Video is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal when building your brand and finding loyal customers along the way.
Videos are appealing sensory cues, and captivating videos prove to be one of the most effective tools to help businesses build an emotional connection with their audience. Brightcove and Ascend2 research found that 93% of B2B buyers say that video is important in building trust in a brand.
YouTube users watch more than 1 billion hours of video content every day and YouTube receives over 13 billion visits every month. A remarkable number which is only topped by Google itself. People consider YouTube a search engine, more than just a video streaming service.
The bottomline is, a strong online presence fed by intriguing video content can help you expand your reach to a broad audience. But what makes a captivating video content? What types of videos should a business produce?
8 types of videos that will boost business growth
Your videos can cover a variety of areas including branding, promotion, PR, HR, sales, customer intelligence and product development. In the video and streaming culture we’re a part of, businesses have to create quality video content covering all those areas to stay relevant and memorable.
So, what type of videos can you produce?
1- Community videos
If you ask a seasoned marketer ‘What makes a powerful brand?’, they will say a strong emotional bond. A bond like what Apple users have with the brand. You’ve probably come across many people who have become brand loyalists after their first Apple product – not something that we expect to occur so early on with the brands in our lives, right?
Well, Apple products have a very special positioning in our minds: the sleek, chic, effortlessly cool design with great functionality and ease of use. It’s been fifteen years since the first iPhone was introduced and the company still creates products that are most popular in their own niche. And one major pillar of their success was their video marketing.
The company masterfully uses video content to preserve the lifestyle brand and nourish the community they’ve been building for years. They’ve produced some of the most memorable marketing videos of all time, in a variety of concepts:
1-1- Cinematic advertising:
Let’s go as far back as to 1984, when Apple introduced Macintosh with an iconic commercial that was aired during the 1984 Super Bowl. The “1984”, one of the most rebellious moves in the history of advertising against the giant.
1-2- Celebrity commercials:
Research suggests that individuals’ appreciation of and respect towards a celebrity results in a certain level of psychological and emotional identification and leads them to be easily persuaded by the celebrity to accept a brand. And, Apple has created some of the earliest and most brilliant celebrity commercials the public has seen:
1-3- User-generated content:
A core element that guarantees the survival of a brand’s community is an active flow of user-generated content coming from a highly engaged community. It’s the most important sign that real people are enjoying their experience with your solution or service and having a good relationship with your brand.
A step further, it’s also a sign that the brand has become a part of their lives. User-generated videos are among the most effective social media content ideas, and have the potential to go viral quite easily.
The Device That Saved Me ad, which is below, is a perfect example of user-generated content that can help you plant the seeds of an emotional relationship with your customers:
Similarly, Darshan Somashekar, who runs the card games team at Solitaired, has found success with community generated videos: “we encourage our users to record their games and share them online. Not only do their friends watch it, they see how much fun they’re having and become users themselves. It’s a similar effect to unboxing videos.”
Now, not everyone has a marketing budget the size of Apple’s. So you’re not expected to spend millions of dollars on partnerships with celebrities. Instead, if you take a PLG approach turning your product into a large sales force, you will be able to use countless affordable video production solutions that can help you generate in-house content. Plus, you can always have agencies and creative freelancers produce the types of community videos that will help build your brand.
The thing is, effective marketing doesn’t have to be costly. Who Gives a Crap, a toilet paper brand increasingly popular, built its audience on social media over time, through its authentic and unique brand positioning and storytelling. The audience grew more intimate with time. Here’s one of their user-generated product reviews.
Start generating community videos, no matter how small you have to start. Encourage your community to contribute regularly, and always ask for feedback. Keep in mind that their contribution is the key to the sustainability of your community and expansion of your business.
2- Solution Videos
Video is the best medium to promote a product or solution. We partnered with Brightcove and surveyed 305 professionals responsible for purchase decision-making within B2B organizations with more than $50M in revenue in North America and the United Kingdom in a study titled B2B Video Marketing: The Power of Video in the B2B Buyer’s Journey, and we found that:
- 88% of B2B buyers surveyed have watched videos to learn about a company’s products or services in the last three months.
- 95% of B2B buyers say video plays an important role in moving forward with a purchase.
- 70% of B2B buyers say video is the best content format for creating awareness of business-related problems.
- 81% of B2B buyers prefer video over written content when learning how to use a product or service
- 93% of B2B buyers say that video is important in building trust in a brand.
- 97% of recent video viewers say that they would be more receptive to sales communication from a business after consuming their video content.
