A checklist for the successful marketing professional
Video is the most powerful tool to entertain, instruct, and engage your audience. In 2010, all you needed to run a successful company was a website and a great team.
Today, in the era of Ticktock, NFT, and Metaverse, if you don’t have enough content to engage and entertain your audience, breaking through all of this market noise, your business might be in trouble.
So let me help you out.
In this brief article, I want to highlight the kinds of videos that every company needs to stay on top of their game in 2022.
1. Brand Overview Video
Also called promo videos or brand promotion videos, this type of content is the best way to get people’s attention and to make an impression.
The Brand Overview Video is the Why video. It answers the question, Why does your company exist? Why is it necessary? It’s a great way to tell your company’s unique story.
It harnesses your mission statement and captures your company’s soul. If your company lost its Why, or it has become murky over the years, it’s a terrific approach to get things back on track by freshly articulating what you do and why you do it.
There are different kinds of videos that can accomplish this.
While traditional filming, editing, and motion graphics can be great, incorporating animation in these kinds of videos, or having a purely animated brand video, is the wave of the future.
2. Animated Explainer Video
Once you capture your viewer with a compelling Brand Overview Video, then you need a great Animated Explainer Video.
An Explainer Video does just what it says—it explains what makes your company great. Explainer Videos flesh out something really complicated in an engaging and easy to understand way, presenting your client’s challenges and offering your company’s solution. It’s a simply awesome way of answering your viewer’s potential questions.
If the Brand Overview Video is the Why Video, then the Animated Explainer Video is the What and the How Video. It answers the questions:
- What is your product or service about?
- How does your product or service work?
Why use animation? Animation helps to make things simple, vibrant, and engaging. Animation can help to illustrate concepts that are hard to show using traditional filming. It brings ideas to life, creating a clear “a-ha” moment for your viewer that holds them and keeps them. A viewer moves from confusion to clarity and from distance to engagement quickly once they see an explainer that is animated. In addition to clearly representing and illustrating difficult concepts, animation can either represent various genders, races, and identities for the viewer, or it can do the opposite, painting a universal picture of your product and its users that is inclusive and representative for all.
Most companies that have multiple products would benefit from having multiple explainer videos. Describing every product, service, or solution leaves no room for mistakes or misinterpretations so that the client knows that you are the right fit for their needs.
Explainer videos are amazing tools with multiple uses. Use them:
- On your website as an on-point pitch machine
- Featured as active content in your email blasts
- As a companion to a great sales presentation
There are some simple tools to create your own explainer animated video. These will get you very basic results:
However, if you need something more advanced and sophisticated, these tools won’t cut it for you. In order to be truly competitive, you need a custom-made, modern-looking video tailored to your needs. Cookie-cutter templates will only take you so far.
3. Testimonials
Once you have your Brand Overview Video (which tells people Why your company exists), and once you have your Animated Explainer Videos (which tell people What your product is and how it works), you need social proof. This is where Testimonials come in.
Many people mistakenly think that the best person to sell their product or service is them. Not true! The best person to sell your product is an existing customer who had a great experience with your company and your product. People trust friends and acquaintances. A customer’s positive testimonial frames your product or service through the lens of someone else’s great experience.
In a Testimonial, your client highlights their problem and describes how your company helped them to find the solution.
Testimonials can be done as:
- An interview. Your customers are busy people. You want to get them to talk about your product while you have them available. Testimonials that are made as a two-person interview are quick, clean, and efficient.
- Q&A. In a Q&A session, carefully crafted questions are posed to the client. The client answers them. In the final video, the answers are woven together to create a smooth narrative.
Overall, this type of video could include some b-roll. In film and television production, b-roll is alternative footage interspersed with the primary shot. These images can illustrate what your client is talking about. In addition to b-roll, you can also use motion graphics to highlight numbers and specific aspects of the story.
After editing the video to a 90-120 second masterpiece, you will have a great-looking Testimonial that could also be adjusted for your social media.
You have now collected some vital social proof of the great work that you are doing.
4. Social Media Ads
Social Media Ads are the lifeblood of your company’s marketing strategy. Instagram and Facebook (Meta), Ticktock, Twitter, and YouTube are all essential for companies and brands in 2022.
There is no single solution. Every piece of content should be unique, whether you want to utilize your existing content by cutting and adjusting your brand video or explainers to your social media, or create brand new eye-catching 3D animation or NFT looking pieces.
All of it boils down to the marketing strategy and the great team behind it. Keeping one step ahead of the competition is the key.
5. Training Video
The name of this type of content speaks for itself. The Training Video is meant to instruct your team how to complete a specific task. It is designed primarily to be used internally to create clear communication between your departments, educate new staff, and train your sales or management team.
Simple animation also could be helpful here, however, smaller companies can effectively use the following tools to speak to their teams:
1 – 2 – Loom – https://www.loom.com
3 – Vidyard – https://www.vidyard.com/
Camtasia – https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html
6 Tutorial or How-To Video
Similar to a Training Video, this type of content could be as simple as a screencast video where you’re recording your own screen and showing your viewers the way your product works.
This video will save your clients time by explaining to them how to get the most out of your product. Motion graphics and step-by-step instructions hand-carry your client through their journey.
Thanks for reading. I hope this was helpful.
Now you have a good overview of the most important type of videos out there that will showcase your brand and highlight your products and services. The main take-away? If you have the right kind of video on your site, potential clients will stay on your website to learn more about your company. According to Comscore, visitors are two times more likely to stay on your page if you have a great video than if you don’t. Digital Commerce 360 states that viewers are 86% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product or explainer video.
If you need more information or want to learn more about a specific type of video, feel free to book a free consultation and my team and I will help you to analyze your product or service and build a step-by-step content strategy for your company.
We can even become your go-to partner or help you to create your own internal editing team for future content.
Click this link to book a quick chat: