5 Types of Videos for Marketing Beginners

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Understanding the importance of video content will go a long way in boosting your marketing career. Video content is the current leader of the pack and will remain so for a long, long time. As a beginner, you’ll learn numerous new things about videos for marketing. One of them is the importance of including videos in all your content marketing efforts.

Given an option to choose from multiple content types, the audience will almost always favor the video content. Marketers can use this remarkable quality of videos to achieve various marketing goals. Video content can also augment the reach and impact of other marketing channels. You can use videos in your emails, social media, landing pages, websites, and more.

The decision to use videos in your marketing effort is a no-brainer. The question that matters is the type of videos to use to start your marketing journey.

Before we discuss the type of videos to use, here is a brief section on the versatility of video content and why you should use the visual medium now.

Video Content: A Go-To Medium for Marketing Beginners

Video’s rise to the top is a remarkable journey that took decades. But a paradigm shift in how we use videos only happened in the year 2017.

Although video marketing as a brand-building strategy has been popular since the 1960s, it’s only in 2017 that video content became the top digital marketing tactic.

Quite a few factors contributed to its rise, the easy availability of affordable video post-production services being one of them.

In the past four years, video content has evolved into something bigger, better, and powerful. Now, it has become a holistic medium used by all teams. Not just a tool to create awareness and convert, but also engage, entertain, delight, and retarget.

Video editor tools such as Veed enable businesses to create videos that tell stories in an impactful way. Veed features tools like video cutter, video editor, MP3 converter and video maker.

Video content is the favorite marketing medium of everyone and for every occasion:

• Customers love videos. Over 50% of them want to watch brand videos.
• Customers prefer video content more than other content types.
• You can expect a jump of 80% in landing page conversion with the inclusion of videos.
•  Adding the word ‘video’ increases the email open rate by 19%.
• Videos help in better decision-making. This is what 90% of customers say.
•  The use of videos on social media has provided at least one new customer to 93% of businesses in 2018.
• Video content is a powerful tool to create brand awareness and conversion, employee on-boarding, customer success stories, meet-the-team videos, and more.
• Video marketing is the tool of choice for businesses of all sizes.
• Research done by HubSpot found customers preferred authentic content to high-quality videos that appeared to push for conversion or felt artificial or not sincere in their message.

5 Types of Videos for Marketing Beginners to Create

Are you all pumped up and ready for action? Before you start planning, here are five types of videos to make your audience care about your brand.

Micro Videos

It’s always a challenge to market a new product.

You are required to find a balance between identifying the best features to promote and keeping the video short to hold the attention. Alternatively, you might have a service with too many salient features that requires marketing.

Such situations demand the use of short videos. Ideally, these videos should be less than 30 seconds long. Short videos are the ideal tool to start because of their versatility. Short videos have something to offer to everybody.

For marketers, less than 30-second videos are easier to create compared to other video types. You can use it to convince the audience regardless of where they are in the buying funnel.

Marketers can post short videos on social media to grab people’s attention bombarded by information from all sides. They have very little time to spare. Your short video can both grab attention and trigger their curiosity to find out more about the product or brand.

You can use short videos on landing pages and websites. By sharing only partial information about your product, just showing them enough to generate interest, you can make them stay longer on the page or website.

Finally, you can use short videos in any marketing channel to achieve any marketing objective.

Unboxing, Product Demo, and How-To Videos

Consumers are obsessed with unboxing and demo videos. The unboxing, product demo, and how-to videos are the biggest draws of YouTube.

When researching a product, it appears, the potential customer wants to know everything about the product, from unboxing to how to use the product.

An unboxing video is an opportunity for brands to showcase the product and its packaging (an essential element of the branding strategy).

You can get more people to watch your videos by combining unboxing with product demos. An in-depth product demo and how-to videos can induce the audience into making a decision.

You don’t need much in the way of production equipment:

•  A decent camera (a GoPro or even your smartphone will suffice), 
• The skill to present the message that would attract and hold attention (you could do the voice-over by yourself or hire a voice talent), 
• Basic editing tools.

In an unboxing video, you can explain the product’s physical attributes and show the product from different angles. In a combined unboxing and product demo video, you can also showcase how it works, its features and functions, and explain how they can use the product in different situations.

In order to maximize your product’s brand impact in an unboxing context, don’t forget to consider how the packaging design and materials play a part in grabbing the attention of viewers. Using eye-catching shrink sleeves rather than generic boxes or labels is a good way to put your stamp on the content.

Behind-the-Scenes Videos

A product bought after much research and thought becomes dear to us. It may be due to the benefit it offers or that it becomes part of our daily life.

That said, clients view brands and businesses as non-human entities, which needs to change. If you want the customers to trust you, then make sure you present the humane side of the business while marketing a product or service.

You could achieve this by creating behind-the-scenes videos.

You can use positive workplace videos, company culture content, bloopers, and behind-the-scenes videos to engage and entertain viewers.

Behind-the-scene videos can significantly boost your social media marketing. You can also create videos that highlight the business’ social responsibility.

Let the audience see how your brand is making a positive change in society. Such videos will help attract like-minded people and boost your brand value.

