How to Make Effective Product Videos That Lead People to Purchase

By now, pretty much everyone understands that crafting high-quality videos to advertise your products can be a powerful asset in most brands’ strategies. After all, the medium gives you plenty of flexibility to show your audience all the interesting benefits, differentiators, and features you feel they need to know about.

If done right, a good product video will move viewers closer to a purchase decision once it’s all said and done. However, the key there is “if done right”.

Today, we’re going to use some top-tier examples to explore some of the most popular (and effective) trends around product marketing videos and hopefully draw some key takeaways you can use to improve your own content.

Learning to Make Awesome Product Videos from Great Examples Out There

Take a look around; product videos have all but taken over most digital spaces. They pop up on every app, page, social media, and streaming platform people use nowadays.

Luckily, that gives us a big pool of great examples to study and draw some valuable lessons from. Lessons you can use to polish your own video content.

So, take notes. Class is in session.

1. Use Compelling Sound Design to Influence Viewers

Since its foundation in 1886, Coca-Cola has always focused on content that nurtures emotional connections with customers. And when it comes to video marketing pieces, sound design is a HUGE part of emotionally engaging viewers.

The careful and dedicated sound design in most of Coca-Cola’s marketing content is far from random. The company is always trying to leverage specific sounds and musical accompaniments to leverage and underline the ideas and ​​feelings they want to tie to its products. Such as a sense of wholesomeness and happiness every time they show a person consuming one of its drinks.

In this particular example, their video’s music seeks to convey a sense of collaboration, unity, and community among the people in the snowy village, ideas closely tied to the seasonality of the piece. Also, notice how the characters don’t even talk to each other; the actions and sounds the brand wants to showcase speak for themselves — for instance, bringing a coca cola to your neighbor’s house to make them happy.

Moreover, if you listen carefully, you will even hear that the only other major auditive cues in the piece are the soft clinking noise each time the boy places or transports a bottle of Coca-Cola, along with the Christmas bells that ring in the background each time.

Also not a coincidence.

Coca-Cola ad’s sound design has been carefully tailored and produced to convince viewers that they will be happier if they collaborate with others, inviting their audience to embrace the idea of cooperation and humanity and subtly placing their product at the center of it all.

The Takeaway

Now that you have heard the example above, you can use the same principles to evoke different emotions in your own product videos.

Seasonality is a big part of it, but even just using jingles, an original song, or a piece of generic music that matches and prompts emotional connections between your video’s visuals and message can turn a good product video into an unforgettable one.

The secret here is not to take your marketing video’s sound design for granted and choose meaningful audio cues that reinforce your core message while driving viewers to feel in a particular way.

Hollywood has been doing it for decades, to great success — ask Zimmer and Williams — so why shouldn’t you?

2. Don’t be Afraid to (Tastefully) Explore Emotionally Powerful Scenarios

Nintendo has been one of the most beloved video game companies in the industry for decades. And when it comes to marketing its products, they have been known to use this customer legacy to its advantage, as we can see in this product video ad.

The piece revolves around presenting its seventh home console around some of its key value propositions: network connectivity and online play. They could have just made a dry product video clearly stating these new features, but they (wisely) decided to take a different approach.

By focusing on telling a moving story, this live-action product video establishes a strained relationship between two brothers. Showing them as they fight and grow further apart at different stages of their childhood. Even as adults, when they reach a boiling point at a family dinner near the end of the piece.

But, before everything is lost, one of the siblings uses their one positive connection growing up: playing the company’s games together to provide an opening for reconciliation. One of the brothers’ gifts a Nintendo Switch — the product being promoted — to the other so they can play together again, online this time around, and, by implication, find common ground to repair their relationship.

This is a clear example of how exploring emotionally powerful scenarios can be used to tell a story that gets your audience not only excited about your product but involved in your brand’s narrative. The brothers might not be close friends yet, but they can still enjoy what gave them so much pleasure in their childhood and grow close thanks to a Nintendo console.

The Takeaway

The main point to consider in this example is how to take advantage of emotional experiences that people live in everyday life and tie them to the products and solutions your brand provides to influence purchase decisions.

Do you want to motivate or convince people to buy a product? Try to engage your audience through emotion with your video, and use that approach to inform the rest of your sales strategy.

Always be on the lookout for opportunities to make a video that tells an emotional story your audience can relate to on a personal level. One that puts your product front and center of familiar and meaningful situations. Manage to do that, and you’ll have a product video your audience won’t soon forget.

