Marketing Videos That Work

Marketing Videos have evolved over the last decade. What you need to know.

They say there is something for everyone. This is especially true when looking to produce the best marketing videos for your business. Over the last two decades I have spent my career producing content for clients. Most of what we do at Indie Film Factory is help business clients make the best videos for their targeted needs. However, we often meet new clients with the same dilemma – They try to put too much information into one video. Simply put, making marketing videos is niche-oriented and requires extreme target focus. Hundreds of years ago, most businesses made generalized TV commercials. If you were a clothing retailer for example, you would jam tons of information into your commercial. You would include terms like “wide-range”, or “assortments” in your on screen text. You would show nearly every product you had in your store within the ad. This “generalized” approach to TV commercials died in 2007, when Facebook introduced its first advertising platform. With the advent of on-line targeted ads, businesses could pinpoint specific customers based on their behaviors. Flash forward a million years to 2022. Targeted marketing on social media has become very popular. The cost-per-click ratio has become so competitive that many businesses are losing the conversion game. This is due part to a highly competitive on-line advertising environment. But it is also becoming clear that smaller niche marketing is the future. Here are a few tips that can dramatically improve customer engagement with your marketing videos.

Hyper-Specific Products

Regardless if you have one product or a hundred, your video ads should always be well-defined. You should always design individual campaigns around certain products. By doing so you can maximize a video ad’s efficiency. One way to do this is to create specific ads that focus on key-wording popular targets. Using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, marketers can easily identify popular search terms within a business. Best of all, they can evaluate if a keyword is competitive or not. So for example, let’s say you have an online store that sells an assortment of vitamin supplements. By doing some research, you discover that tens of thousands of people have been searching for “eye health” in recent months. Surprisingly, the keyword, “eye-health” is low on the competition score. This means there are not as many companies paying for clicks in this category. With the search volume being high and the competition of the keyword being low, this is a good indicator of a niche product market. Assuming you have a product that falls into this criteria, you could quickly produce a video that highlights that particular keyword.

Keep marketing videos short and sweet

I’m sure you’ve heard the term, “less is more”. Well, that is certainly the case for video ads. Customers hate long ads, unless they are hilarious or feature celebrities. If you’re not hilarious, and you can’t afford a celebrity, then you should consider being short and sweet. Keeping your video under 15 seconds can help you keep attention longer. It also shows that you’re not annoying.

Be Informative, Not Salesy

In today’s environment of community, people care about one thing – themselves! By tapping into this atmosphere of self-survival, you can create brand trust with your potential customer. So back to the “eye-health” example. Rather than trying to make marketing videos that say, “buy my eye-support supplement”, you can offer some scientific data on eye deterioration, and how to improve it. You can do this without being too salesy. If the facts are useful for the end user, then they will likely continue watching your video. This creates brand trust, just like I’m doing with this article!

Look Legit

It goes without saying, first impressions are everything. When making your videos, try to look like you know what you’re doing. I will often see products on social media that look cool, but I won’t click on the link because the video looks sketchy. It looks like it was produced by some foreign money-laundering organization somewhere. If your video doesn’t look high quality, it could be an indicator of your service or product’s quality. If you cannot afford to hire a professional video pro (like me), try to use stock videos or images, and edit them on a mobile editing app that offers templates. This way your videos look half-way decent. Obviously, the goal of any marketing video is to get a customer. Just note that it takes time to build relationships and trust with folks. That in mind, make it your duty to always provide exceptional service, and transparency. It takes a great deal of effort to get people into your door, so don’t mess up the customer service part once they get there! That’s all I have for you on this. I hope it helps. Enjoy your week! –Kelly Schwarze

Kelly Schwarze is an Emmy ® Award filmmaker who has produced 8 feature films, scores of commercials and brand films and is the author of multiple filmmaking books. He is also a member of the Rolling Stone Culture Council.