Understand Your Target Audience: You may have a large potential customer base, or a small one, but focusing on your best, most likely demographic will yield the strongest overall product video production. If you’re selling an anti-aging skincare cream, for instance, it may be valuable to anyone over age 21, but you know that women over age 50 are your most likely consumer.
Speak to Your Target Audience: Once you narrow down your most likely consumer, focus on their main concerns, pain points, or needs. Using the example above, maybe you want to start the video with a question, “Just starting to notice the signs of aging? Fix them with our specially formulated anti-aging skin cream.” Tailor the video to your demographic and make them feel like you’re speaking directly to them. People like to feel that a company has made a product for them and their needs.
Highlight Your Product’s Best Features: What sets your product apart from the competition? Is it innovative? Does it offer the same benefits of more expensive products, but at the best price? Does it fulfill a specific need that is underserved? Along with the first two points, make sure the focus of your product’s best features speaks to your target demographic. Your product may have numerous other benefits and features, too, but when creating one video, stick with your strongest points that are most relevant to your target audience.
Show Your Product Being Used: Avoid just having still pictures or static video of the product you’re selling. The strength of video marketing lies in its ability to show movement and demonstrate function, so have someone using your product and showing the value.
Keep It Short: Television commercials only have 30 seconds to convey a message and pitch a product, so even if you’re making an online product video, keep it under two minutes. Even 60-90 seconds is plenty of time to establish the value of your product, set it apart from the competition, and encourage viewers to take action.
Quality Matters: If your video looks cheap and amateur, you can’t blame viewers for thinking your product may be just as cheap and unprofessional. In fact, according to BrightCove, a marketing agency, 62% of consumers had a negative vision of a brand with a poor quality video and 23% would hesitate to purchase from the brand at all.
Clever and Professional Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune: If you can come up with a great, clever idea, or enlist a video production company to help come up with a concept, you can create a fantastic video on a reasonable budget. You don’t need to spend tens of thousands of dollars just to produce a great video. Many of the most popular viral marketing videos rely mainly on humor and uniqueness or oddity than on expensive production budgets.
Avoid the Hard Sell: Ever wonder why late-night informercials seem extremely cheesy? The hard sell comes across as obnoxious and sometimes almost hilarious, but never professional and never something to emulate. High budget TV commercials focus on humor to sell products, which usually means actors portraying someone in the target audience facing a dilemma or challenge and discovering a solution. While watching TV, notice how almost every commercial follows the same basic formula: Actors in awkward or funny situation, facing some type of problem, then discovering the product / service being promoted perfectly solves their issue.
Consider Multiple Videos: Rather than just a product video emphasizing benefits with a funny, clever concept aimed at a specific audience, also consider less expensive “support” videos to include on YouTube, Facebook, and your company Website. For instance, customer testimonial videos are inexpensive to produce but can go a long way in establishing trust for your brand and your products.
Use Your Video in Multiple Marketing Efforts: Rather than just throwing a product video onto YouTube, consider linking to it on all of your social media platforms, integrating it into a landing page on your Website, and sending it in e-mails. Just the word “video” in e-mail subject headings has been proven to increase open rates and videos on landing pages have been repeatedly confirmed to increase conversion rates and thus ROI.
