six:
explain.ink is an automated hand-drawn pipeline. You provide a source document: a landing page URL, a pitch deck, or a short written product brief. The system reads it, generates a storyboard, draws the scenes in a hand-drawn visual style, adds a voiceover, and returns a finished video file. The process runs in minutes.
Source intake. Paste your landing page URL or upload your product document. You can also write a short brief describing the problem you solve, the buyer you are targeting, and the outcome you want the video to show.
Storyboard generation. The system produces a storyboard: one scene per step in the story, with a caption on each scene describing what happens visually. You review the scene list and captions before anything is drawn or recorded. Changing a scene at this stage costs nothing and takes seconds.
Scene drawing and voiceover. Each scene is rendered in the hand-drawn style, from the minimal style a product landing page often uses to the deck style that sits closer to a sales slide. A voiceover is generated in sync with the visual sequence. No external illustrators or voice artists required.
Delivery and format export. The finished video is available as a 1080p MP4 in 16:9, 1:1, and 9:16 ratios. Adjusting individual scenes after delivery does not require re-rendering the full video. The pipeline that produces the video is described step by step in how a video is made.
Every marketing explainer video produced through explain.ink includes:
1080p master file in MP4 format, optimized for fast loading on Wistia, Vidyard, Vimeo, or direct page hosting.
Multi-channel crop packages included: 16:9 widescreen for desktop landing pages and YouTube, 1:1 square for LinkedIn and X feeds, and 9:16 vertical for Instagram Reels and TikTok ad placements.
Hand-drawn animation is most useful in categories where text alone leaves a gap between what a visitor reads and what they understand. Three situations where marketing teams use it:
B2B SaaS and developer infrastructure. Products in this category often have no visible UI that a screenshot can capture. A complex multi-tenant API, a distributed caching layer, or an event pipeline is invisible to a prospective buyer until someone draws it. A marketing explainer video turns architecture into a visual sequence the buyer can follow before the technical documentation takes over.
Financial technology and compliance platforms. Buyers in regulated industries compare your product against established tools they already trust. A short video that walks through the workflow step by step shows what the product does rather than claiming it. This matters at the point in the sales cycle where prospects are scanning for a reason to disqualify.
Product-led growth tools for non-technical buyers. When a product is capable but the learning curve is steep, marketing copy tends to stay at the outcome level without showing the path. A how-it-works video maps the first steps and the new mental model, giving non-technical buyers enough context to evaluate the product without involving an engineer.
The cost depends on how much of the production you want automated versus customized, the number of scenes in the storyboard, how many format variants you need, and the volume of assets across your campaign.
The automated pipeline on explain.ink is designed for teams that need a finished asset without the overhead of coordinating a production studio. You do not pay for project managers, manual revision rounds, or scheduled booking windows. The key cost drivers are video length and the number of distinct formats in your delivery package.
Traditional video production agencies carry overhead built into their quotes whether you need it or not: booked illustrators, voice talent coordination, and rounds of manual handoffs. The automated pipeline gives you a predictable number tied to the asset, not to the hours spent on it.
To get a quote for your use case: share your landing page URL or product document and we will come back with a script draft and a pricing estimate.
Four options are available to a product marketing team building a conversion video. Here is what each delivers in practice:
Stock footage and live action. Stock video signals generic before the viewer has processed a word. Clips of people at whiteboards, in open-plan offices, or pointing at screens do not show how software works. They decorate without explaining. Live action with actual actors costs more and dates quickly: the setting that looked current during the shoot looks dated, and it still does not depict your product.
3D motion graphics. High-end 3D is expensive, slow to produce, and brittle. An update to a UI component or a workflow change means revising an asset that was expensive and slow to make in the first place. At lower budgets, common 3D templates produce a recognizable generic style that resembles every other explainer video on the platform.
Synthetic AI avatars. Talking-head AI videos pull the viewer's attention toward the face and away from the product. Viewers register something inconsistent in the movement and vocal cadence before they register the message. The format works for some content types, but not for a product landing page where the viewer needs to understand a mechanism, not watch a presenter.
Hand-drawn animation. A line drawn on a blank surface holds attention because the viewer does not know yet what it will become. The style is distinctive. The visual logic is easy to follow. The content stays relevant even when the product evolves, because drawings represent concepts rather than screenshots of a specific UI version.
Share your landing page URL, pitch deck, or product document. We will review your positioning and come back with a 60-second script draft for your team to look at.
Published by explain.ink. Updated .
Forty lessons that look like they belong together, without hiring an animator.
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Safety, compliance and process training, made from the SOP you already wrote.
Hand-drawn YouTube explainer videos for channel series, product channels, and faceless creators.
The full list, with what changes for each job.
For a landing-page hero video, 45 to 75 seconds. This gives enough time to identify the problem, show the mechanism, and give the viewer a reason to keep reading or click. For paid social ads on LinkedIn, Meta, or TikTok, aim for 15 to 30 seconds focused on a single hook or objection. For cold email or sales follow-up, keep it under 45 seconds so the video completes on a mobile screen before the viewer moves on.
Split your traffic: send half to the original page and half to the version with the video above the fold. Track bounce rate, time on page, video play rate, and macro conversions such as signups, demo requests, or trial starts. Four weeks of data at typical SaaS traffic volumes is usually enough to see a clear direction.
Do not self-host large video files on your web server. Use a video hosting platform such as Wistia, Vidyard, or Vimeo, or configure a facade pattern: load a static thumbnail and a play button first, fetch the video player only when the visitor clicks. This prevents third-party scripts from affecting your Core Web Vitals score and mobile loading time.
Yes. Every delivery includes 1:1 square for LinkedIn, X, and Facebook feeds, and 9:16 vertical for Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok.
The automated pipeline produces a finished video in minutes after you submit your source document. You review the storyboard before the video is drawn, so you can adjust the scene structure and captions at zero cost before rendering starts.
Yes. Scenes in the storyboard are modular. Changing one scene does not require re-rendering the full video. You revise the scene caption and image, rebuild, and receive a new file.