It is no secret that advertising has always been one of the key factors that influence the commercial success of a product – no matter how great the quality is, people won’t buy it if they don’t know it exists in the first place. Product promotion has come a long way from leaflets and billboards to Oscar-worthy video advertisements posted on social media platforms. Video content has made its way to the top of marketing strategy tools as the most effective one - according to Wyzowl’s report, 78% of video marketers say video has directly helped them increase sales while 84% of consumers say that they’ve been convinced to purchase a product or service after watching a marketing video.
Video is an incredibly versatile marketing tool that can be used in any industry you can ever think of and this is why marketers love it so much. The variety of types of videos you can use to get your product or service noticed is limitless: those can be clear and concise tutorials showing how to use your product, or cinematic product demonstration videos, or product unpacking videos made by your favorite bloggers, etc. Speaking of which, one of the reports published on Statista states that tutorials, how-to videos, and product reviews are in the top 10 of the most popular video content types watched by Internet users worldwide.
While creating video content for your company might seem exhausting, demanding, or pricey, the payoff is absolutely worth it most times. And if you are not sure where to start and how to do it right, here are some of our tips to help you with marketing video production.
How to create an efficient marketing video?
Before you decide on the format for your marketing video, you need to make sure you have a very clear understanding of the product you are planning to promote. The nature of your product or service determines the best way to present it to potential customers. It would be a bit weird to see a minimalistic black and white animation with monotonous music in it as a marketing video for a makeup store, wouldn’t it?
If you feel a bit lost at this step, a good idea would be to make a list of key characteristics of the product to understand it better. Is it something dynamic, vibrant, fun, fresh, and trendy? Then your perfect marketing video would be fast-paced, colorful, entertaining, and fairly short. Or maybe you could say your product is helpful, educational, slick, and straight-to-the-point? In this case, a simple, non-overwhelming video with a tranquil melody in the background could be an ideal choice.
As soon as you get a general idea, it is time to plan the production process.
Plan the video marketing strategy ahead
A solid marketing strategy is key so before you get to creating video content for product promotion, you need to think of the following:
1. The goals of your marketing video
As we have mentioned earlier, there is a ton of different types of videos you can use for product promotion and to choose the right one, you have to know exactly what your primary goal is. For instance, an explainer video would be an amazing choice for introducing the latest updates and showcasing the new features of an existing product. A high-end cinematic commercial would be the best choice when presenting a brand new product or service the audience has never seen before. Unpacking and review is a go-to marketing video type for companies that make consumer technology goods when their goal is to present a new version of their signature product. The aim of your marketing video also influences the little details like the length of your video, the audio that accompanies it, and the amount of motion design elements used in it.
2. Your target audience
Of course, any company always wants to be known all across the globe and strives for high recognizability. But creating a marketing video “for everyone to see” is not the best idea. You wouldn’t write a heartfelt letter and then leave the address empty, would you? Because it would not reach anyone at all and even if it happened to land into someone’s post box it would probably be thrown away. Not having a potential addressee for your marketing video in mind is going to lead to a similar outcome – your video might get a decent amount of views but they will not turn into user engagement or get you the profit you were hoping for. You need to decide who is going to be the primary user of your product or service, whose needs it can satisfy best, and whose interests it intertwines with. What professional/educational background does your average consumer have, what are they looking to use a product like yours for, even what they are like as a person because that essentially dictates the tone of voice you are going to use to interact with your customers.
One more thing to think about here, unless your company is new and growing, is whether you are looking to surprise your existing audience with something novel or your plan is to expand the pool of customers. Consequently, you need to either stay true to your current marketing style and put an emphasis on the features of your product your current audience loves the most or slightly change the way you talk to your customers and show a new side of your product that can attract more users.
3. Deadlines
It’s great to plan in advance and leave plenty of time to really think through your digital marketing and video production strategy but sometimes having a loose schedule for creating promotional content can be a disadvantage. For example, if your product relies on current trends heavily, you need to think fast and launch your marketing video as soon as possible while it is still hot and in demand. If you are not as reliant on the everchanging trends and your product is something fundamental, you are lucky to have the ability to really plan everything out and save some money on video production because as we all know when you need something right here and now it is going to cost more (which in this case includes scriptwriting, video shooting and editing, creation of custom animations, and more).
