Video content gives you a fantastic way of enhancing your marketing campaigns and changing them for the better. Whether you've been on the road for years now or are a new entrepreneur searching for customers or clients for your company online, a solid video B2B marketing strategy can give you the tools and opportunities to achieve your promotional goals.
In this article, we’ll take a page from some experienced video production experts out there and break down seven popular types of videos that will help you power up your marketing campaign—covering how they tie to different marketing goals and providing you with examples that help you understand what each style does best.
An explainer video is a short piece often used for marketing purposes, as they tend to deliver lots of concrete information about a company, a product, or a service, in a compelling and entertaining way.
There are several different styles of explainer videos. You could choose, for example, to make a live-action video with real people delivering the information. Live-action videos are generally used when you are offering a people-oriented service or your niche requires a "human touch."
On the other hand, you could choose to make an animated video, which excels at explaining complex topics and illustrating how products work—particularly useful for software solutions.
Other more niche styles provide other varied benefits, like white or blackboard videos, which are ideal for educational purposes and tend to be easier to develop as well.
As mentioned before, explainer videos tend to be brief, which makes them ideal for marketing. If you are looking for a short video templates or presentation templates that synthesize the main purposes of your company, service, or product, then this is a go for you.
This is a type of marketing video that, while similar to explainer videos, aims to showcase a product's benefits and specs.
A good product video should always direct the attention to how the product itself will improve your customers' lives and how it will make everything easier for them once they acquire it.
Another key purpose behind making a product video is demonstrating how your product works in real life. So, they tend to depict a physical device (or a detailed representation of a digital one), going over its main functions and how it will make your customers’ lives easier or better.
All in all, if you want to direct the attention of your marketing campaign to a particular product, then you should definitely go for a product video.
Commercials are a type of advertising which, historically, used to be broadcast through television or radio. Nowadays, this type of marketing video is being placed all over the internet as well.! If you pay enough attention, YouTube is full of commercials before, during, and after (almost) every video you watch.
These pieces aren’t (generally) longer than thirty seconds and are geared to follow the AIDA model, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. The main purpose of the AIDA principle is the call to action itself, so if you opt to make a commercial, your main goal should be making a potential customer or client click on your link (or call your phone number) right away!
If you want your clients to go immediately to your website or reach out through email, you can definitively benefit from this style of video.
This is a kind of video that is focused on showing (mainly) what your company stands for. It showcases your company's strengths and elaborates on its employees' attributes, skills, and abilities. A company culture video also focuses on what moves their staff members both during and after working hours.
If you own a company, but you are not sure people know its values and what it stands for, then you should go for a company culture video, as it can help you introduce your brand to the world in the most appealing way.
A customer testimonial is a type of video that focuses on the experience that a (real) customer or a client had while using your product or hiring your service. A customer testimonial can make a potential customer trust your company enough to give it a try and decide whether to spend their money on it or somewhere else.!
Why is it a good idea to make a customer testimonial video? Simply because you want your future customers (or clients) to trust your brand. What happens when a company itself recommends a product? You are more likely to think, "Well, they are trying to sell THEIR product. They recommend it only because of that, not because it's actually great.". However, the effectiveness of social proof is undeniable: Wwhen you watch another person (someone like you!) praising a product or a service, you tend to trust their words implicitly.
If you aim to nurture your potential clients' or customers' trust, you should opt for a customer testimonial video.
This type of video is mainly used, as the title suggests, for educational purposes, so they are often targeted at improving customer delight.
In educational videos, the focus is always on the information: creating a step-by-step kind of content would probably help your customers understand everything about your product or service or help them discover new applications that make them more appealing.
It is better if you opt to include audio and visual elements that complement the information you want to break down to keep things interesting. Highlighting key ideas or concepts using animation is great for making your point clear as well as keeping audiences hooked!
If you want to become a reference in your industry, creating educational or how-to videos is a great way to start. Doing this will probably help increase your audience's trust in your product and, therefore, in your brand. Making this kind of video would probably also help in cross-selling and up-selling, and it will most likely increase the visits counter on your brand's site.
Social media videos are meant to be shared on social networks (duh!). This type of video is known for catching your customers' attention in a short period using popular social media platforms, like Instagram or Facebook. You can always create a video if you want to expand the content, but keep your social videos short!
While spending time on social media, people tend to watch mainly short videos: it takes them only ten seconds to decide if it's worth it to keep on watching your content! So, social media videos should be short, and they should try to summarize the piece of information you want to focus on at the start. You can always make more videos if you want to expand the content, but keep your social videos short!
There's no need to develop videos for every social network you know. Finding out where your audience is most active can help you decide which platform to prioritize. You could also try making content for one social media platform first and then branch out to others afterward. See how CIENCE uses this short video on LinkedIn to announce its growth to 10,000 followers:
Videos are a great medium to complement or outright flesh out your marketing campaign. And the great news is that you could choose to make one or more of the video suggestions explained through this piece to power your sales immediately.
As long as you have a clear understanding of your objectives and the types of videos that fit the job, you can easily take your B2B marketing campaigns to the next level and engage a larger audience.
So, stop wasting time and start producing marketing videos right away!