10 Awesome Video Types to Help You Promote Your Business

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As marketers, one of the most common roadblocks we face is trying to drive the most engagement for our content! In fact, studies have shown it’s the most common challenge faced by B2B as well as B2C marketers.

In order to entice your audience to interact with your content, you need to consistently tell brand stories that inspire and delight. It’s a tall order, meaning that you have to persistently keep creating content that:

  1. Educates your audience and answers their questions

  2. Entertains and keeps them hooked

  3. Is relatable and shareable

Easier said than done, right? Grabbing people’s attention is a huge task, which is why many marketers can’t get by without video marketing!

Video marketing presents your brand with a fantastic opportunity to stand out from the crowd. They’re a visual feast for your audience. A video communicates a lot more information in far less time. In fact, a study from Responsive Inbound Marketing found that social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined! Moreover, video is a medium that can help you to tell some irresistible brand stories. It helps you to make use of thought-provoking visuals, graphics, sound and narration to get your audience hooked.

Over 500 million (that’s half a BILLION) people are watching video on Facebook every day. - Forbes

Don’t be left in the dust!

Create video content that provides an awesome experience for your target audience but remember that developing such content requires tons of strategic and creative planning. You have to also ensure that videos are created and targeted according to the stage of the customer lifecycle.

Each video type works best for a particular stage of the customer journey. When you segment your audience on the basis of their lifecycle stage, you will be able to target them with the right marketing messages.

Types of videos to use in marketing:

Educational videos

Providing education to address a problem/pain point for your target audience is a great way to get noticed. Start with a little keyword research to find high search volume keywords in your niche. There are a variety of content formats to help you create educational videos including live-action videos, whiteboard videos, and webinars.

The key to these videos is that they’re short yet very informative. Whether you are in the business of selling business tools or consumer products related to health and beauty, educational videos are a great way to start building a long-lasting relationship with your audience.

Businesses that are cause-related can use educational videos to explain their cause in an interesting way. Take a look at this thought-provoking example from Malezi Bora.

This video beautifully explains and educates people about social problems and influence them to take a step forward. If you are selling a product/service that solves persistent social problems, then such videos can do wonders for your business. These videos work well for non-profit organizations as well.

Educational video content is critical for spreading awareness about your products and services. You should regularly produce quality educational videos. The strategy will fetch you more attention for your brand and a growing subscriber base for your content. They are equally helpful in capturing and nurturing leads.

Entertainment videos

Online audiences love short, snackable content. With this format, you can create entertaining videos that make your audience laugh or get inspired. An understanding of your target audience will help you to create videos that they’ll enjoy watching - videos that will imprint your brand and keep them coming back for more. Starbucks created a charming animated video series called 1st and Main. The video series entertains the audience and showcases Starbucks as a ‘the third place’ between home and work.

Videos like the one below work because they make your brand non-intrusive, and they let you have fun with your target audience. Whether you are a retail or an FMCG brand, this kind of content is a sure-fire way to strengthen brand rapport. Social media fans love videos like this, so if you’re considering video, this is a good start for your content marketing calendar. Entertainment videos are great for the attention stage of the buyer’s journey. Did the Starbucks video keep your attention? Case and point!

Explainer and demo videos

An essential part of marketing your products and services is to explain their unique value proposition.

91% of consumers have watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service. - Strategic

An explainer video is an animated video that illustrates the core features of your products and services in simple terms. It uses animated characters, text, graphics, and a narrative to tell your product story. Just note: You must use a professional voiceover and music while creating an explainer video.

Explainer videos are extremely beneficial for startup companies and businesses selling complex technology products.

Such videos are helpful in the capture stage of the buyer’s journey. You can put up your explainer video on your landing page along with a relevant Call-to-Action, to collect some qualified leads for your business

Event videos

Promoting your events on social media is a great way to strengthen your relationship with your fans and followers.

Video of a live event increases brand favorability by 63%. - Twitter

You can get professional videographers to record corporate event videos and then post them up on your social pages. Live streaming on social media is a trend that’s proven to work and requires minimal resources. You can live stream short snippets of your business events as stories on Instagram or as live videos on Facebook and Twitter.

Event promotion videos are very helpful in nurturing your existing leads and building deeper relationships with them. They do this by creating hype around your brand and its newly launched products, and spreading the word! If you are a big brand with a large, geographically dispersed audience, then videos like these are a must!

Testimonial videos

Every time new prospects visit your website or social pages, they are looking to validate the merit of your products and services.  Once they are convinced about the features and pricing, they are keen to get an unbiased opinion about your offerings.

You can get your happy clients to be a part of a testimonial video that includes:

  1. Details about the problems that they were facing prior to using your products.

  2. Key product features that helped solve their problems.

Testimonial videos can work wonders to trigger the buying decision among your potential customers.

