When it comes to planning your online marketing strategy, videos are maybe the most engaging type of content you can implement. After all, thanks to wildly different styles and types – from the minimalistic whiteboard style to the more traditional commercial ad – most would agree that video content fits in any strategy and niche!

However, like any other marketing medium, a tool can only go so far. You still need to know how to use it properly! And that’s why we are here today 😉

In this piece, we will break down a varied selection of popular types of marketing video styles, tell you what they are best for, and give you a few tips on how to get the most out of each. 

So, let’s get started!

1. Product Videos: Making Your Offerings the Protagonists

Product videos are generally used in e-commerce businesses as they give you the perfect platform to list the qualities of particular products or services succinctly and effectively. Their main goal is to explain the uses and benefits of what you offer, dispel any misconceptions, and help potential buyers understand your product or service while making it more appealing.

A Few Tips on Making Great Product Videos:

  • Show your product or service in action, so your audience can get an idea of how it works in just a glimpse. 
  • Put your product or service in context. 
  • Instructions are a must only when it comes to complex products or services, as they make it clear to the audience what they can expect and how they can achieve the desired results. Otherwise, focus on how the product can positively impact the viewer’s life.

Use Product Videos To:

Product videos are an essential piece in most marketing strategies because they increase the trust in your product, get your leads closer to a shopping decision, and specifically target people who are closer to taking action, which leads to more sales and conversions.

2. How-To Videos:  Win Customers Over, Step By Step 

You can think about How-to videos as a particular sub-section of educational videos, one with such a well-defined and distinctive structure and language that deserves its own entry. These are videos that focus on a process and how to accomplish it through a step-by-step description. Their goal is to inform your audience on how to carry out a specific set of instructions to achieve the desired goal, one that involves or relates to your product or service. 

A Few Tips on Making Great How-To Videos:

  • Stick to the style’s procedural nature. Their main goal is to explain a process step by step – no need to reinvent the wheel. 
  • Follow the right structure and format, and include your product whenever possible in the process you are describing. 
  • Pick a relevant topic that ties to your product or brand and helps viewers attain the desired goal. A How-to video is only as useful as the goal they help accomplish is valuable to its viewer.

Use How-To Videos To:

How-to videos can help educate your potential customers, increase trust in your brand and product, help in cross-selling and up-selling, and improve the overall perceived value around your products.

3. Commercials: Designed to Help You Sell

Commercials, also known as video ads, are a kind of content that aims directly to promote your brand or products. It is their main goal. Commercial videos are thought of as directly promotional, as they don’t try to camouflage the fact that they are developed specifically to sell something to your audience. This type of content is the closest to traditional advertising you can find in online video marketing campaigns and remains as effective now as it has ever been.

A Few Tips on Making Great Commercials:

  • Commercials go straight to the point. You don’t need to try and hide the fact that you want to sell something, but don’t be blunt about it either. 
  • The average duration is 30 seconds per video, especially for social media PPC campaigns.
  • They should be focused on one key element – usually your key value proposition or built around an entirely new product release, for example, instead of trying to cram all available info in a single ad.

Use Commercials Videos To:

Commercials are great to help you generate attention and build hype around your products or announcement through paid ads. They can also be useful to raise brand awareness and, last but not least, drive more visits to your online presence with the right CTA.

4. Explainer Videos: A Formula that Gets Results

Animated explainer videos are short videos explicitly made to describe your business, service, or product in an uncomplicated and appealing way. They are the perfect blend of informational and educational content all in one. They generally tackle a client’s specific pain point while they explain your company’s solution to it. 

Explainer videos are a perfect fit for your website, but they also work great for paid YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter ads and as stand-alone content for your social media.

A Few Tips on Making Great Explainer Videos:

  • Keep them short. Explainers shouldn’t be longer than 120 seconds, as you want them to go straight to the point. 
  • Keep them uncluttered. You only need to answer to the “what”, “how”, and “why” of your service or product. 
  • Always focus on your target audience. Aim your videos to a specific issue, so you can create a solid connection with your viewers.

Use Explainer Videos To:

Explainer videos are great to help you increase conversions during the awareness and consideration stages of the sales funnel and improve average dwell times when hosted on your sites. They can also help your site’s discoverability and overall ranking by ranking by themselves on YouTube and search engines.

5. Customer Testimonials: Let Your Clients Speak for Your Brand

This kind of video revolves around having genuinely satisfied customers offering their reviews and opinions about what your company has to offer. In them, a person stands in front of a camera and shares their thoughts and experiences about your product or service and how your company helped them with a specific problem. Customer testimonial videos are a safe bet if you want to make your brand more relatable to your audience.

A Few Tips on Making Great Customer Testimonials:

  • Your video should be genuine. Forget about hiring actors or trying to get people to “play a part”. Viewers can tell the real deal from a performance, and you want your testimonials to ring true every single time. 
  • Make it structured. A good questionnaire is vital; you have to make sure that your happy client explains their problem, recaps how they first heard about your brand, and breaks down in which way your brand helped them solve their problem.

