Creating product marketing videos for the first time can seem daunting if you aren’t a video production expert. Most video production guides detail the benefits of video to promote your products, but few give you advice on how to avoid the complexities involved in recording and collecting those product videos.
The traditional way of recording product marketing videos can be a lengthy and highly specialized process. Getting a top quality marketing video usually requires you to:
- Hire a professional film crew or videographer
- Find and hire a location for the shoot
- Organize for your team, the film crew, and anyone else involved to be on location at the same time
- Pass raw footage to post-production and video editing professionals to transform it into a watchable, polished product video
This entire process is not only hugely time-consuming (even when you get professionals to do it for you), but can also easily blow your marketing budget. On top of these issues, unless you have a gigantic budget, you end up with only a small number of product marketing videos to help attract new customers.
Vocal Video takes care of all these problems for you. We designed our platform so that anyone could make high quality product marketing videos as often as necessary, at a fraction of the cost of doing it the traditional way. Our unique video recording, collection, and editing process cuts through the usual time, work, and expense of producing engaging video content for your marketing strategy. All without sitting through hours of tutorials to learn our process.
Take a look at the product testimonial video below to see the results for yourself:
In this article, we’ll discuss in more detail:
Vocal Video gives you an easy-to-follow process to start producing the best product videos quickly and affordably. Sign up for a free Vocal Video account to start collecting and recording product marketing videos now.
What Makes Product Marketing Videos Effective?
Product marketing videos are a dynamic way to showcase how your product solves customers’ pain points. They can exhibit specific features of your products, act as a step-by-step guide to how to use the product, or feature a customer success story, for example.
Video is a much more dynamic way to communicate this information, and viewers are more likely to absorb it than text-based content. Product videos are also much more likely to be shared online than written information. If a video’s message resonates with the viewer, it’s easy to click to share it on social media and ask others to watch it.
Overall, product marketing videos lead to higher conversion rates than similar written content because they grab the viewer’s attention, and potential customers see them as more authentic.
The Most Common Barriers to Creating Product Marketing Videos
As we discussed in the intro, product marketing videos have been traditionally complicated, time-consuming and expensive to create. According to a Vocal Video survey on the impact of video testimonials on marketing, the majority of businesses spend an average of $15,000 or more to produce just one marketing video.
This high ticket price makes video marketing prohibitively expensive for most brands. Small businesses often don’t consider it as an option.
Other brands try to cut costs by making the product marketing videos themselves, even if they have no experience or specialized equipment. But making the video yourself takes hours of learning video shooting and editing techniques, and still might not result in a quality video.
Read our article for further information: How much does a testimonial video cost?
How to Simplify Product Marketing Video Production with Vocal Video
Vocal Video is designed so that users can collect and record marketing videos using a straightforward, inexpensive, step-by-step process. The work that you need to do to set up the recording process, and collect the resulting video is intentionally kept to a minimum.
Using our process, product videos can either be made in-house by getting members of your team to record them, or you can ask customers to record them remotely on your behalf.
Users can record videos when it’s convenient for them. They don’t need to schedule a specific time for an online interview. Nor do they need professional audio, video or lighting equipment; they record the whole video on their own device using its integrated camera.
Here’s how to record and collect a product marketing video using our step-by-step system (for this purpose, we’ll assume you are collecting product videos from customers):
Design a Video Collector and Send Out an Automatically-Generated Link
To start the Vocal Video production process, you build a ‘video collector’. This is an interface that customers or other interviewees can follow to record their product marketing video. It takes a few minutes to build, but you can make that even faster by using one of Vocal Video’s 45+ templates which are designed for a wide range of use cases.
The video collector builder asks you to add:
- Three to five questions you want your user to record answers to.
- An incentive for recording a testimonial (optional, including gifts, discounts, donations, or Vocal Video’s monthly prize draw).
- Your brand’s logo and colors (which will be featured in the final video).
- A customizable welcome note or video message.
- A suggested thank you message.
Next, you get an automatically-generated link to send out to the people who will record your product videos. You can send the link by SMS, by email, or by adding it to a social media post. To record their video, your users simply click on the link to be taken to your Vocal Video landing page where they can start recording.
We never ask your users to download any software, apps, or to sign up for services when they use the link. This is to ensure that you get a great response rate and nobody is put off recording a video for you because they are unwilling to take those extra steps.
Find out more about how to build a video collector in our detailed article.
Vocal Video Guides Users to Record a Video Remotely
When the user arrives at your Vocal Video landing page, which is fully branded to your organization, the video collector you built in the previous step guides them to record their product marketing video.
Before they begin, they get tips on how to make the best video possible: Pick a quiet and well-lit place, Relax - You can redo any recording you don’t like, and Smile!
The collector shows your user each question before recording begins, and they can take time to consider how they want to answer it. When they are ready to answer, they press record. They can watch their response after recording and do it over again, if they want to change anything. The ability to re-record answers gives users full control of the process and improves the overall quality of the final product marketing videos.
After answering all the questions you set, users click the ‘submit’ button to send their product video directly to you.
Vocal Video Automatically Edits Your Product Videos So You Don’t Need To
Between the customer submitting the video footage they recorded and you receiving it, Vocal Video applies its automatic editing process to polish the video and make it easy to watch as soon as it hits your inbox. You don’t have to make any changes to the video (unless you want to). You can simply post or share it wherever you want, exactly as it arrives.
