5 Effective Promotional Video Ideas

It’s difficult to know where to start with your promotional video – you have a great product that deserves exposure, but how do you do it justice on the screen? 

You might even think that your product or business isn’t particularly ‘visual’ or that it won’t suit the medium of video, but there are so many different types of effective videos that there really will be one to suit every kind of brand.

If you’re stuck for ideas or still considering whether video is right or you, you’ve come to the right place. Here are 5 promotional video ideas which are sure to yield results.

The emotional video doesn’t necessarily mean a tear-jerker, although that can be very effective if the content is relevant to your business. Instead, it means using your video to get across your brand messaging and evoke the kind of emotions you would expect from the use of your product or service. This can be joy, relief, a new lease of life, the satisfaction of increased productivity, anything really, so long as it ties into what you’re promoting.

Ideas for this kind of video don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The key to getting the emotional video right is to make it believable – we’ve probably all laughed at an advert for something where the characters seem far too enthused about a very ordinary product. 

Use this type of video to demonstrate the type of emotions that come with the ideal lifestyle of someone using your product. This is where you can get a little creative – for example, a new car representing freedom and independence, or improved organisation and cleanliness at home translating to more success and less stress.

This is probably one of the most straightforward promotional video ideas if you have a physical product or service to market. Displaying what your product does and what makes it so great are at the heart of this type of video. This can also be combined with other techniques like client testimonials (more on that later) to back up the demonstrations being shown on screen.

The name is just what you’re trying to evoke in your audience – that thought of ‘I need that’. We’ve all seen these kinds of videos before where we get hooked in and can’t believe we’ve lived without something for so long. The beauty of this type of promotional video is it doesn’t require much spin. You let your product or service do the talking and shoot it in a way that showcases its appeal.

Client testimonials are a great way to give your product or service a vote of confidence from people who were in a similar situation to your new audience. While you can have written testimonials on your website, putting a face to the claim gives extra validity to your audience that those words are true, and that people are willing to publicly show their support for your business.

There are a couple of ways you can go about this depending on whether you want to focus on volume or detail. If you have a huge bank of satisfied customers who’d be willing to endorse your product, then you could opt to show how popular your product is by showing a selection of these people using the product and talking about their experience to show the breadth of your success. 

The other way to go is to present the video as a case study, following just one or two people who have used your product or service. You can create a narrative, showing the audience what the problem was before and how using your business helped them solve it. There are many ways to get creative with structure and style because of the ‘storytelling’ aspect of a case study.

Telling a story can be done in many ways and is one of the most popular promotional video ideas. As mentioned above, it can tell the story of one of your customers and how your service improved their lives, or it could be a fictional story that represents all the values and aspirations that your brand evokes. 

One of the more recent types of promotional video that has seen a lot of success is the company story. This is a great way to get people to know the real people behind your brand and the journey of your business.

We connect more readily with real people than we do ideas, so it makes sense that a storytelling video should include people with stories and ambitions of their own. In a successful brand video, you want to show how your business started and who was involved, showcasing your evolution over time.

Not only does this provide plenty of real characters for your audience to engage with, but it is also a way to show in earnest the values and practices that go into the everyday running of your operation.

This is arguably the most exciting of the promotional video ideas, and the trickiest to get exactly right. The unusual promotional video is the one that is in some way disruptive or shocks your audience. The difference between the unusual video and just a thought-provoking story-style video is that more questions are raised rather than answered, leaving a lingering sense of intrigue in the audience. It is their desire to know more that will draw them to your business.

Not all businesses will suit this style of promotional video, but ones that can pull it off are sure to get the most audience engagement via social media sharing and also through real conversation. If we see something that shocks us or leaves us with questions, the first thing we want to do is discuss it or theorise it with others. The unusual promotional video is the one most likely to have people saying, “did you see that video?”, to close friends and strangers alike.

This isn’t to say that the unusual promotional video should be weird for weird’s sake, offensive, or intentionally ambiguous and confusing. Those things will only turn audiences away. The key is to make an impact and offer enough information about what it is you’re selling without giving everything away.

There you have it – 5 effective promotional video ideas. There’s plenty of room for creativity with each of these types of video, and many of them lend themselves well to being overlapped or combined. Whatever type of video you opt for, just remember to always consider whether you are being true to your brand and the type of values you want to promote.
If you’re interested in creating a promotional video for your brand, take a look at our portfolio and see if we could help you.