Engaging Video Content Types that People Love to Watch

Valuable and meaningful content customized for your audience is the heart of any successful marketing campaign. After all, you want to attract, engage and convert your audience. In short, you want to carry them down the marketing funnel. The world is shifting and video content is increasingly popular nowadays; video marketing is the new darling of content marketing.

Video Marketing Explained

A picture is worth a thousand words, what more will a video be worth then? Video marketing is typically using videos to promote and market your product or service in the hope to increase user engagement, educate your consumers while increasing your outreach on your digital and social channels. 

In short, it is a forward-facing marketing strategy that integrates engaging videos into your marketing campaigns.

According to an online video viewer survey done across selected countries worldwide among 5,000 respondents 18 years and older in August 2020, 27.2% of online viewers watched more than 10 hours of online videos on a weekly basis. In short, 60.9% watched 4 hours and more a week with 42.6% actually watching 7 hours and more a week. If you’re a WordPress user looking to gather insights from your audience, you might consider using a Survey Plugin WordPress to conduct surveys and gather valuable feedback directly from your website visitors.

This shows the growth in digital video advertising spending in the United States from 2017 to 2021. It is projected to grow to 22.18 billion US dollars in 2021. This is not surprising given the similar growth in the number of users watching video content.

It is no wonder that video marketing is the favorite among all marketers. No matter the platform, videos can be used for everything from building customer rapport, to promoting your brand, services, or products. The opportunities are limitless.

Engaging Video Content Types that People Love to Watch

Videos are potent tools for many marketers; there are tons of benefits that you can reap when you offer video content throughout the buyer’s journey. Videos can help educate your audience, make it easier for them to trust your brand, and move them on to a purchase decision faster. You can place your video content across all your digital channels.  

Also, if people face issues accessing videos on certain blocked websites, there are ways to overcome this. In short, introducing video into your marketing strategy is a no-brainer. 

As a business owner yourself, you’ll have to have your own website to create a digital presence. Remember that not all videos perform at this high of a level at all times. You need to make sure you’re creating the types of videos your audience wants to be viewing. Otherwise, you’ll lose them before you have them. 

Videos can be segregated in accordance to the three categories in the sales funnel in order to reap their optimum benefits:

• The top-funnel (awareness) – videos’ theme is mostly on introduction and seduction. 
• The middle-funnel (consideration) –  videos at this stage, focus on nurturing the leads obtained from the top-funnel efforts; you have their attention, now get them to know, like, and seriously consider you.
• The bottom-funnel (decision) –  videos need to give that slight push to convert your potential customers to make a purchase.

Top-Funnel Videos

This stage focuses more on introducing yourself and your brand to the public; more on reeling your audience in to convert them into potential leads. 

1. Brand Films/Behind-the-Scenes

Brand videos can help your audience familiarise themselves with your values, culture, visions, and ultimately the core of your brand. Such videos can be longer than usual to give that broader scope for taking viewers on a journey while diving deeper into your brand. Include attractive visuals, sounds, and storytelling along with cinematic production. You can also turn your brand films into interactive videos to connect with your customers on a personal level. This can help ensnare and keep your audience’s attention. 

Such videos pull back the curtains on your business, giving them an immersive experience and showcasing that your brand isn’t just clockwork, but has human fabric interwoven with colorful personalities. Your purpose is to make your brand more human and more alive. This, will in time, lead to increased conversion rates and better customer retention. 

2. Educational Videos/Documentaries

People mostly search on the internet to find out more about a certain topic. After all, humans are very curious in nature. Especially if your products/services revolve around a theme that’s highly in demand, you’ll be wise to do videos to educate your audience on them.

Educational videos’ aim is to offer something of real value to the audience that they can apply to their everyday lives. Documentaries are similar to educational videos as they also furnish you with knowledge on something real, valuable, and new. However, the latter can tend to be more in-depth and detailed. Creating a series of videos on what your products/services revolve around, helps heaps. 

This can be followed by videos that highlight your products/services as a means of introducing and placing what you offer on the table in a more systematic way so that your audience will be able to understand better. For more information on how to create engaging educational videos and animations, go to Evelyn Learning.

3. Vlogs

Vlogs are typically videos of users’ everyday routines during which they interact with their audience by talking to the camera. You may wonder how this could help with creating brand awareness.  Well, because vlogs have intrinsic human elements woven in them, these are great to help pique the interest in your audience. 

On top of being spontaneous, vlogs help exude a more genuine take on things with a relatable human quality, thus giving a more open and authentic feel to your audience. This, in turn, can help build brand awareness and credibility. So, you can use vlogs as a cost-effective platform to establish a unique brand voice and personable image that resonates with your audience.

