In recent years, videos have been making inroads in digital marketing, emerging as a powerful promotional tool for businesses to promote their wares in an exciting and engaging way. Though when it comes to video marketing, there’s some pretty definitive ‘rules’ businesses should stick to in order to get their videos right. Get them wrong and marketing videos can be more hindering to a company than profiting.
Fortunately, if you’re a business looking to embark on an effective video marketing strategy, you’re in the right place, as Small Business Trends explores 25 tips for creating marketing videos.
Tips for Creating Marketing Videos
Tell a Story
Instead of being overtly salesy, an effective video tells a story. As the Digital Marketing Institute notes, businesses should utilize the emotive power of video by appealing to their customer’s needs and desires.
Make Sure the Introduction Stands Out
A little like how we are unlikely to click on an email if we’re not inspired by the subject line, an incredible one fifth of viewers click off a video within 10 seconds if they’re not interested in what they see. With this in mind, the introduction of the video is vitally important and should be made inspiring, entertaining and informative, to hook the viewer and encourage them to view the whole of the video.
Create a Stimulating Title
By the same token, your video’s title should be stimulating and eye-catching in order to grab a viewer’s attention. Furthermore, by using relevant keywords in a title, the video is likely to show up on the search engines when viewers search for the topic.
Focus on the Mission and Less on the Product
Instead of being overtly focused on the product and all its benefits, channel the message of the video into the mission of the product. Dove, for example, are hailed are being experts in creating emotional viral videos that focus less on their product and more on their mission.
Don’t Be Boring
Who wants to watch a boring video? It goes without saying, if you want your business’s video marketing campaign to be successful, create exciting and inspiring videos that can never be considered boring.
Get a Little Bit Risqué!
While too much naughty content is unlikely to do the credibility of your business many favors, as Inc. writes, just the right amount can be good for page views — as long as not overdone.
Make it Mobile Friendly
With more and more people using mobile devices to get online, it’s imperative corporate videos are mobile friendly. In fact, according to YouTube, mobile video consumption increases 100% every year! Marketing videos therefore need to be able to be downloaded and enjoyed on mobile devices.
Think About SEO
Quite simply, Google loves video content and an effective video marketing campaign should have Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. To ensure maximum SEO value from your videos, accompany the video with a well-written description that is tagged with relevant keywords to help boost the video’s SEO.
Include Your URL in the Video
Displaying your website address in a marketing video is a good way for companies to get exposure and generate traffic to their website through a video.
Educate Your Audience
As the Digital Marketing Institute informs, one of the most powerful ways to implement effective video marketing is to educate viewers. Often videos that offer advice, information, tips and other informative content can be more effective than a solely promotional video.
Make the Video More Atmospheric with Music
Music is a powerful tool on video content, evoking a myriad of emotions. Don’t be afraid to use music in your video that fits the mood of the message and crafts a more exciting and emotive video.
Use Video Content Generated by Customers
Putting your customers behind the camera to talk about how they have used and benefited from your product, can be a powerful way to engage viewers and appeal to prospective customers.
Include a Call to Action
Similar to how all blog posts and content should have a call to action at the end, which invites the reader to take further action, such as signing up to a newsletter, or visiting a website, so too should a marketing video. Ask yourself, what do you want viewers to do when they’ve watched the video and then encourage them to do so without being overtly salesy.
Take Viewers Behind the Scenes
Consumers love to get up close to a brand and video marketing offers the perfect opportunity to take customers behind the scenes and into your business’s ‘natural surroundings.’
Include Tutorial Videos
Posting tutorials that are relevant to your niche is a great way to connect and engage with customers. Tutorials shouldn’t give away all your industry secrets, but should be enough to entice the viewer with informative and useful content, leaving them wanting to learn more.
Keep Them Short
Online viewers often don’t have much time to spare before they’re off looking on a new site and at a new video. In this sense, shorter marketing videos can tend to work better than long ones. As Helen Klein Ross told Kiss Metrics:
“The less you say, the more likely people are to remember.”
Use a Professional Voice
Words spoken with clarity and professionalism will always come out better in a corporate video than an amateur speaker, whose lack of experience speaking on the camera is obvious. With this in mind, it might be a good idea to have an employee that is experienced on speaking in front of the camera record for the video, or even think about calling in a professional.
Use Micro-Video Apps
Along with all this talk of keeping videos short for the viewer, it’s also true shorter content is a better format for most social platforms. As Forbes notes, short, concise content triumphs over longer forms of content, particularly on social media channels. Video marketers should consider using micro-video apps, which shorten videos to less than 10 seconds, so they’re ideal of sharing on the likes of Instagram and Twitter.
Pose Questions
Strive to create engagement and conversation with your video by asking viewers questions. Ask viewers to leave answers to the questions in a comment section below the video.
Don’t Be Preoccupied with Perfection
Videos for marketing purposes aren’t Hollywood movies and nobody expects perfection. Whilst you want the video to look professional, don’t become too obsessed with perfection that on the 50th take you still haven’t got in right.
