Video content has become a vital asset in the digital marketer’s armory, helping brands reach their target audiences to promote new products and services.
However, that’s far from all they’re good for.
Despite marketing videos’ recent growth in popularity, there are still plenty of brands yet to realize how versatile the medium can actually be and integrate it to its fullest as part of their strategy.
The good news is that, when it comes to effective digital marketing implementations, there are plenty of ways you can leverage video to suit your goals.
So today, we are walking you through some of the most popular types of marketing videos from the perspective of the type of marketing goals they were designed to meet and breaking down some lessons you can use to improve your own video marketing content as well.
3 Primary Channels for Video Marketing Content Distribution
Before jumping into the different types of videos and their purposes, you need to understand the key platforms you’ll use to position this content in front of the right people.
After all, no use creating killer videos if they never reach your target audience, right?
1. Email Marketing Strategies
Instead of exclusively using text-only emails to present offers and communicate with potential customers, brands have begun spicing things up by adding creative videos into the mix, to great success.
Email already worked as an incredibly reliable outreach channel — allowing you to build an email list of solid leads — but adding video content to them makes it more likely they’ll open up your emails and take action.
For example, including the tag ‘[VIDEO]‘ in your email’s subject line lets people know there’s multimedia-rich content inside, which helps you stand out in a busy inbox. Stats have shown that doing this can improve open rates by 19% and CTRs by 65%.
You can easily add YouTube videos into your email design. Check how simple it is within Sender tool:
2. Company Websites
Company websites have grown alongside the internet, and it’s rare to find a brand today that doesn’t use one as the cornerstone of its online presence. Understandably, adding video content to websites has also become a common practice, given that they work as an ideal distribution and hosting platform your company controls.
Hosting excellent video content on your site leads to healthier SEO, increased traffic and dwell times, and improved UX and visitor experience. And the best part? The benefits of distributing video content throughout your website go both ways, as video-powered landing pages can be potent conversion tools under the right circumstances.
3. Social Media Channels
Not only are videos the highest-performing content on social media right now, but using them on social media platforms can help grow your brand’s online presence. Thanks to these app’s algorithms, high-quality videos will likely reach bigger audiences and expand your reach organically.
And the best part? While professional platforms such as landing pages require well-structured marketing videos, social media audiences are more open to more informal video content. Giving you some flexibility on the type of production you can take on at any given time.
6 Types of Marketing Videos to Help You Reach Key Marketing Objectives
Now that we’re aware of the main distribution channels you’ll want to focus on, let’s explore six distinct types of marketing videos and the objectives that they’re designed to fulfill (examples and everything!)
1. Explainer Videos — To Nurture Awareness and Educate
Explainers are short videos that follow a narrative formula optimized for marketing and sales purposes. Through entertaining stories, high-quality visuals, and relatable characters and plots, the style allows you to deliver a lot of info quickly and effectively.
Naturally, most marketers and brands leverage the style to introduce new or complex concepts or products to their leads. Done right, a great explainer doesn’t overwhelm viewers but instead gradually warms them up to the idea you’re trying to pitch and ensures they’ll remember your message long after watching.
If you’re looking to nurture brand awareness and attract new leads (while still getting your prospects all the info they’d need to make a decision), explainer videos will prove to be an indispensable marketing tool to add to your marketing emails.
2. About Us Videos — To Humanize Your Brand
As important as they may be, people nowadays care to learn more about the brands they do business with, not just about their products and services.
Brand likeability is a crucial factor in most people’s buying process, and one of the best ways to nurture a positive brand perception is through video content focused on humanizing your company.
By providing insight into your day-to-day operations and the people behind the brand, About Us videos help you showcase your brand values, its personality, and the reasons why you do what you do. That makes them a game changer for marketing strategies focused on the consideration stage of your marketing funnel.
3. How-to Videos — To Anticipate Needs and Provide Value
How-to videos use a simple step-by-step structure to take customers through tutorials that help them accomplish tasks. They come in very handy when your marketing strategy focuses on providing value to recipients and ingratiating your brand.
Given that it is an audiovisual medium requiring little effort to follow, more and more customers rely on How-tos to get the most out of the products they buy. So, any marketing campaign that accurately anticipates those needs and provides content that helps solve them is bound to leave a lot of potential customers satisfied and interested in more.
This makes How-to videos an ideal customer service tool that doubles as a marketing outreach vehicle.
They can save your business a lot of time and resources by providing customers with the necessary knowledge to solve their problems independently. Doing away with relying exclusively on your customer service support on a case-by-case basis — and getting your brand noticed in one fell swoop!
4. Customer Testimonials — To Leverage Success Stories in Appealing Ways
If you want to nurture brand loyalty and credibility, you can’t go wrong with high-quality customer testimonials.
When it comes to most audiences, there are few things more persuasive than seeing peers that share their pain points talking about how your brand has helped overcome them. After all, people want to know how effective your offering is before deciding whether to invest in it and learning about your success stories can go a long way toward that goal.
Customer testimonials are about creating a place where actual customers can share their experiences with your brand and products and tell stories about you meeting and exceeding their expectations.
Needless to say, that makes them ideal for nurturing brand trust at the latter stages of a sales funnel and reassuring leads that need one final push to commit to a purchase.
5. Event Videos — To Establish Credibility and Involve Your Audience
Whenever your company hosts or is a part of noteworthy events, it’s often a good idea to get your customers clued in on them as well. To make them participants, even if after the fact!
That’s where Event Videos come in. These are productions meant to capture special occasions tied to your brand, which would engage anyone interested in what you do as a company.
Great Event Videos can feature behind-the-scenes footage about expos you participated in, recordings of conferences and seminars, or highlights from product launches or new partnership announcements. In short, events showcasing company growth.
That alone already makes them a powerful branding tool. Still, these videos also bring something else to the marketing table: they provide evidence of your brand establishing itself in the industry. And that means they go a long way toward establishing brand credibility and nurturing a more robust reputation that will influence existing and potential customers.
6. Social Videos — To Engage Customers Where They Spend Their Time
With social media channels in high demand, most brands out there are leveraging these platforms to expand their marketing strategy’s reach.
Social Videos refer to content specifically designed and produced to perform well on these channels. They can be ideal for nurturing a healthy online footprint while making your social media presence more engaging.
In practical content terms, Social Videos can feature aspects from different types of marketing videos (some of which we talked about already!), so they can work well to educate your audience about various aspects of your business.
However, they are in a category of their own because they also have to be tailored to meet the needs and preferences of the specific social platform you plan to use them on. For example, these videos tend to be much shorter than your average marketing piece, given that short-form videos are becoming the content gold standard on most social media platforms.
Since more and more people are getting used to using their mobile devices to receive marketing content, social videos can allow your brand to connect organically with them via apps they already have installed on their devices. It makes them a powerful marketing tool combined with other direct-contact outreach tools, like SMS marketing, that double down on the strengths of mobile outreach content.
Final Words on Marketing Videos
Marketing videos provide a great way to promote the different aspects of your brand and convey narratives that engage your target audience. However, to make the most out of any marketing video, you need to understand the purpose behind its structure and formula.
Once you have that down, you can use these videos strategically and accomplish more marketing goals that simply advertise your products.
Hopefully, after reading this, you are walking away with a robust sense of what each of these videos can help you with regarding your marketing strategy. Now, it’s time to start thinking about your current goals and the type of video that will help you achieve it!