Customer testimonials are one of top three most effective type of video content. - Marketinghy

Corporate videos

Corporate videos serve to showcase your company and its vision to your audience. It is the ‘About Us’ page of your website converted into a live-action video!

A corporate video includes details like:

  1. Strengths of a company and its team

  2. Details about the business infrastructure and quality standards

  3. Awards and achievements

Corporate videos build trust among your audience and focus more on the corporate brand, its values, and its objectives. These videos can be very influential in converting prospects who are considering a variety of options.

Here is a very cool example of how you can use your corporate video to advertise space, office, or building to rent. Using motion graphics within your corporate videos are a cost-effective way to create impactful business videos (which can be a huge plus).


Tutorials

When you are selling a complex product, you must demonstrate its usage to your audience.

Tutorials help you to teach your clients about using the product easily and effectively, and  4 out of 5 consumers believe that demo videos are helpful.

53% of the businesses said their customer support calls reduced after producing video content. - Optinmonster 

Tutorial videos are usually created as screen-sharing videos or slideshow videos. You can also create a powerful, live-action tutorial video like this one from popular productivity tool Evernote.

Work culture videos

Hiring a talented team is critical to the success of every company. It’s great to let people know how much your company values the right people. Attracting the right people is an uphill task. It’s hard to find people who have the skills as well as match your work culture. A company culture video helps you to showcase your workspaces and the overall work environment.

Job posts get 36% more applications if accompanied by a recruiting video. - Jobcast

It gives potential recruits a sneak peek into the everyday work life and the growth opportunities.

These videos are helpful when your business is growing and you need to expand your team size.

Loyalty program videos

Reward programs are great to get your customers to stick around and purchase from you repeatedly. You can promote your reward program with the help of a video that showcases its benefits and explains how it works. Loyalty program videos work well in all types of video formats including animated, live-action, and motion graphics.

Such videos are very effective in the growth phase of the buyer’s journey.

Take a look at this intriguing video from HYOTS.

‘Thank you’ videos

Thanking your customers is a great way to make them feel special.  These type of videos also work equally well in helping you to retain your existing clients and get more business from them. You can use any video format to thank your customers, but creating a very personal video would surely add more value.

Here is an example of a striking ‘Thank you’ video from Talbots, a US-based women’s fashion brand.

In this video, the whole executive team of Talbots comes together to thank their customers. The video gives the audience a sense of being a part of the Talbots community - of women who love to dress well. Videos like these help in bringing out your brand values and making your audience feel connected to those values. All types of B2B and B2C brands can make use of ‘Thank You’ videos for higher customer retention. Make sure you have a large customer base and you’ll definitely benefit from such videos.

If you are considering video to help promote your business, then why not contact Jam Shakeshaft Video today for a creative approach and competitive quote.

5 Important Reasons Why Your Business Needs Video

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Nothing helps your audience identify and relate to your business than a solid brand video. A video puts a face to a name and allows an audience to see the genuine nature of your business and offers. People like buying from people. If they have confidence in you that hugely increases their likelihood to buy from you.

1. Reach more potential customers through social

Video is one of the top shared pieces of content on social media.* If your video is relevant to your audience and resonates with them, they will share it with others who they think it will be useful for or to illicit a similar reaction. This gives your message the opportunity to engage more potential customers. Such organic targeting of individuals means your content will naturally reach the right people if it’s effective in its messaging.

2. Convey more information in less time (and more than just information)

“Videos are processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text. Think about the heavy lifting your cognitive system has to do when reading an article vs. watching a video clip!” ~ Liraz Margalit Ph.D.**

Video is a more passive experience than reading text, it’s much easier for the audience to become immersed in what you’re conveying to them. This results in not only more information being conveyed but an emotional quality that’s near impossible to match in the written word.

3. Google loves video

Google is designed to get the most relevant information to the user, the more informative Google deems the information or content, the more likely it is going to put it further up the user’s search results. Also, Googles own YouTube – the second largest search engine globally* and since this acquisition, Google algorithms heavily favor video content over text-based.

4. Stand out from the crowd

There’s no doubt about it: video is an important part of content marketing and it’s only going to become more essential. Consider these facts:

  • 90% of web consumers say that a video helps them make a decision to buy a business’ product or service

  • 65% of executives who watch work-related videos visit the business’ website afterward

  • 64% of people who visit a business’ website are likely to buy their product after watching a video

  • Estate agency listings that use video get over 400% more inquiries than those without video.

Currently, 71% of companies plan to increase their video marketing budget — you still have the opportunity to stand out from the competition by making use of this powerful marketing tool. Use it to introduce your brand to newcomers, answer your website visitors’ questions, or just to make them laugh—not to mention create a favorable and lasting impression.

5. What are you waiting for?

Not only does a solid brand video act as a means to distill your message, but it is also a statement to all those potential customers out there about how you’re aligned with them and that you’re the solution they’ve been searching for.