The COMPLETE GUIDE to Choosing What Type of VIDEO TO CREATE

Commercial / Advertising Videos

Commercial videos often refer to advertising on TV, while advertising videos are typically associated with online platforms. The goal of commercials/advertising videos is to sell to a target market. They also provide value to increase brand awareness to wider audiences for mass consumption. They tend to be scripted and timed to meet a certain time slot whether it be for TV or YouTube. The length can depend on the programming but typically they are 30 - 60 seconds.

“Enjoyment of video ads increase purchase intent by 97% and brand association by 139%” (Unruly)

Purpose:

Commercial/advertising videos are a great way to showcase what makes your brand great and how you differentiate from competitors. Video advertising continues to expand in terms of what mediums you can use to promote it. Commercials act as a great cornerstone piece for a cross-channel video campaign. Everything from TV, to social media and YouTube, to websites and mobile platforms - their utility is endless. The mass reach and use for commercial videos can prove to be extremely valuable for brand awareness. By incorporating compelling call-to-actions in the video you can be sure that they will drive sales and conversions.

Documentary Style Videos

Creating a documentary style video for your brand is a great way to recognize all of your achievements, the history of your ups and downs, and emotionally connect with your target audience and customers. Documentary videos are long-form content to tell the story of your business and be relatable to an audience. A lot of times it incorporates the different personalities from past and present, the leaders of the company, employees, culture, and explains to the viewer who you are, why you exist, and where you are heading.

Purpose:

Documentary videos provide an emotional viewing experience that provides branding opportunities while strictly storytelling. Documentary videos can be a powerful tool to create stronger brand sentiment as the audience is emotionally invested in your journey with positive associations. Due to the style being traditionally narrated in a conversational tone about experiences, it provides an authentic and unscripted view to the audience creating deep connections and relatability of the realities of the brand through human experiences. Documentary videos allow for a wide audience including company stakeholders, employees and future employees, as well as potential and current customers.

“Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.” (Insivia)

Animation Videos

Corporate animation videos use a mix of text, imagery and characters to communicate a powerful message. These videos possess a unique and informal way to entertain your audience. The length of animated videos can range but are typically around a minute. Animated videos are popularly used and shared on social media due to their entertainment value.

Purpose:

Corporate animation videos are used to produce memorable brand experiences. By utilizing animated brand characters, brands have the ability to create personalities that can be used in a series of animated videos. If your brand strategy uses a character or brand mascot, animation videos are a great way to bring that character to life. They also provide a form of video to present abstract or complex ideas that you just wouldn’t be able to capture with real-life footage.

Corporate Video

A corporate video can be used for either internal or external corporate messaging that targets a specific audience rather than being produced for mass consumption. There are a number of types of videos within the term “corporate video” and each can serve a different purpose.

Purpose:

Typically corporate videos aim to drive brand awareness, increase a brand’s online presence, thought leadership, drive leads and revenues, build trust, and emotionally connect with your customers and target audience.

“81% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads.” (Wyzowl)

Brand Videos

Brand videos are videos that showcase your company’s brand, mission, values or culture. They tell the story of your brand typically through human connections and what your brand stands for. They tell a story by focusing on a single aspect of a company’s brand. Brand videos can often be found as a series or multiple videos each focused on their own core value or aspect of a brand. Branded videos are also a great form of video to create long-form content. They typically range in length anywhere from a couple minutes to over an hour in length. As long as the content is engaging and entertaining, you’ll be able to captivate your audience.

“90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.” (3M Corporation and Zabisco)

Why create a brand video?
Brand videos, if done properly, create deeper connections and relationships with customers and a company’s audience. Brand videos create a more personal approach than writing down your company’s “about us” section on your website and provides “shareable” content for social media. Brand videos can intrigue and attract potential customers and customers alike to learn more about who you are, what you do, and what you provide. Branded videos are extremely valuable at the awareness and consideration stages of the customer's journey.