4. Budget
Establishing a realistic budget for your marketing video production is crucial because you wouldn’t want to spend unimaginable amounts of money on promo clips for some minor updates that are not likely to help you make a fortune. And vice versa, if you are planning to announce something big that has the potential to sell at the speed of light, you might want to consider investing a substantial amount of money in creating top-notch marketing content. You need to evaluate the overall scale of your marketing campaign, take the value of your product into consideration, and estimate your budget for the next few months to approximate how much can go into marketing video production.
Streamline your marketing video production with Jitter
When creating a marketing video for your product or service, consider using various tools that can help you make this process more budget-friendly and less complicated. It is pretty ineffective and frankly unnecessary to create every detail of your promotional video from scratch.
One of the instruments that can make this task easier and faster is Jitter – a simple motion design tool on the web that allows you to create animations for your videos. You can find numerous animation templates in the Template gallery that include text message gifs, social media icons popping up, star rating animations, and more.
Although Jitter provides a wide range of templates to get started, the creative capabilities are limitless if you spend some time on it: you can also create animated texts for your marketing videos; you can import your Figma designs and continue editing them using Jitter; you can adjust the settings to change the look of your animations and customize them at your will for your creative project. All of this within your browser.
Get inspired with these video marketing ideas
Before you start creating your own marketing video, it would be a good idea to check out some marketing video examples for inspiration. Luckily, there are plenty of incredibly good promotional videos of all kinds created for all sorts of business spheres that you can find online. Here are some of our favorites categories and examples:
Commercials
This ad is a perfect example of a quick and memorable high-end product presentation. In this video, Lenovo manages to highlight the new features unique to this specific laptop and at the same time show its devoted consumers that this is still their beloved Yoga which has now become more powerful and swift. The flow of the video helps to create the desired first impression of the product - it helps us see the laptop as vibrant, versatile, fast, reliable, and easy to work with.
Product demos
Here is a great example of a demonstration/review video that can help you see what a product is capable of. In this video, members of the Epic Games team explain what makes Unreal Engine 5 the literal game changer and how the new technologies - Lumen and Nanite - are going to redefine detalization in games. A slow-paced demo running with an in-depth commentary in the background is an excellent choice for this marketing video since the primary goal here is to demonstrate the impressive upgrade in the quality of graphics and explain how the new features helped achieve that.
Product videos
Honestly, would you ever expect anything less graceful and tasteful from Apple? This marketing video is an entire short movie about the new generation of iPhone and in terms of format, it is all-in-one. This video is a product reveal and a walkthrough of the new features, a bit of a how-to, and a quick review. Whenever something is being said about the new iPhone 13, you see a fun entertaining demonstration of the features mentioned. Since the new Apple smartphones feature a new, more powerful camera that allows you to create stunning picturesque shots, the choice of the format for this marketing video is impeccable.
Tutorials and How-tos
This is a very subtle yet absolutely great example of a marketing video. It looks like a casual, fun, easy-to-watch makeup vlog without any aggressive advertising whatsoever when in fact it demonstrates several different makeup products in just one video. What makes it especially awesome is that Rihanna does her makeup all by herself without any help from professional artists which helps promote the idea that her Fenty Beauty products are for everyone to enjoy. One more amazing thing about this marketing video is that the customers can watch the entire process step by step and recreate Rihanna’s makeup, and that (as you’ve probably already guessed) is going to make them want to buy the exact same products.
Explainer videos
This is a solid example of an explainer video – not only do you see dozens of beautiful 360° closeup shots of a product but you also get to know what actually makes it ‘the World’s fastest football boot’. In the video, Puma’s Head of Innovation explains the technology behind the brand’s latest football boots that makes it a remarkable piece of sportswear approved by professional players. The video is a beautiful combination of dynamic football field shots, animations showing the little details of the product, and commentary from Puma’s creative team responsible for product design. The music, the pace at which the shots change one another, the amount of action in the video consolidate the main idea of Puma Ultra being the fastest football sneakers.
