Good product adverts engage and entice potential customers to learn more about the product. The obvious aim for the business is to provide a positive or memorable association with the customers, with the ultimate goal of purchasing the product. The business must also provide enough information so the potential customer can make an informed choice.
Here we can see there can then be two main components of a product advert. First, the information about the product – so the USP’s, key functions or benefits. Second, it’s desirability. This is where the visual and production elements come in. Beautiful design and imagery will increase the quality perception of your product and will no doubt lead to a professional positive association with the product. The best product adverts marry these two elements together.
There is no ‘off the shelf’ solution to create a guaranteed hit with product adverts. After all, your product will be competing with other products, and the success or lack of it could be down to many other factors. However, a good product advert will be one of the most effective tools to engage the customers.
Let’s take a look at some of the key best practices to produce better product adverts and increase your views.
Grab your audience’s attention straight away.
It is not always about creating a bang with music, vo and editing. It can also be about other ways of hooking the audience in. In essence, it’s about getting to a key point quickly, within 5 seconds is best.
Inject some personality.
Not all product adverts need to be dry and just informational. Try to inject some level of your business personality into the video. This doesn’t need to be gimmicky. If the product is strictly for professionals, then you’d want the product to be shown as reliable and well made. These characteristics can also come across in the way you approach the production. The product video in itself should reflect the brands personality and tone of voice.
Keep it short.
For a product video that launches your product or range you should look to keep the initial video as short as possible. 30 seconds is best here for an initial launch. You can then follow this up with slightly longer videos to show more features. Keeping it short and snappy will also benefit you when promoting your video through paid advertising. When you approach a video with the intention of keeping it short, this will push you to only focus on showing the key information. With these short snippets you’ll then likely be able to easily create shorter clips to push through other social channels, thus creating more content for you to work with.
Keep copy to a minimum.
No one wants to be reading paragraphs of copy during your product video. Keep to a few key sentences if necessary, even better is single words to convey your key points.
Keep your design clean.
Cluttered or chaotic frames can work in instance where this is the message you want to convey. But in most cases a cleaner frame is better to focus attention on the product. This can be achieved by either keeping block colour background or by using a slight gradient to background colours. If the video is live action, then again look to keep the background elements to a minimum and graded the final piece to keep the colours consistent.
Remember, your product advert should not include every feature of your product. Use it to engage the audience to want the find out more and enhance your reputation with them. Look to create further content and how to’s to educate and inform the viewer further as the move through your sales funnel.
Below are some quick tips on the SEO side to help give your video the best shot of rising up the YouTube rankings.
SEO Tips.
- Add a description. Add a few paragraphs describing the product in the description section.
- Hashtags. Yes you can hashtag your videos. These can then be linked to other products in your range if you use the same hashtag.
- Promote through paid advertising – It always helps to get the YouTube bots accessing and scanning your video. It will help to get some initial traction on your video and push it up rankings.
- Link through to other social streams and repost there on a consistent basis – but not so much it becomes annoying.
- Link through to other videos in your product list within the description section.
