Five Types of Video Content for Digital Marketing

The goal of any company’s marketing team is to entice future customers by conveying your company’s identity as well as the unique service it provides to the public. There are a variety of means by which you can accomplish this, either via infographics, newsletters, blogs, photos, whitepapers, etc. As a customer familiarizes themselves with your company, these forms of content should educate them about your brand and leave them with a solid first impression. All of these forms of content, if utilized correctly, present your future customers with different information that should make them see a need for your service and product. Today, we wish to discuss one of the most critical aspects of digital marketing content, the video in all its various forms.

Before we begin, it is essential that you create and update your video content regularly as a facet of your marketing strategy. These videos should be creative, unique, captivating, or informative, especially if you want to increase the chances of a video going viral. Regularly posting and updating video content weekly or monthly helps to build brand strength and authority and encourages customers to come back and see what you will post next. As we have seen from popular YouTubers, the public treats their content as a form of a television show that they anticipate, watch immediately and then discuss. While one solid video is a great starting place, your end goal should be to have a captive audience who looks forward to whatever it is you will drop online next.

Related: Why Your Company Should Invest in Video Marketing

Webinar Videos

While written word in the form of newsletters, blogs, and whitepapers is a great way to inform your audience, you run the risk of not capturing your audience’s attention. Some people are better auditory learners than visual, and especially in today’s social media, fast-paced culture, your audience may be more willing to watch a fifteen-minute educational video than they would be to read a paper that took them the same amount of time. In this digital age, more and more companies have turned towards these types of media content as the primary way they engage their audience.

A webinar generally takes place in the form of an exhibition, conversation, educational session, or demonstration that occurs online. To promote these, businesses release an amalgamation of content including audio interviews, blogs, and videos to encourage their audience to watch live. If they are unable, the beauty of webinars is that they are archived and may be viewed at a later point.

Webinars and Vlogs allow you the opportunity to take your time and dive deep into whatever topic you wish to educate your audience about by providing exciting and informative content or instruction. Today’s younger generation is especially likely to get their information from this type of format than they would be from a more traditional print source. The final benefit of webinars is businesses can use them to be recognized as thought leaders and opinion influencers.

Animation

Animation is regularly employed as an ingenious means of introducing your company to the viewers as well as showcasing your company’s personality. Disney is probably the best example of the staying power of animation as a visual medium. With animation, you can tell a story, which otherwise would never work in live action; you can anthropomorphize inanimate objects or concepts and give them a personality or infuse life into ideas. Animation allows you to boil down difficult concepts in a fun or exciting way and to do so with flair or creativity that can help you be remembered.

The goal of these videos should be to captivate and introduce yourself to future customers. With animation, you can share your brand or company’s story, explain a facet of the service or talk about your core values. They can help you take a complicated or tedious message and change it to something that is easy to digest and enjoyable, especially when compared to text. Further, animated videos have been proven to significantly boost conversion rates for both e-marketing campaigns and websites. They also help generate further traffic by getting indexed in search engines like YouTube or Google, and they help enhance organic search rankings since you have diverse and unique content.  

Tutorials

While similar to webinars, video tutorials are fantastic means by which you can educate your already engaged audience. Similarly, they are excellent educational content for visual learners. With a tutorial, you can help your audience go through every step of whatever process you wish to teach. Unlike webinars, tutorials are not live broadcasts. Instead, they are posted and after that, accessible anywhere and anytime. While they can be long or short, they are generally on the shorter end so your audience can digest and find that piece of information easily and quickly.

So, instead of watching a 2-hour webinar on marketing, they get a two-minute video on a specific aspect of marketing. It will be much easier for them to follow a step-by-step instructional than a written list of steps. The beauty of these tutorials is that your audience can skip parts they do not wish to watch or can replay the vital information repeatedly, which is something you are unable to do in a classroom. Tutorials also are a fantastic way of increasing your Google search metrics since your audience is likely to have a variety of general questions about your market. Capturing the “how to” themed searches are extremely valuable, and if they see your video on these topics, rather than your competition, they are more likely to trust and employ your brand.

Testimonials

The goal of every business is to sell its brand and product. Audiences are well aware of this fact. They know that you are going to do everything in your power to build up your image and to rave about how you will make their lives better or easier. Because of that, they take your advertising with a grain of salt. They go, “Yeah, BUT, what do actual customers have to say?” As evinced by businesses such as Yelp, IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes, we are far more likely to trust a customer’s voice rather than someone who is paid by the businesses. Positive reviews and experiences build trust in brands.

Testimonials are a fantastic way to reach out to your audience, to put a real face to your customer base. They allow those who have utilized your service to share how it helped them in their lives and why it would help others. If done correctly, genuinely, and not with paid actors or scripted lines, audiences are far more likely to connect to your brand if others have already done so.

Interviews

Like testimonials, interviews with thought leaders and experts within the industry also give your brand a stamp of legitimacy. You not only have customers who support your service or product but leaders within that field. Again, like in the case of testimonials, if an interviewee is genuine and not thought of as some paid shill, their opinion is far more valuable than a random Joe off the street since that is their area of expertise. They have studied and spent years working and gaining knowledge and insight about their field. They can tip the scale and help convince someone with a more appeal to logic rather than emotion, as you might see with happy customers.

Related: A Look at Live Streaming Video Content

Conclusions

If utilized correctly and sincerely, video content is a critical aspect of your digital marketing strategy. They are fantastic tools for building brand awareness, engaging people in your message and conveying what you are selling in easily digestible ways. Take the time to build up a trusting audience by releasing informative and engaging content regularly. Do this well, and you will see the benefits to your business manifested.