Vocal Video’s pre-editing covers the following processes:
- Title slides and text overlays
- Slides with the questions asked
- Your brand colors and logo used throughout the video
- Animated transitions between responses and slides
- Captions and a computer-generated transcript (a plus for accessibility, readability and SEO)
- Default background music
- A call-to-action
Add Your Own Edits with Vocal Video’s In-Built Video Editing Functionality
Although your pre-edited videos already look great, you can also add some extra flair and polish by using Vocal Video’s in-built suite of video editing tools. You can make any specific changes, such as removing hesitations, adding extra text slides, or editing captions, right within the Vocal Video platform, and without having to upload your video into third-party software.
Like the rest of our process, we’ve designed our video editing tools to be as easy as possible and super quick to learn.
Our video editing tools allow you to:
- Cut video responses or change the order they appear in
- Trim long scenes, cut out pauses in speech, or remove non-essential remarks
- Change your logo and brand colors
- Add different background music and adjust volume
- Edit the captions and the transcript (AI-generated captions and transcripts may have some small errors)
- Splice several videos together to create highlight reels
Learn more about video editing with Vocal Video’s in-built tools.
Use Share Links, Embed Codes, and Gallery Displays
When you are happy with the way your video looks, you can share it across your marketing channels using the automatically generated share links (for social media platforms, YouTube channels, email, and the like) and embed codes (for your website).
Vocal Video also makes it easy for you to create beautiful galleries to display all your best product videos. You simply copy and paste a block of code that Vocal Video provides.
You can customize each gallery display by:
- Choosing background color gradients
- Selecting fonts
- Highlighting text from the video transcript
- Updating logos
- Adjusting design elements
- Picking the style of display (wall of love, card, gallery, carousel, list, etc.).
Plus, you can get a preview of what your gallery will look like on your site or store before it goes live.
Read about how to build beautiful video galleries for your website or eCommerce store.
Five Types of Product Videos to Consider Using in Your Marketing
1. Product Testimonial Videos
If you want to get a quick start on producing product marketing videos for your business, product testimonial videos are a great place to begin. customer testimonials and similar user-generated content are a solid foundation for your product video marketing strategy.
This type of video provides genuine social proof for your brand and products while raising brand awareness in an engaging way. Potential customers get to see live-action footage of real people engaging with your product and explaining exactly what they like about it.
Here’s an example of a product testimonial video recorded on the Vocal Video platform:
See six more examples of video testimonials and how to record your own.
To speed up the production of your customer testimonial videos you can use one of Vocal Video’s customer testimonial video templates, which give you:
- A three-step email sequence to request product testimonials from your satisfied customers.
- Customizable questions to ask your customers to get great testimonial responses.
- Suggested welcome and thank you messages.
See our articles for more information about how to get the benefits of testimonial videos on a budget and how to increase conversions and improve other metrics by recording your own product testimonial videos.
2. Product Demo Videos / Explainer Videos
Product demo videos highlight the features and benefits of your product and how it solves your customers’ pain points. They are more directly marketing focused as they are used to nudge customers into buying your products.
Explainer videos, while similar to product demos, explain in detail how the product works, or show customers how to troubleshoot a problem they may have with your product. They are focused on the practicalities of using your products, and are usually aimed at customers who have already bought your products.
These videos can be added to your landing page, as a quick walkthrough of exactly what your product does, on your FAQ page, or as a customer support resource.
Here’s an example of a video gallery of product demo videos put together using Vocal Video:
Explainer videos are useful to provide a visual solution to solving product problems, as long, written instructions become unwieldy and too complex to follow. Saas brands often use explainer videos to explain the nuances of their software products, for example.
3. Product Launch Videos / New Feature Videos
In the past, it has often proven difficult to use video for product launches due to the long time and high expense involved in finding early users, or influencers, and shooting and editing the resulting video footage. But if you have a way of capturing video asynchronously from enthusiastic early users, and the recording process takes just a few minutes (as it does with Vocal Video), it becomes feasible to produce them.
Below is an example of a product launch video from Sleep Test captured remotely using Vocal Video’s quick recording process:
Product and marketing teams can use these types of short, authentic videos to promote new products and features when they are launched.
You can use the Vocal Video product launch template to start creating your own product launch and new feature launch videos.
4. Ecommerce Product Review Videos
Ecommerce product reviews are among the most powerful tools a marketing team can use to build trust in their online product and convert browsers to buyers. When people buy online, they need to trust that the products will be as good in reality as they appear to be on screen.
An eCommerce product review, although similar to a customer testimonial, usually focuses on an individual product sold within a web store that may sell multiple products. They are often included on each product page and are proven to be more convincing to potential customers, than more common star-rating, or quote reviews.
Here’s a great example of an eCommerce review of the Hip Hook by Aletha Health:
Click to use Vocal Video’s template to collect ecommerce review videos.
5. Case Study Videos
The social proof of case studies has long been considered to be particularly effective, particularly in B2B organizations. Historically, however, case studies have been presented in long-form written format, but short video case studies are becoming more popular.
These videos are easy to watch and digest, and more likely to be shared online. The transcript that comes alongside the video can also be used to continue to take advantage of the SEO benefits that text usually brings.
Here’s an example of a case study video created by Activ:
Use Vocal Video’s B2B case study video template to start recording case study videos for your brand.
Vocal Video: Cut through the Expense and Complexity of Producing Your Own Product Marketing Videos
Vocal Video lets you collect and record product marketing videos easily, quickly, and affordably whenever your marketing needs them. You can create a free account, and upgrade at any time to an inexpensive subscription to access premium features including watermark-free videos and white-labeled video collections.
Sign up for a free Vocal Video account to start collecting and recording product marketing videos now.