Making short posts that will be interesting is the hardest part for many of us. finding something useful or entertaining for a post requires some effort, but not really hard to do, if you have a week for this. Reactions and comments are helping to find good connections, and initiate discussions in the right direction. Most of the time it will be just talks, but it can help find clients and businesses that may be interested in your services.

It's more about marketing and business, than design and animation. But after all, we have to feel the market to provide the best options for efficient advertising and becoming valuable assets of someones businesses. Motion design can provide right approaches, but it can also be a piece for a portfolio, which is just beautiful graphics, takes a lot of time to produce and hence, costs high. Making simpler things, based on templates, stocks is a necessary part of motion design work. But this regular work also needs to be used for public interaction and attracting new leads. Building entire work with a purpose for social media presence is just too important activity to avoid and wait for another month or year.

Target audience

Analyzing one's strongest sides and targeting for a specific niche requires work with data and statistics of posts, viewer's reactions, demographics. Totally not the design and animation part of work. But it's a universal requirement for many businesses. And it's closer to the motion design field, because many marketing technical terms and words might be familiar to interactive designers and animators, so a small hidden advantage is included. The rest depends on the efforts we're putting into learning how to work with social media platforms, LinkedIn in particular.

Most of the time it's just needed to find a way to overcome our fear of posting messages. Messages that will be helpful for the motion designers community, helpful for clients, interesting for everyone. Path of errors is inevitable, but anyways, those who already worked as creative directors, art directors, marketers and business owners will be having more clearer messaging for a community. Because they have moreover outlined tasks for some particular company, website. And they already have some imagination of what's produced for customers, who they are, what they need theoretically.

But if you're a new motion designer without a specialization, and doing everything for anyone - it will be hard to step out from the competition. Because about 95% of motion designers can do everything on some level. Design, 2d animation, 3d modeling, animation etc. So, determination of your main proficiency gives you a chance to be shown for someone, who's looking for someone like you. Competition will be always, but there will be a different pool of candidates. So simply it's easier to become the best candidate among 5 motion designers for the natural cosmetics brands, than one of 150 motion designers that can do everything.

Defining the niche

Knowing the audience is like knowing the rules of the game. You're making much less mistakes that can lead to an absolutely irrelevant final product. Learning the company goals and strategies can be time consuming, and working in one niche will lower the efforts needed to understand a client. And it will bring trust, which is really important in almost every moment of communication. They know that you know what to do, because you have experience in this field. They don't need 30 years of experience in animation. They just have to feel that you're their good fellow, who understands the basics and much more. It's comfortable for both parties.

It can help significantly to build a good portfolio that's tied to some industry. Simply define for yourself if you like medical, automotive, real-estate, sports, hotel-restaurant, electronics direction, and build a portfolio that can be suitable for such kind of clients, that's relevant to these businesses. At least it will be a good start. Later it can be a more specific or more advanced outline of your target audience.
By learning, exploring specific things about the niche, it will be much easier to talk about the needs of your imagination(firstly for some time) or real clients. Speaking their language is important. For a client it's like finding those, who's supporting him in this big and wild world.

Marketing Research

LinkedIn is just providing the most pure data about client's. It's not just liking or comments from teenagers, who're just watching fun stuff. Business owners, recruitres, CEOs, creative directors, professionals, heads of marketing departments of big companies, influencers, writers, book publishers. Many of them may like your message in the post. And this way you'll find a source of inspiration for an animation project, which will satisfy the content needs of these respected people.

Interaction with the audience is also an important part of the motion designer career. It's needed to feel what people love to see. A market is an unstoppable force, which unfortunately can form your future. But it can also improve your future, if you'll be able to predict it a little bit. Which is possible to do, when you have only similar people by some characteristic. Measuring the whole market will provide less useful predictions than with a smaller group of people that's interested just in some type of products or services.

For example: winter tyres. Seasonal ads that are relevant only in late autumn and winter months. All graphics will be created earlier, but for example it's needed to show this transition from autumn to winter, and how this tyres are performing in such conditions (in details), so those motion designers who is familiar with this problem can show the ad, that will be clearly saying, that these tyres are best for you.

Interaction with the ad will demonstrate that the message and design was correct and hitting the right audience. Making glowing light effects will probably not resonate with the audience the same way. But it will be beautiful, eye-catching. But probably for clients that don't plan to buy these tires. It's just a very simple example, but probably providing clear evidence of the importance of the ability to write the right message firstly, for the right client and then to start a creative process.

Trial and Error

Sometimes there will be some mistakes in understanding the real intentions of the client. But if you're clearly seeing that the post gathers much more likes and comments on LinkedIn than usual, then you've probably found the right idea for your audience and clients. The rest is just to use it for improving your presence on the platform by applying your incredible animation skills.