But Don’t Forget Production Quality
That said, it’s important a marketing video is produced professionally. From the camera work to lighting, edited to voice overs, it might be a good idea to call upon the expertise of a professional video production company to ensure the video is produced in a high quality.
Use Videos to Help You Create Your Own Effective Video Marketing Strategy
Head to the likes of YouTube to see how businesses are already building videos that have managed to go viral. Featuring the likes of Coca-Cola, these ‘10 Epic Viral Marketing Videos’ on YouTube will give you some pointers on how some of the biggest and well-known brands are producing a video designed to go viral.
Build Hype Around the Launch of the Video
Instead of just going ahead and launching your video, build hype around the video by promoting its launch date on your website, blog and social media channels.
Provide Some Humor
Not all corporate videos need to be serious. On the contrary, some humour can work well in generating more interest in your video. Vidyard gives an example of a humorous marketing video that proved hugely successful — a parody by cloud invoicing provider Taulia of the award-winning commercial series ‘Get Rid of Cable’ by Direct TV. As Vidyard writes:
“The video not only delivers a laugh, but this kind of humorous take on B2B solution can really get your customers feeling connected with your brand and help you stand out in what can be a stuffy market.”
Embed a Video in Landing Pages
Think strategically about where you are going to place your marketing video. Statistics show that embedding videos in landing pages can raise conversion rates by as much as 80 percent.
With video forecast to claim more than 80 percent of all web traffic by 2019 and 90 percent of customers reporting that product videos help them make purchasing decisions, it is imperative companies create videos that resonate with their audience and ultimately help sell their services and products.
Related reading: Small Business Guide to Video Marketing
Making Video Photo via Shutterstock
Ben Sibley
Videos can be useful at every step of the funnel. We commonly think of posting videos to Youtube to get traffic when with considering videos in marketing, but they can be a great way to communicate with customers too.
Video can warm up your onboarding process or make for a great newsletter. I’m sure customers would also appreciate that kind of personality and attentiveness. Too many businesses feel like they’re ignoring you once you’ve payed.
Aira Bongco
Video is really starting to become a mainstream medium online. But it can be difficult to record and edit them. Hiring someone can get pretty expensive too. So you really need to learn it yourself.
Jack Hodge
These are great tips, Gabrielle. Thanks for sharing them.
Video really is not only the here and now of marketing but also the future. We’re in place where we can see UCG turn into branded content and kill it on social and, maybe, the next step will be more brands creating marketing videos for VR, AR, and the likes. All this shows us is that mastering video is super important, especially for small businesses. So these tips are super helpful for all of us because the more videos we make the better our marketing results and the better our skills. Luckily, for small brands and companies with the smaller budgets, creating video isn’t out of reach. Between live platforms like Facebook Live and YouTube Live and online tools like wistia.com and slide.ly/promo, it’s getting so much easier to create really high quality videos at any budget size. Gone are the days of spending thousands on video campaigns and so are the days of the big brands getting and staying in the spotlight. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to see what the smaller, indie brands start to do with their small budgets and all these new(ish) video tools–especially after they read articles with great tips like this one.
Simon Morice
The skills and literacies for shooting and editing a simple video are available to anyone with a phone. The Filmic Pro and LumaFusion apps along with a microphone are pretty much all you need to make broadcastable films on your iPhone.
The single most common point of failure for video that fails is the story. This is amazing since story is possibly one of the oldest human cultural artefacts. I subscribe to the definition in Dramatica Theory that it is a mind’s argument for the solution to a problem. It’s one that I use in teaching video and audio production.
To make your argument in a 60-90sec story (or less) consider four questions: “What/Where is it?”, “How does it work?”, “What does it mean?”, and “Why is it important?”. The last two questions on impact/benefit and significance are the basis of why you’re great and why we should buy your stuff.
In short: “Making video on your phone using this technique allows you to harness the power of video within a budget that doesn’t break you!”
Virginia
Great tips Gabrielle! The part about the mission caught my attention a lot, it’s something I guess I understood but hadn’t really put that much thought about. It makes total sense, you don’t wanna over saturate your customers with your product, it’s better to sell them on on the depth of it (even thinking of myself as a customer it’s actually easier for me to connect with that than whatever product), so thanks a lot.
The company I work for really wants to make some videos that we can play for commercials or at the office. We have never made a video before, and were wondering what we should do. That is a good idea to make sure we tell a story with our videos. It would be good to make sure we appeal to our customer’s needs through stories. Thank you for all the tips!
These are great inputs, Gabrielle! Every point well thought of. We could definitely use these tips for our video marketing. Can’t wait to share these to my clients.
Yet scared, I am determined to start my own business! I love these tips, especially the one of creating a business video! It’s true, all big companies have wonderful videos that describe who they are, and what they are doing. I will need to look more into how to create a profession video.
visual marketing like infographics and videos are becoming more and more useful and can easily help your brand’s growth. When creating videos to promote your business, consider videos like testimonials, success stories, service or product presentations, reviews, videos for email marketing, and many more. We provide video marketing services to promote your business. For more information visit our website.
Priya Sharma
It’s like check-list of video marketing. I am surely gonna bookmark this and follow for every video I will generate for my company. Thanks for sharing.
has worked hands-on with launching video strategies from the
ground up.