TESTIMONIAL Video

The first type of corporate video we will cover is a testimonial video. Simply put these are reviews of a product, service or brand in video form by actual customers. Typically anywhere in length from 0:45 - 1:30, they provide powerful messages from customers promoting your product, service or brand. They are also typically produced with “talking heads” of a customer speaking in conjunction with b-roll footage of the customer.

“59% of senior executives prefer video over text.” (Brainshark)

Why create testimonial videos?

Testimonial videos build powerful connections and trust with your audience. They drive conversions, and increase your brand’s reach by creating strategic partnerships with other influential brands and leaders.

When customers can be seen enthusiastically praising and thankful for your product, service or brand, it drives trust that you will be able to do the same for them, thus increasing brand trust, conversions, and revenue.

It is no secret that video has higher retention rates than text, and it also helps with storytelling providing visuals to connect along with social proof. Testimonial videos provide a more powerful story of customers achieving success or happiness from your product, service, or brand than basic reviews on a website.

Product Video

Product videos are essentially videos that showcase or explain the benefits, features and what pain points a product will relieve for a customer. There are a number of different types of product videos including showcase videos, demo videos, explainer videos, etc.

“68% of people say they’d prefer to learn about a new product or service by watching a short video.”  (Wyzowl)

Why create a product video?

Product videos allow you to create stronger, longer lasting impressions and emotional connections between a product and a consumer. Product videos can help demonstrate real-life examples or functions of your product that resonate with your consumer by putting them in the shoes of a product user. Providing product related information with video over text helps the retention of information through visuals that express and mirror the feeling of using it. This feeling is aimed to help the consumer understand why they need a product in their life.

“Video marketers receive 66% more qualified leads per year.” (Optinmonster, 2019)

Product videos can be extremely useful on your website if they are placed on a product landing page where you are looking to convert customers. In terms of where they fit on the customer journey, they help to push users from the consideration stage to the purchase stage.

INTERVIEW Video

Interview videos are exactly as they sound. It is a video of a person being interviewed, typically up close and personal. Unscripted and off-the-cuff type of interview style videos usually resonate much better with viewers as they provide an authentic point of view. Scripting interview videos can be obvious and create disengagement with viewers. Authentic answers to questions provide a personal point of view on a focused subject matter or theme of questions.

Why create an interview video?

They are an easy to produce yet powerful method to showcase expertise and engage an audience. They provide an excellent platform for storytelling by allowing the interviewee to provide personal anecdotes to really bring the story to life. It is access to an insider's point of view or look into a subject providing exclusive information or commentary from a leader in your business. Interview videos are perfect for providing additional value and engaging content on your website and social media.

Thought Leadership Videos

Thought leadership videos can be composed of a variety of content including interviews, talking heads, speaking engagements, and more. In each type of content the premise for the video is showcasing knowledge and industry expertise on a specific topic. Thought leadership videos aim to position leaders and businesses as authority figures in their area of expertise by providing insight and actionable items to help others on a topic.

Why create a thought leadership video?

Thought leadership videos help to establish your brand as subject matter experts. They help to create larger audiences and social media following by providing timely information and tips surrounding industry specific topics. They can also be used as a great tool to increase subscriptions to your newsletter or YouTube channel. These videos build brand authority by ensuring that if a potential customer needs a solution to their problem they think of you first - keeping your brand top of mind in the eyes of consumers.

Social media Videos

“Video is the #1 type of content people want to see from brands on social media” (Animoto)

There are a number of types of videos to produce that can be a very powerful tool on social media. We’ve already covered quite a few in the Corporate Video section but we’ve highlighted a few more below to get your creative juices flowing. Getting down to the nuts and bolts of social media videos, they should be a part of your content mix on social media to provide detailed information in a short time frame. One thing to keep in mind is the social platform you want to use the video for. Different platforms provide different opportunities to engage your audience. As an example, Is it for Tik Tok or for LinkedIn? The same video won’t work on both platforms.