Use Testimonial Videos To:

Customer testimonials are great if you want to increase trust in your brand and humanize your company in the public’s eye. Also, while not built necessarily for it, they can also help you boost sales and get your audience closer to a shopping decision. 

6. Educational Videos: Address Important Issues

Educational videos’ main goal is to inform an audience about some specific problem they are experiencing or topics they are interested in (that relate to your brand or products). The principal idea of this type of video is to help the audience understand certain things, providing value and bringing them closer to your brand and the solutions it offers. 

A Few Tips on Making Great Educational Videos:

  • Stay relevant. Only talk about issues that are important for your audience.
  • Go straight to the point and provide only succinct and helpful answers to your potential customers’ doubts or information they’d find valuable. 
  • Try to be fun, as educational videos can especially benefit from being entertaining. No one wants to spend valuable time of their lives watching boring content if they can choose to watch enjoyable videos.

Use Educational Videos To:

Educational videos give you an excellent way to increase your brand’s visibility and nurture awareness at the early stages of the buyer’s journey. They can also help you position your brand as an expert in the industry and a reference to come back to once customers are closer to a purchase decision.

7. Company Culture Videos: Put the People Behind Your Brand In The Limelight

If you are looking to bring your audience closer to what your company is all about, company story videos are a great fit for your strategy. They are amazing at adding a more human touch to your brand and having potential customers connect with your values, goals, and the things you represent. These videos can take many forms: employee interviews/testimonials, event coverage, foundation stories, etc. But regardless of the specific formula that you decide to go for, they are all less about selling and more about engaging viewers personally.

A Few Tips on Making Company Story Videos:

  • Give them a “unique vibe”. Your company is a community of people that can’t be compared to any other group out there. This kind of video should be about you and only you. 
  • Include different voices from your staff, as it helps you feel more relatable to your audience. 

Use Company Culture Videos To:

If you want to increase your brand’s trust and generate a stronger connection with your target audience to boost sales in the long run, then company culture videos are a must in your content marketing strategy.

8. FAQ Videos: Precise Answers to Your Audience’s Questions

Frequently asked questions videos are great when it comes to giving your audience more detailed information about what you are selling or to assuage concerns, as they are designed to provide precise answers to the audience’s questions. As opposed to written FAQs, the medium of video helps make your FAQs more entertaining, easier to consume, and overall more effective in terms of marketing and promotion.

A Few Tips on Making Great FAQ Videos:

  • Include precise and straightforward answers to issues or doubts that many people asked before about your product or service. 
  • Be topical. As you can’t create a single video for every potential question, it would be great if you gathered together all the questions that are related in some way and tackled them in groups.
  • Be short. You want to inform your audience, but you don’t want to bore them with endless and useless information. Videos about 2 minutes long would be okay.

Use FAQ Videos To:

FAQ videos are a good complement to your content marketing strategy. They nurture your leads by answering doubts from potential customers, getting your viwers closer to a shopping decision, increasing conversions at the latter stages of your funnel, and boosting trust in your product and brand.

9. Live Videos: Seize the Appeal of Immediacy

Any video that you stream live through any social network or streaming platform falls in this category, but there are different types of live videos in terms of style and structure. Most often than not, live videos revolve around product presentations, events, and behind-the-scenes sneak peeks. But when it’s all said and done, what makes these videos stand out is their spontaneous nature and the interactivity with live viewers. 

A Few Tips on Making Great Live Videos:

  • Start your stream for no less than 10 minutes prior to beginning the content to give time to more viewers to arrive and get into the stream before any reveal or information is delivered.
  • Make them interactive. Answering questions and showing interest in your audiences’ comments and chat is a must.
  • Be spontaneous. Your potential customers don’t expect a lot of formality from your live videos, but don’t try to improvise the whole thing! Make your preparations and sketch a rough idea of the major points you’ll want to cover.

Use Live Videos To:

Live videos are great for your marketing strategy not only because they help you increase your brand’s presence on social channels but because they can capture your audience’s attention in unique and engaging ways. That, in turn, helps you boost brand awareness, grow your follower and subscription base, and improve the overall engagement with the rest of your content.

Final Thoughts: 9 Types of Videos You Need To Boost Your Online Marketing Campaign

And there you have it!

Developing different types of videos can be a great boon to improve your marketing campaigns if you use the right tool for each job! And hopefully, after reading this piece, you realize that it’s easier than you might have thought.

Give these video styles a try. Choose one that you feel fits with your marketing goals and audience best, and the results might surprise you!

This is a guest post written by Victor Blasco

Victor Blasco is an audiovisual designer, video marketing expert, and founder/CEO of the explainer video production company Yum Yum Videos. Besides running the business, he’s a lifelong student of Chinese philosophy and a passionate geek for all things sci-fi.

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