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Published on February 13th, 2019 | by Sunit Nandi

5 Popular Types of Videos and How to Use Them in Your Marketing

Video content has a unique and consistent ability to boost your marketing campaigns.

It can take a struggling marketing approach and turn it into a one that works. Or elevate one that’s already working into a highly efficient conversion system. But why exactly is that?

Well, a lot of it has to do with the way we process information. When a person watches a video, he or she is likely to retain as much as 95% of the message being delivered. As opposed to an average 10% for the same message in text form.

Which means that when you use video, you are dramatically increasing your message’s chances of successfully engaging your target audience.

Now, including any type of video content will most certainly improve your marketing campaigns in some shape or form. That much is a given.

But using the right type of video? One that’s designed to match your message and your specific campaign goals?

That’s bound to have a powerful synergistic effect between your message and the medium conveying it, which makes it that much more effective when it engages your potential customers.

This post will help you get a sense of how to do precisely that, but discussing some of the most popular types of videos being used right now in marketing, why they work, and what you should keep in mind when using them in your own marketing campaign.

Explainer Videos – Appealing to the Need of Understanding Something

Explainer videos are one of the more accessible types of videos you can incorporate into a new or existing marketing campaign. As their vast flexibility and versatility allow them to work well with any topic and most marketing approaches. Not surprisingly, it’s one of the go-to formats preferred by marketers right now.

At their most basic form, they tend to be short videos geared to address a business’ services or products in a simple, and more importantly, engaging way. While incorporating subtle but effective marketing and branding strategies that tackle the customers’ specific pain points, and the proposed solutions to them by the company.

Explainer videos tend to be short, simple, targeted and branded.

You try to keep explainer videos short because online, you can’t depend on people giving you vast amounts of time to speak your message. The briefer you can be while communicating all you need, the better overall results you’ll get.

Simplicity is both, appealing and valuable to your customers. If you manage to explain a complex topic they care about simply and engagingly, your chances of them hearing you all the way through increase tenfold.

They need to be targeted because a lot of an explainer videos’ performance relies on your understanding of the target audiences. As much as it depends on your knowledge of the subject matter. If you can reflect your audience’s profiles, interests, and preferences in your content, you can create a piece of content that speaks to them on a personal level.

Lastly, your explainer videos should be branded. This means using effective marketing and audiovisual communication to ensure your company’s image is coming through, even if it’s in a subtle way

Want to see when all of this comes together? Here’s an example:

Product Videos – Showcasing Something the Right Way

Product videos are another essential piece of video marketing today. They serve as an ideal channel to list the attributes and qualities of individual products and services in an easy-to-understand way. Regardless of their original complexities.

If done right, these videos are a great way to quickly and thoroughly explain a product’s uses and characteristics. Leaving out the ambiguity other mediums suffer from. Making it easier for your potential customers to understand how they work, and perhaps more importantly, visualize themselves enjoying their benefits.

Great product videos usually cover a combination of three areas of focus: Uses, context, and instructions.

For a product video to work, you need to showcase the different uses and utility they bring to the table. Nothing can help a customer visualize the potential benefit of something better than seeing it in action. The ability to do so is one of the reasons why these videos work so well as powerful conversion tools. No number of photos or text descriptions can even come close.

Context is another massive part of a fantastic product video. It’s not enough to visually display your product. Whenever possible, you need to showcase a product being used in a real-life scenario. Or a service being utilized in real time. To make it easier for your target audience to envision themselves doing the same and form a connection.

Then, we have instructions. Not all product videos have to include them, but they do become a necessity as a product or service’s complexity increases. Clear and concise instructions bring the benefit of cutting through the noise and help shape your audience’s expectations while illustrating how they can accomplish what they are looking for.

Here’s an excellent product video that accomplishes this:

Company Stories – Connecting to Your Audience on a Personal Level

The first two videos we’ve discussed so far center around something – a product, topic, or service – you want to showcase for your potential audience. In company story videos, your company or brand are the stars of the show. And they can be a force to be reckoned with in your marketing strategy when done right.

