When done right and with a clear strategy in mind, video marketing becomes one of the most effective approaches to promote your product or service, boost sales and increase brand awareness. That’s why video production is quite a trendy approach a lot of businesses aim to follow. In this article, we will dwell on some tips that will help you come up with an effective promotional video that will fit your business goal and perfectly complement your video marketing strategy.
1. Decide on a Goal
One of the best things about video marketing is the opportunity to realize plenty of creative and effective ideas. You may come up with an explainer video to explain to your users the essence of your invention, create a demo video to show how your product works, dedicate your video to one of your products or services to better highlight its benefits, interview your customers, and much more. But all these types of videos are promotional in their nature. The only difference is in your approach and the goal of your promotional video production.
That’s why the first step towards creating an effective promotional video is to decide on the goal you want to achieve. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you may create a video with virality potential. If you need social proof to share with your prospective leads, consider gathering your current customers’ feedback in the form of a video. If you want to state your mission and promote your values, brand storytelling works best in this case.
That is, every effective promotional video starts with setting a clear goal that guides you along this path.
2. Consider Your Marketing Channel
Next, depending on the goal, you should decide on a marketing channel you will use to promote your promotional video. The trick is in the fact that different videos are used at different stages of the sales funnel, and that’s why you should use different marketing channels to show your video to your audience. For example:
- a demo video is suitable for a home page or a product page
- an explainer video may work well on YouTube and crowdfunding platforms
- a storytelling video with a focus on emotions and/or humorous promotional video will make a perfect match with social media.
Also, depending on the channel, you should decide on your video length. Most video production experts agree that the perfect duration of a promotional video is 30 seconds-3 minutes, but don’t take this advice as the ultimate truth.
Short promotional videos are great for well-known brands since they may instantly get started with a key marketing message. Newly created companies need more time to speak of themselves, increasing users’ awareness gradually. However, each rule has an exception. For example, one of the promo videos created by Nike lasts 10 minutes and still performs well.
So, deciding on the perfect length for your video, consider the specifics of your business, your goal, your users’ awareness, and the marketing channel you will use.
3. Follow Your Brand Style
Staying compliant with your brand style is also important for making a holistic impression with the help of a promotional video. Before getting started with it, highlight brand style features you have to use, such as your brand logo, branded colors, other design elements, and your tone of voice.
Each promotional video is a branded video too so you need to use it as one more tool for increasing your brand recognition and awareness, differentiating your brand on the market, and making an emotional connection. According to the research, colors alone are able to improve brand recognition by 80% so be smart with the visual tools you intend to use.
Experts even recommend creating a branded video style guide that will highlight the approaches you will use to follow your brand style as such, keep up with the current trends, and achieve your marketing goals with the help of a video.
4. Create a Script and Storyboard
After you are done with your goal, channel, and style, it’s time to create a script and storyboard for your future video. But what should you have to create first? Like with video duration, there is no one-fit recipe. Since the process of promotional video production is quite creative, this is the right moment to trust your intuition and start creating while being guided by your inspiration.
If you have some ideas to use in your script, write them down, and then you will be able to create the corresponding storyboard frames. If you already imagine some pictures, draw them on paper and the right words will come by themselves.
But don’t forget that your promotional video should be logical. It should start with a brief introduction that instantly connects to your target audience, then addresses their pain point, and proceeds with your product benefits and unique features, summing it up with a motivating call to action.
5. Come up With Several Calls to Action
By the way, your call to action deserves to be discussed separately. This is the main driver of your conversions so the best strategy is to come up with several CTAs and test them. Let’s compare two simple examples of calls to actions:
- Find Out More
- Buy Now
Both are simple and understandable but they work differently in different environments. For example, the first one is good for promotional videos that are shown to the new group of users who may still have questions about your product or service. The second one is more suitable for promoting limited offers when you need to create a sense of urgency. To come up with the performant CTA, get back to your goal and try to feel what intended you have to create to make your users perform a target action.
6. The Last Tip – Define Your Metrics of Success
What makes an effective promotional video? You guessed it right In addition to the tactics we have already discussed, you should also have clear success metrics to evaluate your video effectiveness. For example, if there is a product promotional video, the increase in product sales may be your metric. If you want to increase brand awareness, monitor the number of shares, likes, comments, and mentions across different platforms.
Also, keep in mind that video marketing is quite an effective approach by itself but you need to follow a clear strategy and align your video marketing efforts with other ways you use to promote your business.