How about a video marketing agency?
If all this sounds too exhausting and confusing, you can always choose to create a marketing video with the help of a video marketing agency (luckily, there are many of those to choose from). This is a great option if your budget allows you to splurge a little more than you’d wish or if you don’t have a video designer on your team. There are agencies that focus on social media video production, the ones that work with animated video content, teams that create polished movie-like marketing videos, and many more.
When you decide to go through an agency, you need to know that your deadlines might alter depending on how busy their creative team is, and making the schedule tighter will turn into extra spendings. Plus, you have to understand that as a team of digital content creators, any video production agency will likely make adjustments to your initial idea since they have their own artistic vision. If this does not sound disappointing to you, trusting a team of professionals to create a high-quality marketing video for your company is a good decision.
No matter what you opt for at the end of the day, one thing both marketing video production agencies and companies find useful when creating promotional content is Jitter. Jitter can help you make motion design easier and faster whether you are making a single video for your company or working as a video designer full-time. It is beginner-friendly, it provides endless customization capabilities, and it was made for creative collaboration which makes it a perfect tool for marketing video production.
How do I distribute my video?
To make sure your creative efforts pay off, you need to think of the most effective (and cost-effective) ways of distributing your marketing video. This is where you need to go back to your initial analysis of the product and your video marketing strategy because your choice of video distribution platforms depends on where your target audience is likely to see it and what the goal of your video is. I mean, it wouldn’t make much sense to choose Reddit as the primary social media platform for advertising luxurious limited-edition perfume, right?
Here is a list of options you might want to consider when planning the distribution of your marketing video:
Across your own channels
The best thing about this option is that it is essentially free. Use every online platform your company has - its main website, blog, every official social media account (from Twitter to YouTube and everything in between), newsletter, etc. When you promote your video using your own channels, you are completely free to choose how it is going to look, when it is going to go live, and how the users are going to be able to interact with it.
If you have a significant amount of subscribers, followers, visitors on your website, and readers on your blog, posting on your online platforms is a great strategy. It works perfectly well if you post regularly without being overwhelming and interact with your audience by responding to DMs, replying to comments, and taking users’ feedback into account. And if your brand is new or has a weak online presence that is still in the making, distributing your marketing video using only your own channels would not be very effective. In this case, consider paying for ads on social media and other websites or buying sponsored content.
Paid media
Ad recommendations have become so personalized in the past few years it’s scary. But when it comes to marketing, it is a true blessing because now the chances of your ad being seen by a person who might be genuinely interested in a similar product are exceptionally high. Online advertising has become so widespread, you can’t even scroll your social media newsfeed without seeing at least 5 different advertisement posts anymore. Whenever you Google something, you always see promoted links at the top of the search results list. When you start watching almost any blogger’s YouTube video, you will probably hear something like “I’d like to thank Company X for sponsoring this video” right after the intro.
All these methods of advertising are amazing for distributing your marketing video content. Though once again you need to think about your target audience to decide where exactly it would be best to have your video promoted and what type of ad placement would be the ideal fit in your case. For instance, it would make perfect sense to collaborate with a YouTube blogger if you create filters and effects for cinematic video editing. Needless to say, you also have to take the cost of the ads into account: at the time of this writing, getting your video promoted on Google Search is $1–$2 per click, the average cost of a Facebook ad is $1.7 per click, Instagram promo starts at below $1 and goes up to $6.7 per click, and the cost of influencer advertising varies greatly and can sometimes go way above $1000.
How do I measure the performance of my video?
Creating a marketing video is not the fastest and cheapest part of your advertising strategy at all so it is important to track its performance and analyze its effectiveness. The data you acquire will help you adjust your marketing plan for future campaigns to get the most out of them.
What metrics and tools can I use to assess the success of my marketing video?
