There are universal marketing principles that will apply to your video content whether your company sells a product or a service. Principles like, ‘don’t say what it is, show what it can do’. However, there are certain approaches that will work better depending on whether you’re selling a product or a service.
Whether they’re looking for a product or a service, your customer is almost certainly looking to fulfil a need or solve a problem. The difference between the two is the customer’s required level of convincing. This is what you’re trying to exceed with your video content (and all-round marketing). This level is different for a product compared to a service and should be catered for and met in a different way.
Your customers will be bringing their own buying-baggage when they view your videos. This is accumulated baggage from every single product they’ve purchased or service they’ve subscribed to. Those that have been exceptional value for money and solved a problem, and those that have been a letdown.
We tend to hang on and remember the bad experiences, so there’s a level of caution to overcome. However, remember that your customers do have a problem and you have the solution. You just need to assure them.
With a product video you will likely have competing products, so it’s about communicating what your product does or has that makes it do the job better than anything else – and in a way that your customer can trust and tip them over into buying. You’ll notice with the best product videos, they aren’t afraid to get deep into the technical aspects of the product. For example, the iPhone XR goes into a crazy amount of details about its LED screen (wide-colour gamut!), because without doing so, the customer won’t know it’s different, and more importantly, without the technical reassurance, they won’t believe that it’s “the greatest LED screen in any smartphone”.
Fundamentally, you’re showing how the product itself is able to do all the great things that it can do.
It’s harder to employ the technical approach effectively if you have a service business. With a product you can claim the fastest processor, and that can be tested. With a service, you can claim to have “the world’s greatest customer service”, but it’s almost impossible to prove – and let’s face it, a dozen of your competitors will claim the same thing.
Instead, to get your customer over their personal trust threshold, and take that next step with you, the approach should be to show how great the service and results are by focussing on the end-user. By capturing peer-review-testimonials, this changes your video marketing message from you saying “we’re great”, to the peers of your customer saying “these guys are great, and here’s the proof”.
This can be done through testimonial videos, case-study success and review pieces. The most successful service video marketing campaigns lead with this, whilst cleverly seeding the USPs of the service and discussing the results and benefits.
Of course, the real trick is making sure the video is authentic and believable. Using trusted people from well-known companies within the target industry helps. Where this isn’t possible, volume is good – a large number and a wide variety of people saying how great the service is and how good the results are carries a good amount of weight.
The end-user approach can also be a great way to differentiate yourself if you’re in a highly competitive or saturated product market. This is something the latest breed of memory foam mattresses relied on – quickly highlighting the 5,000+ five-star reviews and awards from review authorities like ‘Which’.
These aren’t hard and fast results, and there’s plenty of overlap, but it’s about considering how to approach video marketing to best build trust from your customers – and in the 60-or-so seconds that you have their attention on your business.
