18 types of video to boost your business

The good news is, that if you’re not already using video for marketing purposes, then this is a huge opportunity to massively boost your web traffic & potential customers, and ultimately grow your business. Because as well as explaining concepts or showing who your are or what you do, videos are also great for converting viewers into customers and generate traffic to your site.

So now you may be wondering – what should I be making videos of?

Well, here are some ideas…

Recently a survey was carried out by Ascend2 to see what successful companies are doing with their video marketing. These companies ranked the different types of videos they are making in the order of most to least effective.

1. Customer testimonials – very popular and gives an authentic, real testament to how effective the company or product is

2. On-demand product demonstration videos – 64% of people are more likely to buy a product after watching a product video

3. Explainer and tutorial videos – optimum length is between 1-2 mins

4. Thought leader interviews – Building trust and positioning yourself as an authority

5. Project reviews and case studies

6. Live and on-demand training webinars – length can vary depending on purpose (but generally longer videos 30-40 mins)

7. Video blogs

8. Event videos – highlights video, show people what they missed…how about video content leading up to the event to advertise and boost ticket sales

If you don’t know where to start with video marketing here are some ideas:

Home page video
According to surveys 20% of web visitors read text compared to 80% that watch videos! That means that you could increase the effectiveness of your homepage or any page of your site by adding a good video. Also make sure it is above the fold, so users don’t have to scroll down to see it.
In this home page video introduce yourself, your company and what you do.
Share the main concerns people have when looking for the product or service you offer.
State the pain points in a positive way. Explain how you or your company or product is the solution.
Next show your values and social proof. You can list the 3 main pain points you mentioned earlier as positive benefits.
Lastly add your call to action.

An about you video
A video about you or your company is often a good homepage video, or you can also embed it on your About Us or About Me page. You can then upload this as the first video on your YouTube channel. Explain what you do, why you love doing it and your overall mission. Remember to always present this information with your customers’ needs in mind.
This type of video will help your prospects to get to know and hopefully like you and your enthusiasm for what you do. Remember, people want to do business with people they like rather than a webpage, so this is a close second best to meeting your prospective customers face-to-face.
Us humans are all hard wired to respond to stories and feel we connect more with people once we know a little bit about them. So this is your chance to tell your story and show your passion for what you do and why you do it.

In your about you video…
Explain who you are
Explain what your business does for your customers
and lastly explain why you love doing what you do!

FAQ’s videos
Find out the most frequently asked questions relating to your business sector, service or product and make each question into a short video. Then optimise these videos and upload them to your YouTube channel. I’ll talk more on optimising later. So once you’ve uploaded your FAQ videos, organise them into a play list and then embed the playlist onto your FAQ’s web page using this embed code.

I’ll include this code below the video so you can copy and paste it.

Make sure you break up long videos into short ones and again make a YouTube play list.

Get into a habit of using keyword rich titles for your YouTube channel and play list. This will help them to rank higher and makes them easier to find. More on that later.

A product demo video
Make demonstration videos of the products you make or sell, because video is the best way to explain your product online. Post these videos on the product page of your site and on YouTube. Then optimise them with general titles. Here’s an example of how well this works: One of my clients, OverBoard, manufactures waterproof bags. We made them a product video for each of their main products and then optimised them with general terms like – Waterproof Dry Tube Bags – Waterproof Bags – Dry Bags – OverBoard (notice their brand name comes last).

OverBoard’s YouTube channel

So far, they’ve had over 738,000 views (at the time of writing) across all their videos and are dominating YouTube for most of their keywords. Actually, type “Waterproof Bags” into YouTube and guess who comes up top?

OverBoard appearing top for “waterproof bag” in YouTube (213k Views)

Example Product Demo Video we created for JTX Fitness

A tutorial video
Make a tutorial video teaching your target audience a skill. These days, people are constantly searching YouTube to see how things are done. So whether it’s a nifty shortcut in a software tool or doing Halloween makeup, be the person to teach them. Make sure it’s visual, snappy and entertaining. We created a video explaining how to make a product demo video and optimised it correctly so it comes top (for that search term) in YouTube and Goolge (where it get’s a huge thumbnail). It’s getting around 5000 views a month!

Our huge thumbnail in Google

Example tutorial video we created.

A screen capture video tutorial
If you use software in your business or you make software products then you could be making screen capture tutorials. This will push you forward as an authority in your market and gather traffic to your site.

Example screen capture video demo

A landing page video
When you optimise a website you don’t just optimise the home page. You should theme each page for a different subject related to your main business and optimise it for keywords that match that theme. In the example image below a wedding DJ may have “Wedding DJ Brighton” as the keyword of her homepage. And she may have 2 landing pages, one themed to “corporate event DJ Brighton” and the other for “karaoke hire Brighton”. These pages then get indexed into Google as Landing pages.

Showing how you can theme your landing page keywords

This is how you can generate way more traffic than just having your home page indexed. These landing pages should include a content-focused video with a clear call to action which will then increase conversion rates of that page. So if you implement this strategy not only will your website pages get more traffic but they will convert better due to the videos. Add in a good call to action, at the end of your videos, offering a compelling Lead Magnet and you’ll be able to turn all that new traffic into targeted leads.