3. Find Creative Ways to Showcase and Break Down Relevant Info

Upon the release of their new App Store for Windows 11, Amazon had a clear challenge in their hands: to promote their new software platform’s launch and give viewers all the info they’d need to access it. And do so in a single, short video that wouldn’t bore people watching.

In just 68 seconds, the company used an explainer animation video to provide a step-by-step product guide that explains how to download, install, and use the app on Windows 11 with a lot of character and visual appeal.

Animated explainer videos are one of the preferred formats for explaining and introducing complex products to an online audience. This example summarizes the key aspects of the style, with colorful animations, catchy music, and fluid takes that remain simple to follow, regardless of the complexity of the info being delivered.

The result? A clean and short explainer video with relevant content that their users would appreciate.

The Takeaway

For most people, the best way to understand a product at its core is through an effective product video, especially when it comes to digital products and online stores! No one wants to have to read a complex manual or long whitepapers to understand what they are getting into, and formats like explainer videos offer an entertaining-yet-informative way to understand the “what”, “how”, and “why” of the product you want to promote.

The great thing about the explainer formula is that you get to place your product front and center but also use creative approaches that keep your audience engaged.

By leveraging new, unconventional styles — like Amazon’s example — you can find refreshing ways to explore the core points and key value propositions tied to your product and showcase the positive impact it can have in the customer’s life. An appealing recipe, no matter how you look at it.

4. Make Your Customers Feel Part of the Process

With more than 33,000 stores in 80 countries, the famous coffeehouse chain Starbucks is no stranger to making compelling product and brand videos. One effective way they do that is by leveraging their customer targeting initiatives as part of their advertisement content.

For Starbucks, it is essential to let its customers know that they are very important to the company, and they lean into that premise in this product ad made for the coffee chain in Mexico.

The global coffee company customizes every cup they sell with a scribble of the customer’s name. The video uses the company’s signature tradition as a narrative element and uses the label “Sue” — a stand-in for all their customers watching — to involve them in the entire production process. The coffee seed, the coffee beans bag, the truck that transports it, and yes, the disposable cup that finally reaches the customer.

The message is clear: Our drink is made especially for you, the customer, from the ground up, resulting in a product video that strives to delight the customer with friendly and special treatment.

The Takeaway

The key to this approach lies in translating the company’s signature customer service system into its ads. Something the brand has down to a T.

Like Starbucks, you should endeavor to make videos highlighting your customer’s involvement and making them feel like an integral part of the process.

The best product videos aren’t about you offering just any product but one that has been specially designed and created to meet your customer’s needs. From its origin until the product reaches their hands.

The best product videos make sure to either imply or demonstrate that connection.

5. Find Unique Perspectives to Showcase Your Product (and Brand!)

The Bank of Scotland is one of the oldest commercial banking companies in the UK. For more than 300 years, it has provided its services to more than 3.3 million customers.

Let’s be fair; this ad is more about a brand’s service than a specific product. But there are plenty of good reasons why we included it on this list, and they all revolve around the different elements the video plays with.

The video begins with a voice-over explaining their services, the days they are available, along with a bit of their history to keep things interesting. They also use slow motion and zoom-in film-making effects to keep viewers engaged and uses visual narrative elements to showcase the many industries and environments their bank caters to.

It all wraps up in the end by displaying a plaque, front-and-center, as a direct reference to the institution’s historic trajectory tracing back to when it was established as the bank of the Scots 300 years prior.

The Takeaway

The narrative the company builds here involves the use of video-enhanced shots backed up by a narrator and a variety of film-making techniques, all combined to individually add something unique to the piece.

With interesting editing and direction choices, like focusing on a continuous zoom effect, you can display your product in a particular context (or several!) which leaves a lot of room for creative exploration. When it comes to service products and brand showcases, it’s especially useful to drive attention to key value propositions you want your potential customers to be aware of.

From a practical standpoint, it’s also useful to make marketing videos that focus the viewer’s attention on the center of the screen and create a sense of movement.

Welcome to today’s growing world of visual marketing narratives.

Visuals themselves are powerful enough to convey a lot of information, such as the context in which the product will be used. And through the combination of different techniques, like zoom effect, voice-over, and slow motion effects, not only adds visual interest but it draws attention to something more specific, the product.

Wrapping up

As you can see, most companies combine marketing, design, and effective advertising to differentiate themselves from the competition and create videos that capture people’s attention. And your own product videos should follow the same cues!

These examples showcase high-quality video marketing approaches that can be decisive when it comes to selling something. So take a page from their playbooks, and develop product videos that say what you need to say, but also do so in a way viewers will remember long after hitting play.