The idea of company story videos is to showcase your company’s values and the people that embody them. And do so in a way that resonates with your core audience and furthers your branding efforts. You’d be hard pressed to find a better way to show your business’ human side than through a company story video.

The critical features behind all great company story videos are uniqueness, purposeful, and representative.

For your company story video to work, they need to be unique. It’s ok to take inspiration and guidance from other company’s story videos, but at the end of the day, yours needs to be yours. Your company and workforce are unique from every other out there, regardless of your niche. And this should be reflected in the vibe and tone of your video.

These videos also need to be purposeful, to get people feeling like they can be a part of something bigger. By making it clear what you are all about, how you want to help your customers, and all you do to accomplish that goal, people will have a much easier time standing behind your brand and identifying with your efforts.

Finally, your company story videos need to be representative. They need to carry a clear message of who your company is to the viewers, so they walk away feeling like they got to know you a bit better. Pace, music, and even the emphasis you give to certain parts of the script are fundamental in achieving this.

Want to see it all in play? Here’s an awesome company story video that hits all the marks:

Customer Testimonials – Fostering Confidence in your Brand

It’s challenging to try and find a more useful, and more underused, type of marketing video than customers testimonials. There’s just nothing more convincing about the value of your brand than real customers offering an unbiased review of your products or services, and how they helped them solve a problem or accomplish a goal.

That’s what customer testimonial videos are for, to showcase real people sharing their views on your company’s solutions. They are a fantastic asset for any marketing effort because you get to bypass that difficult barrier of conflict of interest that your clients otherwise feel when getting their information directly from you.

Persuasive customer testimonials tend to be focused, structured, and contextualized.

For the most part, testimonials work best when they are focused around a single customer’s story and the specifics of how your company helped them.

By the same token, structure is essential for these types of videos. Testimonials are most effective when they cover a basic structure of happy customers explaining their original problem, recounts how your company came into their life, and what you did to help.

Then there’s context. Testimonials shouldn’t be people talking in a vacuum. They are videos where real people in real life situations get to express their feelings and share their experiences with your brand. Context helps frame this through the lens of your company.

Here’s a neat example of a testimonial video that accounts for all those elements:

Social Media Videos – When Content Adapts to Format

Social media videos are an exciting type of video born out of the huge importance social media platforms have taken over the past few years in the way we do marketing.

Social videos can be a bit of everything, from explainer to commercial videos and everything in between. With their major distinctive factor being that they are designed and intended to appeal favorably to a given social media service.

Social videos, then, are a curious case where the how you say something, is just as crucial to what you say. As staying true to your chosen social media platform will dictate much about the formatting preferences and trends your video should follow.

Whatever social platform you end up deciding to pursue, there are three significant points of interest you should account for whenever you are putting a social video together: Length, native, and broad aim.

If, as a general rule, your marketing videos should always be kept on the short side, length is an even bigger issue when it comes to social. Given the massive amounts of media that circulate a person’s feed on a daily basis, keeping your videos short and digestible makes it more likely they’ll perform to your expectations.

Native quality has been proven to be integral to a social video’s performance. By this I mean to upload and promote your social video to the platform where you want it to spread, instead of merely linking or embedding the content from a different platform for convenience’s sake.

To be successful, social videos need to cover a broad range of characteristics to work. Entertainment, inspiration, and information are three such characteristics that make amazing social videos.

Want an excellent social video example? Look no further:

By understanding these types of video content, choosing, and matching them according to your specific marketing needs and the goals you are going for, you are ensuring an above average performance.

Adapt the type of video you decide to include to fill in gaps or reinforce important objectives in your campaign. I assure you, the results will be swift and impressive.

About the author:

Víctor Blasco is the founder and CEO of the explainer video company Yum Yum Videos. He is also an audiovisual designer and video marketing expert. Aside from running the business, he loves studying Chinese Philosophy and is a real geek for science fiction films and comics! You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Tags: how to, marketing, popular, types, use, videos

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.