Those depend on the primary goal of your marketing video and on the tools you used to promote it online. Generally speaking, markers of success include the number of views, user engagement (including likes, shares, comments, profile visits, etc.), and the number of clicks leading to your website or directly to the product page. If you used any of the paid promotion methods (sponsored content from bloggers, Google Ads, Facebook ads), you need to calculate your Return on Investment a.k.a. ROI. It will help you figure out whether investing in online promotion paid off or not. There are several ways to approximate it and the basic formula is (Sales Growth - Marketing Cost)/Marketing Cost = ROI. And if you want a more accurate answer you can add one more number to the equation - (Sales Growth - Average Organic Sales Growth - Marketing Cost)/Marketing Cost = ROI.
When it comes to paid promotion via Google Ads or advertising on social media, there are numerous uncomplicated analytics tools you can use right there without having to export your data and perform calculations manually.
As soon as you get the idea of how successful your marketing video was, you can take the best from it for your future advertising projects. Once you are ready to scale up your content creation, it is important to have an efficient tool to produce content efficiently. With Jitter, you can create multiple versions of your project and reuse your favorite designs to facilitate the production process in the future. You can tweak the settings until what you see feels right for your current video marketing project. Jitter is a perfect go-to tool for video marketing.
Is video marketing really important?
You may wonder “It seems a little unnecessary and over-the-top and my company is far from being as big as Adidas or Microsoft – do I really have to put this much effort into doing video marketing?” The short answer is yes, absolutely. The longer answer is without any doubt a billion times yes and let me go back to marketing statistics to show you why video content is vital for product promotion.
Video content is everywhere
Firstly, video as a form of content presentation has become so popular it is changing the way our brains work - as you probably know, generation Z has a shorter attention span than any other generation that came before it because they were born in the era of social media, when loads of video content are everywhere and you can scroll through it for hours on end. They are used to processing insane amounts of visual information daily and marketers are desperately trying to figure out how to keep this age group interested since they are very likely to ignore a video that is too long or not dynamic enough. As Wyzowl discovered, at this point 69% of users are saying they’d prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service. So I’m guessing it’s not just the zoomers whose attention span is decreasing.
Video improves SEO
Secondly, video improves SEO which is something any company desires. Search engine optimization is what determines whether your page is going to pop up in Google’s top search results for the users’ queries or not. Many companies try their absolute best to optimize their video for the web because as you may have noticed, Google likes to put a couple of relevant YouTube videos at the very top of the search results. In case you want to check whether it’s true, try Googling “marketing video example” and you’ll see that the first results are all YouTube videos. And I agree, this search query was a pretty obvious one and you’d expect to see video content but try one more – “how to use ads on social media”. I hope you believe in SEO video magic now.
Time to get started!
We hope this article inspired you to create your first marketing video! Now it’s time to do a bit of brainstorming and come up with an idea for your product promotion campaign. Whatever your creative mind generates, there is one tool that can help you make your marketing video lively and engaging - check out Jitter, a fast beginner-friendly motion design tool for your video content.
FAQ
How can I produce marketing videos?
You can either produce a marketing video with your creative team or contact a video production agency that can do all the work for you. Think of your deadlines, budget, and the complexity of your creative idea to pick an option that would be best for you.
What kind of video should I create?
Before you decide on the type of video, you need to analyze the product you are planning to promote, its target audience, and the goal of your marketing video - is it going to be a product presentation, a tutorial on how to use your product, or an in-depth review of its functions? This will help you figure out what kind of marketing video looks like the right choice.
What does a video marketer do?
Video marketers or video marketing managers are responsible for video content created for product advertising. They control the process of making marketing videos from advertising strategy development to shooting and distribution of the final creation across various online platforms.
How much does a marketing video cost?
Marketing video production cost is an extremely changeable variable – it depends on the length of your video, on its technical complexity, and on whether you are going to trust a video production agency with it or not. A great way to save money on marketing video production without sacrificing the quality of your creation is using tools for motion design – Jitter is one of them!
Is video important for SEO?
Video content is crucial for SEO - in fact, whenever users look for something on the web, Google puts several relevant YouTube videos on the first page of the search results. Video has proved to be the most engaging form of content that is more appealing to an average consumer than a text article or an image.
What is promotional video production?
It is the process of making video content aimed at promoting your product or service. It is a part of the overall marketing strategy and one of the most effective advertising methods.
