1. Set your goals for your product video
Like any piece of content, you need to know what your goals are before you start. This not only helps you choose the right video format but also helps come up with ideas to help reach that particular goal. Perhaps you are trying to persuade your audience through emotions, display detailed aspects of the product, or maybe a mix of the two.
There are many ways brands can use videos in different stages of the customer journey. Around a third of businesses use video for sales while 20% of businesses use video for product management and customer support messages. Depending on what your business needs are, you may want a video for any of these purposes:
- Building brand awareness: introduce a need for your product and make your brand look good
- Generating leads or sales: convincing prospects to get in touch or buy
- Explaining specific features: educating existing customers to improve adoption and retention
Your goals help you determine the kind of video you should produce. If you’re looking to build brand awareness – do a short ad. Want to improve customer retention? Create video tutorials for different features. The options are endless. Through video, you can easily help your product stand out in the marketplace by showing how your product fits into the lifestyle of your intended target audience.
Once you have your goals set, it’ll be much easier to proceed with the next steps like writing the script, choosing the tone, etc.
There are plenty of YouTube tutorials to help you along the way with any exact technical questions, but it’s important that utilizing video only helps your product stand out but doesn’t take away from any of your other messaging.
You may receive a ton of inquiries from people who have no clue what exactly you sell. We suspect that this might be because you don’t have a lot of information in the form of video on your various web pages:
Ask yourself, why are we creating this video? What problem are we trying to solve with it?
2. Identify your target audience
Setting your goals is the first step. Then you need to know who you’re addressing and the message you need to convey.
First, who is this video for? If your answer is “everyone” you might need to spend a bit of time doing some serious research.
Knowing who your ideal customers are will help you choose the best tone and language to address them, increasing your video’s effectiveness.
Then you need to ask, what do we want to emphasize in the video? What is your biggest selling point? Why should people care?
These questions should help you narrow your focus on just the essence and highlights of your product in the video and make them memorable for your viewers.
Here are some ways to identify your target audience and value proposition:
- Ask your sales team. They talk to customers all day long. They know the kind of retailers who’re most likely to buy, what they care and worry about, and how they speak. This will help to frame your videos in a way that connects with your target market
- Talk to your customers. The best way to understand your customers is to talk to them. Ask them why they chose your product over a competitor’s, what they like most about your product, how they use it, and what they wish they had more access to when they were going through the buying journey.
- Monitor your brand discussions. Sometimes your customers might not want to speak to you. They might just want to share their opinions with their followers and friends. Or they may just leave a review online. Keeping a close eye on all your brand related conversations will help you understand them better – what they really think about your brand, as well as the language they use when communicating. This method takes effort and time to search out online platforms where these conversations and messages are being shared, but it will pay off in the long run.
- Steal ideas from your competitors. Your competitors’ customers are your best prospects. Check in on your competitors to see what kind of people they are targeting, how they’re targeting them, and what storytelling tactics they may be deploying, that you aren’t currently utilizing.
Do your homework to find out who your target audience are and what they care about the most to determine your video content and tone. While product videos are creative, the best product videos use analytics and data to drive those creative choices.
3. Draft a script and storyboard based on your target audience
Once you decide on your target audience, tone, and value proposition, you can start drafting your script and storyboard.
Whether you’re filming the project yourself or hiring out to a contractor, you’ll want to craft your video’s script to ensure the story is told in your own words and speaks to the target audience you’ve just selected.
Writing your script
The script is the foundation of your entire video. Like the script of a movie, basically. If you’ve spent any amount of time in an English or writing class, you’ll know that a good story needs some sort of conflict, and then a resolution. The same goes for a good product video.
Setting up the challenge
You need to first set up the context and the challenges faced by your target audience. Then, you introduce your product as a solution to their challenge.
Use the right tone to reflect your brand
The tone of your video should represent your brand voice and what you’re selling. If you’re representing yourself as a smart solution, sound smart. If you’re a new piece of clothing, sound edgy and experimental.
You also need to speak your audience’s language. Are they tech geeks who like to use technical terms? Or are they teenagers who speak in emojis? To connect with and convince your audience, you must use the same language as them.
Talk benefits, not features
Your customers don’t care about you. Or your product. They care about themselves and their problems. The only way to get them to care about your product is to show them how you can solve their problems.
So if you’re selling a hat, talk about the great skin your customer will have in 10 years from sun protection, or how great they’ll look even on bad hair days. The hat is the feature, the outcome is the benefit. Your script needs to be all about the benefits. It’s okay to touch on features, but only when you show how it can help your customers.
Choose words that reinforce your central idea
In your video, you should have one theme or central idea. Remember, your video isn’t about you, it’s about your customers. Make sure that this is as clear as possible throughout the entirety of your video.
5. Filming, actors, and voiceover
Filming is typically the easiest part of the whole video production. All of the scriptwriting and storyboarding lays the foundation for what’s to be done in the filming and editing phase, to ensure that time and resources are utilized most efficiently.
If you’re working with an agency, they will bring all the equipment, but if you’re doing it alone, just use whatever tech you have at your disposal. Most modern phones have cameras that are more than capable. Other factors to focus on are finding good lighting to help your product shine and ensuring there is a quiet space for any voiceovers that are needed.
As for the voiceover, make sure to rehearse and experiment a few different versions with the crew in a quiet room!
5. Diffusing your video
Once your video is ready, you need to get it out there for the world to see.
Based on your goals, you have to decide where you want to share and host your video.
Here are a few common options:
- A landing page
- Your website homepage
- Social media platforms
- Nurturing emails
Hosting your video
YouTube is everybody’s go-to platform for videos, and if we target the right keywords, we can reach a big audience that’s never heard of us. It’s also a completely free hosting option, which helps.
The only problem is, when we embed a YouTube video, people can click away from our page to watch on YouTube instead, thus less likely to continue reading or doing what we want them to. YouTube also displays lots of ads and suggested videos, which may very well be one of our competitors’.
Because of this potential dilemma, see if your content management system on the backend of your website will allow you to directly upload video files to your website, without the need for a hosting site like YouTube.
If this is an option, it may be advisable to upload your creations both to your YouTube page and to your website directly. This way, website users won’t be drawn away from your site, and you’ll still be able to take advantage of the searchability of YouTube.
Now that you know exactly how to script, film, and share your product videos, it’s important that you check out TradeBeyond to find the next great products to create videos about.