Promotional videos are the secret ingredient in every high-performing sales professional’s recipe for success. According to Vidyard’s 2021 State of Virtual Selling Report, sales professionals using video in their sales cycle close 50% more deals than those who don’t. Those using promo videos in emails also see higher open and response rates.
Every company should produce promotional videos consistently. Without them, they miss out on thousands of potential leads who prefer learning about products through videos rather than text or audio. You can follow these six simple steps to create the perfect promotional video to attract new clients and grow your business.
1. Set a specific goal
Set a concrete goal to determine the content most likely to achieve it. A precise goal gives you focus. It lets you filter out any information, sounds, or visual assets that are not aligned with your goal. If a finding is novel but unrelated to the problem your video solves, there’s no point in adding it to your script.
Broad goals like “increase sales” don’t give you that focus. If your goal is to “increase sales,” then a 1% increase in sales over the next 15 months means the project was successful—but it wasn’t.
You can set SMART goals to inform the content your script should have. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, “Grow the number of bottom-of-the-funnel leads we receive by 15% before June 1.” Since the goal targets bottom-of-the-funnel leads, your scriptwriter will know that including basic concepts can bore viewers. Instead, they will add charts and statistics that convince viewers to buy products.
2. Write a 30-second script
Think with Google found viewers are more likely to watch 30-second ads than 15- and 120-second ones. Thirty-second ads are short enough to build a cohesive argument for why a product is worth buying but aren’t so long they become tedious.
Aim for between 50 to 70 words for your script—the average number of words a person can say in 30 seconds. Start your scripting process by creating a bullet point list of customer pain points. Then pair pain points with your product’s functionalities. Creating a connection between pain points and your offer helps you position your product as the best solution to their challenges.
With your audience’s pain points in mind, use a three-act story structure to build a cohesive narrative. The three acts for a 30-second story could look as follows:
- Present one of the pain points.
- Introduce your product.
- Explain how your product helps overcome a challenge.
Finish the script with a clear CTA for the reader. A viewer who gets to the end of a video cares about your product. But if you don’t reveal how they can buy it quickly, they’ll be less likely to do so.
Your CTA should tell viewers exactly what to do. Tell viewers to “book a call,” not to “learn more.” Similarly, ask them to “start a free trial,” not to “be part of the change.” A clear buying process avoids losing interested prospects in the middle of the sales cycle.
3. Design a storyboard
A storyboard is a document where you can sketch your speaker’s appearance, their lines, and the video’s events. This document also shows stakeholders the charts, props, and visual assets you will use to convince viewers to buy your product.
Stakeholders can comment on what’s unclear, boring, or missing. For example, let’s say a speaker will be claiming that electric cars will become the standard. It’s a bold statement. Without an equally attention-grabbing visual, the statement can sound unimpressive.
A stakeholder can flag this concern and suggest ways to make your claims more convincing, like showing the rise in electric car sales. While short, their feedback raises the odds of producing a profitable video. Their intervention will also save you from animating a video that won’t accomplish your SMART goals.
Use Vyond’s free U.S. letter or A4 storyboarding template to design your storyboard. Sketch characters, props, and the scene’s location in the squares. Don’t focus on the quality of your drawing. Instead, focus on adding everything you plan to animate into the square.
Then write each scene’s script lines below each square and conclude by writing the sound effects you will use below these lines. Placing script lines, scenes, and sound effects nearby gives you the chance to verify if they pair well before animating.
4. Turn your storyboard into an animated video
Animation software gives you control over the environment, sounds, props, and characters that appear in the video. This freedom allows you to re-create any promotional video’s storyboard without increasing costs.
You can freely change your character’s body type, facial features, or outfit to signal a specific age group. With live footage, you would spend weeks finding the right actor for your video.
At the beginning of the project, you can choose between three visual styles in Vyond: contemporary, business-friendly, and whiteboard. Pick the style that best matches your brand. Click the Character menu in the top-left corner to choose a pre-designed character or create one from scratch. Create a character that looks like your target audience, so viewers can place themselves in the character’s shoes as it encounters obstacles.
Next, click the prop (top left) and background (top right) menus to decorate your scene. As with characters, making scenes relatable by adding common items and settings helps viewers remember the hurdles they go through.
Finally, animate your characters and props. Select characters and click the Action menu on the top right. There, you’ll find hundreds of actions to imitate real-life scenes. You can also add Motion Paths to both characters and props to make them move the frame.
5. Distribute your video
Social media and advertising platforms are distribution channels that you can use to reach customers. But to maximize your chances of seeing a positive ROI early on, it’s crucial to focus on the platforms your audience uses.
Most TikTok users are below 30-years old. So while a pension plan company can promote videos there, they would likely see a higher ROI on platforms with older users, like LinkedIn.
You can find the websites your audience uses the most by reviewing your audience profile documents. Once you know the platforms they use, create accounts there and study how other companies promote their posts. Are their captions long or short? Are they uploading videos natively or sharing a link?
Write promotional copy with a structure that’s similar to popular videos from the platform. By replicating their structure, you’ll reduce the chances of publishing a post that gets ignored or, worse, removed by moderators.
6. Measure your video’s impact
Check if your video’s performance matches your SMART goal’s forecast. By contrasting expected results with actual performance, you’ll be able to report on the ROI of your promotional video.
A successful video with known metrics also lets teams make educated guesses on a video’s strengths. If a specific promotional video receives more views than usual, your team can study it to replicate its success. Maybe it’s the fast-paced script or the use of animations. Whatever it is, you won’t even discover the video is performing above average unless you track its performance.
But what if the video doesn’t meet your SMART goal? In that case, you will have metrics to once again speculate on why it failed. For example, a video probably has an uninteresting hook if 90% of viewers quit the video after 10 seconds of watching. You can use this data to test different intro formats and improve upcoming videos.
Private hosting platforms like Wistia let you track how viewers interact with your video. The software will tell you the number of people who see, click, and watch videos hosted on Wistia or that you emailed. This data lets you track how videos are performing, speculate on potential problems with your video, and measure the success of the solutions you come up with.
Create high-quality promotional videos to cut your sales cycle
Whether they’re in emails, sales calls, or on landing pages, promotional videos can shorten sale cycles. They convince viewers to buy your product or, at the very least, book a demo to inquire about it.
You can use Vyond’s video-maker features to add promotional videos to your next sales or video marketing campaign. We have templates to create videos explaining your products, report results, and compare options. Using templates means you don’t have to ideate a cohesive narrative. Instead, you can build a story on top of them and launch your promotional videos faster.
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