One of the most common challenges when implementing video marketing is figuring out how videos can bring more value to their audience, which is essential. Many businesses are making videos just for the reason of having videos, not to miss the bandwagon. Not only this practice won’t usually bring any results, but can disrupt your audience if you are not careful.
So, before you start your video marketing campaign, make sure to re-evaluate your understanding about your audience: can you deliver more value using videos? What are the types of videos they are searching for? Are there any specific queries/keywords you can optimize? From answering these questions (the more the merrier), you can develop a comprehensive video marketing plan.
Another important thing is that regarding videos, longer videos are always better, but maintaining quality and engagement will be harder. The key here is finding that delicate balance.
Your tips for a marketing video are great. But I find it difficult to combine humor and professionalism in one video. I also notice most successful marketing video have their clear and meaningful messages instead of only products. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for your helpful list. I would say the single most important – and often underrated – point is the story! A good story keeps people listening around bonfires, reading a book cover to cover in one day, or creating an emotional connection to a company. Don’t tell people what you are doing; tell them why, and why YOU!
It’s interesting to know that a fifth of people won’t watch more than 10 seconds of the video before losing interest. My brother and I want to make a video to advertise our business. Maybe we’d benefit from finding someone to help us create one that will hold viewers’ attention long enough to learn about us.
Video is really starting to become a mainstream medium online. But it can be difficult to record and edit them. Hiring someone can get pretty expensive too. So you really need to learn it yourself.
-Michael Joseph
I also shifted to YouTube more as compared to Reading those boring articles over internet. Videos are the future.
This is awesome! Thank you so much for the thorough set of instructions. I was wondering from the number of post but i can’t get satisfaction information from there. But when I was reading your post my process is ending. I was being too much happy with your post information.
Sudhakar Tammysetty
Using videos for marketing is gaining popularity option for most of the markers. Even customers are spending more time on video content. If the video has subtitles, it helps a lot for people who watch video muting audio. Your tips are great and easy to implement.
Thanks a lot for sharing Gabrielle.
I have try to read 25 tips because i was looking of video promotional tips which will be helpful to grow business services .
Actually I have a business promotional tips and also have 3D Animation, Logo Animations & Intros, Corporate Videos, Profile Videos, Educational Videos, Animated Videos, How It Works Videos, Stick Figure Videos, Stock & Cartoon Videos, Kinetic Typography, Video Editing & Motion Graphics etc.
That’s why I was looking some promotional video tips which i have gotten from this blog .
Thanks for sharing your informative tips
As someone who spends their waking hours convincing would-be clients to devote resources (time and money) to producing video content for their brand and their products and services, this is great information to help convert the unconvinced. And I love that your #1 action item is to tell a story. Videos without stories never yield as much engagement as those that include some sort of a narrative.
Thanks for the great content!
These tips are very useful for beginners who want to grow their business. thanks!
This is awesome! Thank you so much for the thorough set of instructions.
For years, I have been planning to start my business, and now that I’ve decided I am looking for advice on how to promote properly. I like that you recommend hiring a marketing video agency, and make sure that you tell a story, along with making sure that the introduction stands out. I will start looking for a video marketing production near me so that I can get the project going.
I like that you mentioned that humor can be a powerful tool into getting the attention of an audience. I’ve been thinking about starting my own clothing store business someday and I think having a nice video advertisement will be good for its grand opening day. If I’m lucky, maybe I could even make the local TV station air it as well.
I just want to say thank you!! I just found your blog and I am at the baby stages of my business. All of your tips have been super informative and have helped me a lot! I appreciate all that you do!
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Outstanding content and presentation. I’ll be implementing your suggestions immediately. Keep inspiring others as you have done here!
I really appreciate what you do. Thank you! I’ve been asked to come up with a content strategy for a video campaign for the company I currently work for. This video is a great help for brainstorming ideas!
I really appreciate you for publishing this blog here about tips for creating marketing videos; it’s really a helpful and very useful for us. This is really appreciated that you have presented this data over here, I love all the information shared. Great article!
Very good article & i picked up on the having the points made about having the right lighting for the camera to work right. This is such a big thing & if the lighting isn’t right your footage just wont work. This is very common when companies try & live stream an event or conference, without the right lighting equipment your event / shoot is floored. Either hire the expertise of a professional video production company or hire the right lighting for the job, most production companies can help with this sort of stuff. Ohh and for those that need content there are plenty of sites out there giving away free content or content that can be turned into better content if your ok with some simple video editing software.
amazing ! Content is very useful. You present really well!!
Thank you for all the content offered by the page through your comments and information, it was a great help for some work that I had pending for the university, thanks for everything
I’m finding your tips so helpful! Tips are so important for business owners to help them grow.
I just want to say thanks and I’ll be implementing your suggestions immediately.
that’s really cool and thanks for this amazing content looking forward for more also
Thank you!,you are so structured, clear, organized and informative. I love your style and I implement your strategies in my business.
creating video marketing is great for more conversions and more traffic
Laptopsfreak
I just want to say thanks and I’ll be implementing your suggestions immediately