That said, everything should always be in moderation so don’t make your entire video content marketing strategy around vlogs only, as too much of something can easily bore people. Nevertheless, vlogs are still a potent supplement to many of the other video types here.

4. Event Videos

Event videos can have an accurate through-the-keyhole impact that plays on a powerful, emotive marketing technique – the fear of missing out. It is a psychological trigger that causes people to suffer anxiety when everyone’s talking about it and they know nothing about it. It makes them feel excluded.

Organizing events is the fad now, it’s all the rage, not only among the general population but many industry professionals as well. Even churches have entered into the world of live streaming their events. You can do live gatherings of like-minded individuals from your company’s niche; this is an excellent opportunity to showcase your company’s talent. Done right, these videos can quickly foster brand recognition, helping people see your company as one with its finger on the pulse.

5. Interview/Q&A

Interviews are excellent to help inform people about the business’ industry and what they can expect from it. It can also be seen as an educational way to enlighten individuals about your brand and its future plans. Interview videos can help build your brand’s authority by: 

• aligning your brand with an inspiring person or authoritative leader.
• establishing authority with input from a respected voice.
• allowing your audience a more intimate experience, where someone in your business answers hard-hitting questions.
• giving your audience multiple perspectives on a topic.

You’ll need to have a set of guidelines gently guiding the interviewee to discuss hot topics, trends and, if possible, to reveal exclusive news or big secrets for the audience. You can even create a series of interviews with different guests, leveraging their knowledge to empower your marketing. As such, you get to gain more credibility through brand association. 

Middle-Funnel Videos

Now you’ve secured your audience’s attention, you can look into creating more of the following videos to help push them further down the sales funnel: 

6. Product/Feature Videos

Product videos are great to highlight a product and its functions along with the benefits. It is important to focus on how your products can resolve your audience’s pressing issues so that they can relate better to your products.

Additionally, you can do a series of feature videos to showcase in more detail the highlighted features of your products. Who knows, maybe you’ll strike the right chord once your potential customer sees what he/she likes. 

7. Product Reviews

A product review is one of the most helpful types of video content, especially for consumers who are in the consideration phase of the sales funnel. You’ll need to dwell on how your product works in practice to convince your viewers of its benefits. To do so, you can get your product to some of the industry’s influencers or review channels and get them to put in a good word for you and your brand. 

Such avenues have a lot of credibility in consumers’ eyes, so it would be wise to leverage this in your online marketing strategy. That said, you have to ensure that such videos are unbiased and don’t look like paid promotions. 

By reviewing products and presenting such videos to your audience, you can easily answer common questions, dispel doubts, and show viewers the unique benefits that your product offers. This helps heaps especially if they’re having difficulty trying to make the final purchasing decisions.

8. Testimonials

Studies have found that customer testimonials have the highest rating of effectiveness at 89%, for content marketing. This means that testimonials are very powerful tools when it comes to boosting the decision part of the marketing funnel. This is because people are likely to purchase your products when they see positive testimonials of your business. 

You can look into bringing some of these testimonials to life by recording them. By doing so, you’ll not only be showing your prospects, your real-life customers, but you’ll also be putting forward your successes to those clients front and center. 

It is best to go for those cherry-picked responses from customers who have great experiences with you. Remember that good testimonials from past customers always help boost a brand’s trust signals. 

End-Funnel Videos

Congratulations! Your potential customers are on the verge of making a purchase. In short, your leads are ripe for picking. Just give them a slight push and you can effectively convert them.

9. FAQs

Featuring a more detailed FAQ in a video format can help heaps to encourage the click of the ‘Buy’ button. At this point, your prospects are generally looking for answers to any remaining questions they may have. Therefore, focus on allaying their fears and calm any last quibbles.

10. Instructions/Tutorials

Such instruction and tutorial videos are some of the most searched for online. While this type of video can fall under the educational type as explained above, these videos are targeted more towards post-sales support. Such videos’ purpose is to help your customers troubleshoot and resolve any issues pertaining to your product. 

Putting out quality tutorials with a laser focus on helping people can help you earn their trust. This can give that boost to your brand’s image. 

Conclusion

It’s already 2021 and if you’re still not using video content, you’re missing out on massive opportunities to engage your audience and also losing serious ground to your competitors. Including video in your content marketing strategy is an effective and efficient way to accelerate the journey of leads in your funnel.

The above enlists the engaging video content types which people love to watch. Although they are segregated in accordance with the usual sales funnel journey, they can belong at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Ultimately, what compels increases conversions.