When you’re picking the medium for your next big marketing campaign, video content is always on the table. This is true whether you’re operating in the business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) space, and no matter the size of your organization. Video marketing is versatile enough to fit any needs you might impose upon it.
Once you’ve decided that promotional video content can help your brand, it’s time to figure out what type of content best suits your needs and how to roll it out to your target audience. Rather than using video in a limited capacity or as a supporting element, you can create a focused and strategically aligned campaign, drawing on the full creative resources of your marketing department or third-party content partner.
Learn how B2B companies use video as a marketing tool.
6 Impactful Video Campaign Ideas
Sometimes, all you need to launch an exciting video campaign is a spark of inspiration. To that end, we’ve assembled a list of 6 concepts that can deliver results — and already have for companies of all kinds. These ideas include:
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1. Product Demos and Explainer Video Clips
When you want to tell people why to use your product, sometimes the best approach is to tell them how to use it. Whether you’re enticing potential customers or ensuring your existing buyers have a good experience with one of your products or services, an explainer video is a perfect fit for the situation.
A detailed product demo video uses images and narration to convey how your products can work for users, describing every step in a way that’s clearer than would be possible through text or static images. A YouTube channel full of instructional videos and explainer videos is a valuable asset, helping you spread the word about your products without active intervention.
Example: Lasko Fan
See how a clear studio video can guide a product owner through every step of assembling and using that item.
2. About-Us Videos Starring Your Employees
Video can show off more than your products — it’s also a wonderful showcase for the people who make up your organization. By putting your employees front and center, you can build a strong brand identity that may appeal to potential customers and job applicants alike. Clips that show off your company’s culture from the ground up, taking in individual perspectives rather than using a single top-down message, can be a powerful tool in humanizing the brand.
A coordinated series of these about-us videos can encompass many different teams and departments, showing the breadth of backgrounds and perspectives contained within the organization. And if you want to make a promo video series that will be extra fun for participants and irresistible for viewers, try profiling your team members’ pets alongside their human owners.
Example: Brafton employee profiles
Check out the way we use text and illustrations to highlight our Brafton team members.
3. Behind-the-Scenes Clips From an Event
Every in-person event, whether it’s a user conference, an annual meeting or an industry-wide convention, is a chance to capture interesting video footage. By bringing viewers behind the scenes of your company’s latest gathering, you can generate long-tail value and audience engagement from the event.
Having a videographer on hand throughout a convention lets you augment more formal coverage with candid, off-the-cuff footage of your team. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can start this type of marketing video series before the event and keep the cameras running throughout the course of the event, providing a weeks-long stream of fun clips to share on your YouTube channel or as part of a social media campaign.
Example: Decorating Den’s Dream Room Awards 2022
This corporate gathering and celebration yielded six distinct types of content — a recap, keynote speeches, a company update, social media clips, a sizzle reel and B-roll for future use.
4. Short Form Video
Creating a great series of short videos is an art form. Your marketing team or third-party videographer can slice content into highly focused clips that each get their message across in a minute or less. Without much time to express ideas, you have to deliver your pitch in its most potent form.
One factor to keep in mind when producing short form video is where you expect viewers to encounter the content. When releasing the videos as part of a paid or organic social media campaign, for example, it can pay to caption all your videos, because mobile viewers scrolling through a social feed may watch them with the sound off.
Examples: Miner and Don Jon
See the ways these brands summed up their services in 60 and 45 seconds, with all the key info summed up in written rather than audible narration.
5. Testimonials and Customer Success Stories
The power of testimonial videos comes from their ability to provide social proof. If you can present your target audience with an example of a real customer describing a positive experience with your product, the result can be more convincing than a highly polished ad campaign.
Testimonials are convincing for the same reason that customers look for product reviews before making a choice. There is a difference, though — since you have control over testimonials, you can add interesting visual cues such as animated video elements to give each clip extra appeal and draw in a wider audience.
Example: Bookme testimonial clip
Check out the way Bookme combined live-action testimonial footage with illustrative animation.
6. Celebrity Spokesperson and Influencer Marketing Videos
No matter how visually appealing or conceptually interesting your videos are, there’s one hook that reigns supreme: star power. If you can bring in an influencer or another well-liked celebrity to endorse your brand and otherwise appear in your content, there’s value to be had.
Of course, the simple presence of a well-known face will only draw initial attention. To keep your viewers engaged, you need to come up with a good idea for a video marketing campaign that gives your influencer of choice something interesting to do. Finding a connection between brand and star is the key here — why is this person endorsing your brand, and where can your series go after the initial introduction?
Example: myFICO and Kyle Busch
See how myFICO parlayed its sponsorship of two-time NASCAR champion Kyle Busch into an engaging explainer of its services.
A video campaign is defined by its potential to spin off multiple clips, rather than simply using an idea once. You may focus on repeating a formula, like producing clips about many products, employees or customers. Alternatively, you can film a large collection of footage around a single event or influencer, then release it piece by piece to craft a satisfying narrative — the options are virtually endless.
Browse more ideas for compelling marketing videos.
How Do You Maximize the Effects of Video Marketing?
Once you’ve decided to commit to a video marketing campaign, it’s time to take any and all possible actions to take maximum value from your new effort. This means taking the video roll-out as seriously as any other kind of marketing, making a formalized strategy, tracking results and adjusting on the fly to keep reaching your target audience.
Both between campaigns and during your campaign, you can tweak key elements of your approach for optimal value. Variables worth adjusting based on results and feedback include:
- Distribution platform: Are you posting your videos to a public YouTube channel, hosting them on your own servers or uploading them directly to a social media platform? Based on your intended audience, industry and content type, your ideal approach may vary.
- Promotional strategy: After initially publishing a video, there are multiple ways to extend its lifespan and expand its reach. These include linking your videos in blog posts, striking cross-promotional deals with partners in your industry and promoting the videos in social media marketing posts.
- Partnerships: Your brand doesn’t have to be the only source promoting and posting your video content. If your videos include influencers, for example, you can strike deals for promotional placement on those creators’ channels. In the B2B space, you may also find opportunities to post your content on third-party industry sites.
Evergreen video content is a potential recurring source of value for your organization, adding to its appeal as a promotional channel.
See examples of videos with great storytelling elements.
Why Do You Need Video Marketing Campaigns?
Video’s popularity as a marketing medium makes it important to use this content well, rather than just producing it in a rote way. In a media landscape where every competing company is using video, you need an edge that will make your content stand out from the pack.
This need to distinguish your brand is another place where strategically planned marketing campaigns come into play. The best campaigns aren’t just series of videos; they also encompass all the elements that come along with those videos.
From careful planning and brainstorming to analytics of video performance and adjustments to maximize performance, countless actions make up a video marketing campaign. Each new video is a building block in the overall campaign, and by the end of the planned roll-out, you’ll ideally have achieved a specific goal.
That objective may be anything that fuels your company’s specific value proposition — new customer acquisition, higher audience engagement among your existing user base, improved brand visibility or any other measurable metric. Tracking your progress toward your target is a great way to see the return on investment from your video marketing strategy increase in real time.
Learn about the unique value proposition of video.
Time To Get Serious About Video Campaigns
Video marketing via well-designed campaigns combines the multimedia power of video with the tried-and-true effectiveness of content marketing. Whether your organization focuses on B2B or B2C audiences, there’s a video marketing strategy out there that can unlock this value for you.
Gaining access to the sophisticated video production services that will help your brand thrive may require working with a third party or increasing your internal team. Fortunately, there are plenty of options on the market today, likely including one right-sized for your specific needs.