By offering videos about your solutions, you can easily convey:
- Your solutions’ features and the advantages they bring to the table
- How customers can use your products or solutions effectively
- Why customers must choose you over competitors
In other words, videos can help you explain to customers what impact choosing you will have on their lives. Use the concepts below to communicate your benefits:
2-1- Case study videos:
Think of every benefit you’re offering via your products or solutions. Consider your buyer personas and find out which benefits will have the most positive emotional impact on their lives. For example, how you make online shopping easier or how you’re the most reliable website hosting partner. Create a video series that will stimulate your audience’s feelings and evoke those emotions. Here’s an excellent example of what we’re talking about:
2-2- Customer testimonials:
90% of customers report that they will choose a product that comes with a person’s recommendation over one that doesn’t. Even if they’re not acquainted with the person. That shows the power of word-of-mouth marketing and testimonials. Alongside giving room to testimonials in a variety of related places on your website—like under a solution page, in a blog, or straight on your main page—you can distribute them via your social channels. Like this smart example from Salesforce:
Notice how Salesforce refrained from being overly promotional. Testimonials are not effective when they’re designed to give your business compliments. Keep in mind, you want to show prospective buyers how working with you can change their lives. Let them see a preview of what they’ll experience through the eyes of an independent party, a customer like them.
2-3- Live streaming:
The use of live streaming as a shopping channel skyrocketed in China when COVID-19 began. A report from Alibaba’s Taobao revealed that in 2020, about 300 million users watched the in-app live streams during a 10-day period in 11.11 sales. Remarkable, right?
Back in 2018, live stream shopping used to account for only 3.5% of all retail commerce in China. In 2020, it reached a $300 billion segment and made up for 10% of retail sales.
Aside from shopping, there are different ways you can take advantage of live streaming. One way is organizing events that will create excitement among your audience. It doesn’t have to be a shopping event. Any kind of fun and educational event could work here. Live streaming could also function as a good opt-in incentive for growing your subscribers.
Salesforce, for instance, held an 11-part fully educational live stream event promoted on their social channels. Some 600,000 organic visitors were pulled in. Marissa Kraines, the Senior Director of Social & Content Marketing for Salesforce said regarding the event series:
”We find that live streaming is really a wonderful way for us to engage our audience in real time, take questions, and interact with them in a very meaningful way . . . .What we found is creating a cadence of content where people knew that they could come back to on a regular date and time really helped with our viewership,” she says. “We found that we had the same people asking questions, and commenting, and sharing the content each Tuesday at 11:00 AM … They were really excited for the main event, and we just had that huge audience once we got there.”
2-4- Educational series:
All ranking algorithms, with Google paving the way, increasingly put emphasis on search intent. Google is the fastest at processing a query, understanding the intention behind it and offering the best results that serve the intention. Naturally, it prioritizes content that is educational, informative, accurate and accessible.
Create videos that will help answer the questions in your customers’ and prospects’ minds and contribute to their growth.
Ahrefs, a popular keyword research tool, for instance, nails educational video marketing:
They give room to general concepts and how to videos as well as technical topics. Meaning, they both create top-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel videos that target viewers at different stages of the buying journey.
The style is very clean and understandable, and once again, not promotional.
Make sure to keep your content insightful and data-driven while providing solutions to customers’ pain points.
You could use these videos as part of your customer support strategy. Produce multiple explainer videos and educate your customer support team on how to use these videos for customer education. Then equip your customer support team with these videos and a suitable CRM that gives them an idea on where customers stand in the buying journey.
2-4- Business operations videos:
Another way videos can help you grow your business is through facilitating your operations. Think of all the ways you’re indebted to videos for your daily business operations. Video interviewing platforms allow you to save time by talking with candidates remotely. Project management tools and meeting management platforms make it possible for you to hold numerous meetings with your remote team.
Videos can also help you with customer intelligence. An effective way to learn more about your business, product and website, most notably through the eyes of your customers, is through video captures on websites. What does this mean? Specifically, allowing your users to give you feedback on your website through a button or pop-up and let them hit the record button. Some even offer voice recording functionality, so you can see and hear exactly what your users like or dislike.
This is very effective when trying to understand how to position your product in a competitive marketplace or simply getting feedback from users that helps you determine what to build next. Getting screen recordings from your users is a great way to understand how they perceive your offerings and what you can do to improve!
Viewer experience matters:
Creating videos for different business purposes has never been easier. You can use an online video editor that allows you to customize your videos in a cost-effective way. What’s important here (and most often neglected by marketers) is providing a pleasant and seamless viewer experience.
This gains more importance when it comes to live streaming. Low-quality streaming, unreliable uptime, or insecure connections could mean loss of an audience and the failure of your whole video strategy. To avoid any of these and ensure a pleasant and seamless viewer experience, you need to take advantage of a solid online video platform such as Brightcove. It also comes with a host of handy tools and features for growing your video engagement such as video communications, audience insights, video marketing suite, virtual events, etc.