YouTube trailer
If your main focus is YouTube, then making a dedicated video that welcomes new subscribers to your channel is a great start. It should explain who you are, what you’re about and how you will help others. This video will be the main homepage video on your channel and should set the tone for your offering.

A free mini training series
Aimed at educating your target market, make a free mini training series around what your product does. Here’s an example of what I mean:
Let’s say you have a software company and you’re constantly adding all kinds of nifty tools and features to your software. But you realise that most customers hardly ever use any of these extra tools and instead just use the standard functionality. This should tell you that your customers and also your prospects are just not aware of the awesome power of your tool, perhaps because they don’t fully understand it. So you need to educate them and in doing so, you will sell more. If you dedicate yourself to teaching people how to maximise the results they can get from using your software in all its glory, then you’re onto a winner. They’re happy because you taught them how to do their jobs better AND are giving them the tool to do it with: your software.

Video testimonials
Showing your clients raving about you on video is a great way to help build confidence & credibility in your company. Video testimonials speak louder than the written variety as the viewer can see and identify with the person in the video, so it’s more real and more credible. Video testimonials will enhance the user experience of your website, and increase its conversion as well. Try to show the before and after of their story if you can. Put a testimonial on your checkout page if you have an online shop to boost its conversion rate. Always ask the client if they would recommend you to others and get them to repeat the question in the answer! Imagine a wedding band consistently grabbing a quick video testimonial from the bride and groom just after a brilliant set, with them saying how they loved it and how the band were amazing and hey they would highly recommend booking the band! That’s marketing gold, and pretty easy to do!

Example of a client testimonial video

Trade-show videos
If you find yourself at a trade-show, get a colleague to interview you and you can make an editorial style video about your business. You could do a quick product demo in front of your stand for example. Then grab some of the spectators for a brief testimonial, edit those in and you’re done!

Example of a Trade-show video

Event videos
If you hold company events, like seminars for example, make an advert video to promote the next one. Don’t worry about videoing the whole event, just shoot nice visuals that tell the story of the day. Grab some testimonials at the end, add some title slides with the key messages and you’ve got yourself a powerful trailer for you next event.

Example of an event video

Expert interviews
Interview experts and post these videos on your blog. This will generate a ton of traffic and again help to position you as an authority in your market as well as getting some amazing content on your blog. I created a video about the blurred lines lawsuit by interviewing a friend in the music business. It’s got 20k views currently (around 800 a month) and appears 2nd in the YouTube search results for “Blurred Lines Lawsuit”.

Example of an expert interview

Example of an expert interview designed to get views

Statistics video
Make a stats based video aimed at your market. This needs to be an emotive piece set to music, which shares vital statistics from your industry. Give it a compelling title and watch the views and traffic roll in.

Email campaign videos
Make a good quality video for your email campaign and make it the main focus. Include the link near the top of the email and near the bottom. I don’t claim to be an expert on email marketing but I’ve heard from experts that keeping your email text-based, short, chatty and informative is the way to go (because that is what we are used to from our friends and colleagues.

Sales video
Sales page videos can drastically increase your conversions allowing you to generate way more sales. You might be thinking “no-one is going to buy something from me after watching one video”. Well you might be right if they come to your sales video as a cold lead. But if you have offered value through YouTube videos and turned them into a lead after they watched your squeeze page video. Then they may have watched your ‘about you’ video and learned your story and seen your passion for your business, then the chances are they are now a warm lead and will be more likely to listen to your sales pitch video in a positive light. By then they feel like they know you and are more likely to take the next step and take action.

A sales video formula

Grab Attention – Promise more income, influence and impact
Problem to Solution
Explain the Benefits
Expert Story
Pivot to the Offer
The Price
Guarantee
Wrap Up
Call to action

Training video (paid)
The final piece to the puzzle are product training videos. This is where you can leverage your knowledge of your industry and turn it into paid content. This can then be sold over and over worldwide making you round-the-clock income and allowing you to grow your business. Products in video form have a higher perceived value meaning you can charge more and they allow you to get your point across in the best possible and most engaging way.

Here are my top tips on making online courses:
Make your course a step-by-step guide.
It needs to be goal focused (what can they achieve using your course).
Host the course on WordPress with Optimisepress theme (which allows you to create membership sites, landing pages and sales funnels quickly and easily).
Use Wistia for private video hosting.
And use Active Campaign for email marketing software (this integrates nicely with Optimisepress).

Editorial videos
Now you know about the many types of videos you could be making, I want to make a very important point. Although the ultimate result of these videos is more sales, try to make a large amount of your videos ‘editorial’ rather than ‘sales’ videos. So think of editorial pieces that would interest your target market. A good way to do this is to imagine a magazine about your industry and think of articles that would appear in it. These are the kinds of things your prospective customers want to read about and watch, so make content to match this. If you’re the one who is delivering the content, you will elevate yourself to celebrity status within your industry and push yourself forward as an authority in your chosen market.
The other thing about using the editorial style is that you don’t need to present to camera as much. Let’s say you’re used to doing product demos to the public at trade shows. If you got a work colleague or friend to appear in the video they could play the customer asking the FAQ’s and you could be answering them without having to present to camera. This is a handy trick to make you come across more relaxed and genuine on camera.

So there are a number of important videos you could be using to grow your business and attract more customers.
So what now? If you need help creating video content for your business so you can engage your target audience get in touch, we’d love to have a chat and see how we can help.