Typical Social media videos can range in length but typically remain under a minute. Facebook however prefers long-form content and prioritizes videos over 90 seconds. Whatever length you land on, with social media you have only a few seconds to catch the attention of the viewer and engage them to continue watching.

Purpose:

Social media videos are an ideal way to drive your audience to a desired call-to-action. Whether it’s to drive sales of a product, or learn more about your company, social media videos help drive results.

Social media videos are also beneficial to increase your brand reach. By creating shareable content you will grow your audience and essentially your database to market to. Creating killer videos will drive up your followers allowing you to reach more and more people with other content forms as well.

Social media is the best platform to engage influencers to share and engage with your content if influencer marketing is part of your overall marketing strategy.

EXPLAINER Videos

Explainer videos are a way to present the solutions you can provide to a problem your target audience is having. It’s a quick, interesting, and easily consumable explanation typically ranging from 30 - 90 seconds of that shows how you can help. This video format tends to be animated with graphics with a voice over.

“39% of people want to see more explainer videos from brands.” (Wyzowl)

Why create an explainer video?

Explainer videos are a great way to incorporate some creativity and resonate clearly with your target audience through solution selling. By clearly and concisely illustrating how you will solve a customer’s needs will help increase conversions. These videos are very versatile and great for use on a product page on your website, to share on social media, and to convert visitors on a landing page. In these quick videos you can arm the customer with a wealth of knowledge including other customers or brands that you’ve helped along the way.

Announcement Videos

Announcement videos are a great way to share your company’s exciting news or product launches. If something big is happening with your company, video is a great way to announce it. Video announcements can compliment press releases by providing a more engaging platform to share the news.

Why create an announcement video?

More and more people are getting their news from social media platforms. Whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, news is one of the most popular forms of content on each of them. Creating your own newsworthy content through video to share on social media will perform well and could even get you #trending.

In addition to using announcement videos on social media, they can be repurposed for a number of other uses including but not limited to: to add to the news section on your website, to create more engaging email marketing messages, and to enhance the performance of your press releases.

“By providing links or embedding video into press releases, it can increase the engagement
of your press release by 55%” (HubSpot).

Microvideos

Microvideos are short educational videos that focus solely on one specific topic. Typically under a minute in length, they provide valuable information to be consumed by today’s audiences with short attention spans. These videos have no unnecessary information - straight to the point.

Why create a microvideo?

Creating microvideos can be very helpful to show users how to use a certain feature of your product. A lot of times you can find a series of microvideos for complex products. Take software for example, microvideos can be valuable to help users navigate one function as opposed to the many functions that a software provides. They allow customers to get very useful information specifically directed at what they’re looking for as opposed to trying to find what they need from a longer educational video. These videos can be versatile, as well. They provide short informational videos on social media, on product pages, or online customer support centres.

“8 out of 10 people have purchased a piece of software or app after watching a brand’s video.” (Wyzowl)

Educational / instructional / tutorial Videos

Educational videos provide valuable information with actionable insights. They can also be referred to as “how to” videos. With the increase of research happening online before making a purchase decision, educational or instructional videos can be a customer's guide to learning. Educational videos are content marketing at their core, meaning they aim to provide valuable content to your target audience to pull them into engaging with your brand as opposed to pushing out advertising or hard selling.

Purpose:

By providing value to potential customers they will remember you. If you are able to help consumers and create a connection with them, it helps to build trust between your brand and your target audience.

Educational videos help with SEO, as well. Your target audience is asking questions, if you can be the authority with relatable and easily consumed content, Google will let them know.

“It is 50x easier to achieve a page 1 ranking on Google with a video” (Forrester Research)

These videos are also highly shareable on social media as people love showing support and helping others with their problems. If you can be the brand that gets shared on social media providing value, it will pay you back in spades.

“48% of people said they’d be most likely to share video content with their friends, ahead of any other type of content.” (Wyzowl)