As you probably know, videos have taken the lead in content consumption, so creating videos is a great way for businesses to generate leads and boost sales. However, making a sales-oriented product video can be challenging since it’s easy to make some content and production mistakes that lead you to waste valuable time and resources and translate into poor results.
To keep that from happening to you, you want to create product videos that resonate with your target audience and help you convert viewers at the middle and end of your marketing funnel — and that’s what we’ll be focusing on today
In this article, you’ll learn about some key elements that can help you craft truly compelling product videos and discover some practical tips to help you along the way.
Let’s get started!
How Can Product Videos Help My Business
The primary goal of a great product video is to showcase your product in a way that lets your potential clients understand how it suits their needs and brings them closer to a purchase decision.
Now, that basic premise can take a lot of forms, and it can be approached in a variety of ways depending on your specific campaign needs. However, most product videos that deliver results revolve around five core areas that make them effective:
- Boosting brand awareness: creating a fertile environment for your brand to remain in your potential client’s mind.
- Educating your client: helping them understand how your product works and anticipating possible questions or concerns they may have about it.
- Generating engagement: getting potential clients interested in what you offer.
- Building trust: by showcasing to an increasingly skeptical audience that you can actually deliver on your promises.
- Prompting clients to take action: When viewers get a good sense of what your product and brand can do for them, they’ll be more inclined to make a purchase, visit a page, or even share your content.
These core areas speak to high-quality product videos from a general perspective. To make even more effective ones, let’s look at six specific elements you can (and should) optimize to create product videos that deliver results.
5 Key Elements to Create a Product Video That Actually Sells
When it’s all said and done, great product videos are there to provide viewers with the next best thing to a hands-on experience with your product. You want to anticipate and address their questions, convey all the relevant information they might need, and prompt them to take action.
However, different products, audiences, and marketing approaches might benefit more or less from different elements you can include in these videos. So, let’s explore some of the most important ones to pay attention to.
Develop Attention-Grabbing Openings
Regardless of the specifics of your product or service, the first few seconds of any commercial are vital — most viewers decide whether or not to pay any attention going by these first few seconds!
Now, the specifics you have to work with will vary depending on the product you are promoting, your specific marketing goals at that stage, and even the overall branding strategy your company goes for. But in a general sense, you want to start your product videos with elements like:
- Visually stunning openings that catch the passing viewer’s interest.
- An alluring question or promise designed to tug at the viewer’s pain points.
- A rapid-fire outline of your product’s key value propositions.
- A recognizable branding cue (a jingle or logo your audience already relates to you).
- Glamour shots of your product (effective for products with immediate visual appeal).
However you decide to go about it, just know that the name of the game here is to start with a bang.
Provide something that makes potential customers stop and pay attention to what you have to say, and your product videos will be far more likely to generate interest and, ultimately, conversions.
Storytelling and Narrative are Your Allies
Feature-oriented product videos are a staple across a variety of industries and content marketing strategies for good reasons. They do a particular job, and they do it really well. However, nothing sells better than a great story that speaks to your audience on a personal level.
A lot of the time, instead of just making a straightforward product or feature showcase, you can make a far more effective video if you can weave a compelling narrative around what your product can do for your potential customers.
Then, it’s not just about what the product does from a practical standpoint but about how engaging of a tale you can weave around your product to stick in your potential customer’s minds.
Even the most mundane product can sound fantastic and appealing with the right visual narrative.
Emotion is a Powerful Driver of Conversions
One of the best things about video marketing content is that, as a multimedia medium, it gives you a lot of opportunities to engage viewers in ways that tug at their heartstrings.
The right shot combined with the right tune and dialogue can have a lasting impact on your viewers, making it far more likely that they’ll want to take action — whether that action is to look into more detail about your brand or outright purchase something from you.
Most successful video commercials and product videos leverage the emotional impact of the medium in a handful of ways that have proven to be very effective, which you should consider adding to your content as you go through the production process.
Using music to set a tone that resonates with your target audience’s preferences is a baseline all product videos should adhere to. By the same token, using sound design cues to highlight crucial pieces of information can also help reinforce the most critical parts of your message.
Humanizing your product through visuals can also be a game changer. A product video that keeps the focus around your product all the time can be perfectly serviceable, but adding the human element by showcasing the emotional impact using a product can have on people has proven to be far more compelling most of the time.
Last but certainly not least, building your video’s script around a particular emotional core, such as humor, awe, and passion, can transform an ok product video into an experience that moves the viewer into taking action.
When You Can’t Show, Tell
As important as the visuals are in any piece of video marketing, never forget that the medium gives you a lot of opportunities to break out of the norm to leverage originality.
You should always try to convey as much information as you can with your product video’s visuals — it is essential to keep your runtimes as short as possible. But, at the same time, developing an optimized script and incorporating elements like narration can ensure your audience gets your message clearly and unambiguously.
This is particularly true when you are dealing with complex products — like software solutions or technical gadgets — where communicating a large amount of information is as important as showcasing the product itself.
Moreover, you can use your narrator as an active part of your marketing personalization by choosing voice talent that mirrors the tone and language of your target audience. You can also leverage animations and typography in an active role to help you reinforce particularly important pieces of data you want your viewers to remember long after watching your product video.
Specificity > Generalities (Especially for Short Videos!)
Unless you are a growing small business that deals in very targeted solutions to a specific problem, chances are that your products bring a variety of appealing features to the table. Understandably so, you might be inclined to try and cram as many of those features into your video as possible.
After all, the more features, the better your chances something will appeal to a portion of your audience, right? Well, not necessarily.
You should look at product videos as scalpels and not as multi-tools, especially when you plan to use them as part of your ads campaigns. You have a very short time to get your message across to viewers, and since your primary goal with these videos is to generate conversions, building around one key selling point will usually make for better use of a couple of minutes you can expect to engage the average viewer.
It is worth mentioning that some products are all about providing a wide array of features, and if that’s the case with your product, you can consider a broader approach for your piece or maybe make a series of focused product videos instead of just one broad one.
Just know that the more focused you can make your piece, the better it will tend to perform in terms of generating conversions and brand awareness.
A Few Pro Tips to Make The Most Out Of Your Engaging Product Videos!
Having an excellent product video that leverages the elements we’ve discussed so far is only part of the equation. Once you have one, you also need to make sure to deploy it strategically to give it the opportunity to meaningfully contribute to your overall marketing efforts.
Here are a few core ways you’ll want to do just that:
- Make sure to prominently feature your optimized product videos in any dedicated landing pages or eShop profiles tied to your product. You can (and should) consider creating synergies between your product video’s CTAs and the button layout on said pages to facilitate conversions.
- Short product videos edited for YouTube and similar social media platforms tend to perform really well. Timing their release around product launches or announcements can help you generate buzz and drive attention to where it’ll be most impactful.
- Email campaigns synergize extremely well with product videos. Including videos as part of email strategies generally increases open rates and can have a significant impact on how much conversion it ends up generating.
- Short product videos can be a game changer when used as video ads on PPC platforms Like Facebook Ads and Google Ads, furthering the potential returns you get from developing the piece.
Summing Up!
Developing and deploying product videos can have a dramatic impact on the response your marketing pushes get — but that’s assuming you are optimizing your pieces that move people to take action.
Luckily, after reading this far, you are much more aware of some key areas you can leverage to turn what would have been a run-of-the-mill product showcase into a compelling marketing piece that gets your potential customers paying attention.
Time to take the theory into practice and start working on that new product video that will make your offerings shine!