FAQ Videos

The audience will appreciate and trust you if you offer what they want and in the format they like. For example, take the Frequently Asked Questions section of a website or a product.

If the FAQ is text-based, the biggest constraint is to be brief to hold the reader’s attention. Even when a query demands a detailed answer, at best, you can offer them the answer in 4-5 lines.

The advantage of having FAQ videos is that you can provide a detailed answer in less than a minute. In addition, the customers are not burdened by the task of searching for a solution through the long list of FAQs, flood your inbox with emails, or call every time they have a query.

Although it helps, businesses need not make FAQ videos of professional standards in terms of video quality.

The focus should be on the content (message) and sound quality. The kind of questions asked will depend on where the potential customer is in the sales funnel.

Customer Testimonial Videos

Earlier, customers could only rely on their intuition to decide whether a product or service was worth buying. They had only limited access to what other customers thought about a product.

Now, the target audience could watch the customer and hear their experience of using a product on the brand website, social media, and in the inbox after signing up to newsletters by filling subscription forms.

Statistics and research data back the claim that most customers watch customer testimonials or product review videos before purchasing a product.

A Nielsen study found that 66% of customers rely on and trust product reviews posted online. Customers, a majority of them (83% to be precise) trust recommendations made by people who have already used the product.

If you play it right, customer testimonial videos are the easiest to produce, even though you’ll have to do the bulk of the heavy lifting.

Request your customers to provide their honest feedback on your product. Send them the list of questions they need to answer in front of the camera.

The questions should be about the product, their pain points, experience with the product, how the product solved their pain points, why they picked your company or brand, etc.

Make sure the testimonial is authentic and valuable to potential customers.

Bonus: Live Streaming Videos

The inclusion of live videos in marketing is no longer an option. It’s necessary. It’s a must because live content is changing the way businesses interact with their audience.

Live streams are better than other types of videos and content. Its popularity is increasing fast. Compared to other content, customers spend 8.1 times longer on live streaming videos.

Going live with an event or seminar boosts the authenticity of the brands. That’s because live content offers no scope for cuts and retakes.

For customers, live videos allow clearing all their doubts then and there. Potential customers who receive real-time solutions are likely to place their trust in the brand.

The growing popularity of live streaming has ensured more and more tools for the same are available. Brands can choose Facebook Live or any professional streaming service to publish their content.

10 Video Making Points to Focus on for Marketing Beginners

For marketing beginners, creating videos might feel like a daunting task. A lot goes into making a video, but understanding the steps involved in the process can make the job easier for you.

So, here is a brief account of the video production process:

Plan the Video: The plan document defines the target audiences, purpose, best aspect ratio, goals, budget, due date, and the list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track and analyze. It also must list the people or teams whose participation is required for the creation of the video.

Prepare the Script: Unscripted video will look authentic, but its impact on the audience is questionable. Among other things, a script will also reduce retakes and edits.

Preparing a script will help you craft a compelling message that will produce the desired result. You need a script in hand to decide on the graphic design, music, and other video elements.

Understanding the Camera: To master video production, even if you plan to hire a third-party service, you need to know a thing or two about cameras and filming. Learn the basics of video shooting using both smartphones and professional cameras.

Organize the Studio: Where you plan to shoot the video can decide the overall budget. You should know the essential equipment required, so there aren’t any last-minute delays. Again, a basic knowledge of setting up the studio, how to use the equipment, and camera angles will help bring out the best in your video.

Educate the Talent: If you hired external talent to appear in the video or do a voice-over, talk to them about your views and expectations.

Body language plays a vital role in attracting and convincing an audience. Hence, make sure the actor or narrator knows precisely what you want.

Shoot More than What’s Required: In video marketing, it’s better to shoot more and then edit. This will save you a ton of trouble later in the process.

Organize the Files: Professional marketers and video creators know the importance of organization. Having the files related to a video in one place, well organized, will streamline the production process.

Edit the Footage: Now, you’re into the most critical part of video creation – post-production work. Use editing software for the purpose. Alternatively, you could hire a video editing service to take care of post-production work.

Insert Sound and Music: The music sets the mood and tone of the video. The right kind of music in a video can encourage the audience to take notice of your message. While choosing the soundtrack, make sure you abide by Copyright Law.

Do the Voice Over: If the video involves a voice-over, now is the time to get it done. Once the content is ready, check and re-check, and save the video in the format that you need.

Finally, upload the videos and use invoice templates to send the bill for your work done. Next comes the tracking progress and analytics part. That’s a topic for another day.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re using videos to drive traffic, brand awareness, build a personal brand or boost conversions and sales, the first step to success starts with picking the right type of videos to market.

Our guide advises you on the five types of videos to start your marketing career and discusses the video creating process.

It’s customary to wish ‘Good Luck’ before the start of a journey. But we doubt you’ll need ‘luck’ when you have a solid strategy in place.

We’re giving you a helping hand in crafting your very own video marketing strategy through this blog post.

Guest Author bio: Cristian Stanciu

Cristian Stanciu is a freelance video editor, owner and post-production coordinator of Veedyou Media – a company offering video editing services to videographers, marketing agencies, video production studios or brands all over the globe. You can catch up with him on his blog or on LinkedIn.