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Simon Washbrook

4 Types of Engaging Video for Your Video Content Marketing

The winning way in the video marketing game is to create engaging content that leverages your brand’s image in your target audience’s view without actually trying to sell anything. This can be done by using video content marketing that interacts with the imagination, grabs emotions, or proves useful for your audience. Even better is when it can do all three.

Video content marketing has the potential to fit perfectly in the overlapping area in a Venn Diagram between imaginative, informative and emotional. On top of that, almost every device has some sort of display on it. That’s one, among many reasons, why the competition in video content marketing and other visual marketing areas (e.g infographics and slides) is rather fierce and demanding. In the era of digital information, being able to visualise content and brand stories is every business’s key to survival.

4 Types of Video to Help You Win the Video Content Marketing Game

1. Explainer Videos

Explainer videos, like many other types of video content, are tools that can improve your business’s reputation in different ways. First off, explainer videos are both likeable and useful, especially animated ones – sometimes they even evoke certain emotions. What makes explainer videos a way to win the video content marketing competition is their quick and witty characteristics. They are fast-paced and informative, holding viewers’ attention and delivering useful information to introduce your product/service in only 2 minutes or less. Explainer videos are mostly used on a website’s homepage and landing page as a tool to attract, inform, and convert visitors without having a big chunk of text for them to scroll through.

Animated explainer videos are just one way of visualisation, and there is no one big reason for you to choose this type of video content for every occasion. Animated explainer videos are well-suited for niche businesses in which selling a product through promotional methods is difficult. For example, imagine you provide website design services specifically for actors and singers. Your explainer should contain target consumers’ problems, address the benefits of choosing you, and explain the workflow of your service/offer. Plus, you have to admit that charts and data are better represented using animation.

But then again, you can visualise anything when you choose to use an animated explainer video, and that’s one of its main benefits over live-action videos. While live-action videos are limited to scripts and other real-world aspects such as weather and actors’ skills and voices, characters in an animated explainer video can fly, dance, sing, twerk, or somersault – virtually anything! The limit is your imagination (and possibly time frame as well).

Successful Video Content Marketing: Dropbox

The performance of explainer videos is tried and true. Founded in 2010, Dropbox grew from 0 to 100 million users in 5 years by using an effective viral campaigns and the simplest web design. Their landing page had only an animated explainer video and a download button.

2. Customer Success Stories

Having your consumer in the spotlight gives them credit and appreciation for their success, with you (the consumer’s provider) as a supporting character that helps them achieve that success. It allows potential customers to see themselves making a similar smart decision that led to your consumer’s success, which is using your product/service.

Successful Video Content Marketing: Salesforce

Salesforce is committed to telling their clients’ success stories. They don’t do it to explicitly brag about how they help their clients achieve their success. They show that a company’s internal qualities plus their own assistance made that success. Salesforce highlights the best accomplishments along with the struggles to achieve them – of course, with a hint of Salesforce’s involvement in those achievements.
And therein lies the fundamental difference between marketing and advertising: marketing provides value to sell whereas advertising sells to get more value.
two men shaking hands for 4 types of video content marketing game

3. Company Value Illustration

Video is an amazing storytelling medium. Your company’s mission statement is essentially its statement of purpose. It serves as a guide for all of the company’s decision-making. To help your target audience understand the reasons why your company makes certain decision, you need a medium to share your company’s moral values with them. For the foreseeable future, video will remain the best storytelling medium. Whatever you’re looking at–TV, desktop, tube TV, smartphones, or tablet–video performs better than still images and other content. Video isn’t always about how to be cool and different. It can also be about story. It’s about connecting on an emotional level; marketers and brands forget this often. Your audience wants to care about your story, where you’re from, what you’ve achieved, why they should buy your product, and so on. If you can connect with your consumers in a super-passionate, emotional way and make them feel like you’re part of them, you’re in. That’s all it takes, but it has to be genuine.

4. Product-Specific Videos

In addition to brand-building functions, video serves as an ideal format for tutorials, process guides, product demo, and virtually any other practical resources that help your company live up to your product’s promises. On the consumer’s side, tutorials and practical guides help them to achieve their intended goals when using your products, which in time will turn them into loyal consumers. Adobe has used tutorials to help their community get the most out of their products, specifically Adobe Photoshop:
The ability to pause, rewind, stop, and play a recorded video tutorial allows your audience to replay important points that they need to remember and put into practice. In a live seminar, it’s easy to miss what the speaker says at any given moment, but with a video tutorial the replayability is nearly limitless. A video tutorial allows your consumers to reach the peak potential of your product, as well as play the information in its entirety.

Takeaways for Your Video Content Marketing

Video is the best content for telling stories and sharing information, and it is currently leading the modernisation wave in the business world. But along with this modernisation, the competition to the top is tougher than ever, especially in the video marketing game. Every business is doing its best to make share-worthy video content that proves useful for both their company and target audience. However, you can still win the competition, with a fair amount of elbow grease. Here are four ways you can create engaging and valuable video content for marketing:

  • Explainer videos: A short introduction to the what, how, and why of your company’s product or service.
  • Consumer’s success stories: A real story of how you play an important part in helping your customer achieve a success.
  • Company value illustration: A visualised version of a moral ground on which your company stands.
  • Tutorial videos: A company’s product success depends on how much its users gain from it, and tutorials help your consumers to get the most out of your products.

What are your thoughts about winning in the video content marketing competition? Let us know in the comments below!

popcorn is a smart, easy-to-use and efficient platform that saves you time, money and helps you gain control over your sales process. If you would like to test popcorn and see if it could help improve your lead management, you can sign-up for the free trial here.

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