All organisations should be considering whether they can utilize video content, so what are their options?

Video has been one of the runaway successful trends of the last few years. All the social media channels now allow their users to host video content. YouTube has over a billion users and last year saw a 40% increase in people watching its videos.

So how can you incorporate video into your website and your marketing? The answer to this depends on what you do, who your audience are and what you want to achieve. We thought now would be an opportunity to outline 6 different types of video content.

Explainers.

Explainer videos answer questions that customers or potential customers might have about a company’s products. Explainers might cover problems that are solved by the product and be an important part of pre-sale promotion or they might provide guidance or tips on using the product. These are commonly used by software companies and other ‘low-touch sales’ businesses. It’s also worth considering that you can use animation for explainers if it’s easier to explain that way or simply if you’re not confident in front of a camera.

Knowledge sharing.

A knowledge sharing video is where you use your expertise to educate your customers or casual browsers for free. The free part is important. This is about building trust, and every time you refer to your business or product you chip away at that trust. That doesn’t mean you should never mention the brand, only that you need to weigh it up. People are less cynical when someone is helping but wants nothing back. There are plenty of tradespeople who do videos on how to do basic DIY tasks, sacrificing the odd sale for their brand. Youtube is full of young entrepreneurs whose business models revolve purely around this type of content.

 Culture.

This is content designed to bring across company culture. This is really about brand awareness, and if done well, people will know you are, they’ll want to work for you and people will have confidence in your brand. For some businesses however, culture can be difficult thing to communicate.

Montage.

The easiest way to create video is just to present stills with a voiceover, and there’s plenty of software that makes this simple. Worth considering if you want to show off the visual aspect of your business or products without expecting people to scroll through a gallery.

Vines.

 Just got a great idea, but nothing to build around it? Not problem, with vines you just need 6 seconds.

Webinar.

Okay, so webinar is one of the most annoying words in the world and we normally love portmanteaux*, but if you have enough people who are interested in a topic, it’s a good way to use video as a means of communication with your customers. You can take questions and the live-format means people put aside a prolonged amount of time to spend in your company which is a rarity. Also, it might be a live event, but you can always upload the recording to your site for future use.

Still unsure of what will work? Now that you’re thinking about it, perhaps you’ll start to notice what other people are doing and inspiration will strike.

*= yes this is the plural of portmanteau, we checked.

We managed to get through the whole article without mentioning Cindr is a super-simple website builder that lets you add video REALLY easily your site.