5 Best eCommerce Product Marketing Videos (And How to Make Them)

Chances are, if you’re selling stuff, a large number of your sales are happening online. eCommerce has grabbed an increasing market share of sales every year for the past few years, and that trend was accelerated by the pandemic. 

Did you know there are specific kinds of videos you can make that will boost your sales? Here’s a handy guide to help you get started in the world of product video marketing. 

What is Product Video Marketing?

Product video marketing emphasizes videos showcasing your products, thereby communicating their strengths and benefits to consumers. 

Why are Product Marketing Videos Important?

The drawback to eCommerce is that you can’t hold a product in your hand to judge it. But product marketing videos address that problem by providing information and reassurance, helping consumers feel more confident in making a purchase.

By guiding consumers through the ways your product can positively impact their lives, you can overcome the potential coldness of eCommerce (not to mention the overwhelm of the internet) and create a direct and intimate bond with your customers.

Learn more about product & ecommerce video production.

eCommerce Product Marketing Video Types (With Examples)

Here’s a guide to the five main genres of product marketing videos, so you can decide which of the video types is most relevant for your brand.

Product Focus Video

Product Focus videos — like this one for FreshPet — are exactly what they sound like. They put the spotlight on your product and explain some of its ins and outs. A short, punchy video production can make your product feel that much more tangible and real than a short description or static photo. 

Why It Works

Product Focus videos work because they appealingly illuminate aspects of your product. Product Focus videos are largely visual, a big plus in our visually-driven culture, and help offer a fresh, creative perspective on your product.

For example, Freshpet decided to create oddly satisfying stop-motion Product Focus videos that highlighted the fresh ingredients of their offering. Their style is fun, and the message is clear: Freshpet equals quality. Some approaches you could take include:

• Offering a 3D view of your product
• Demonstrating what your product looks like outside of its packaging
• Visually representing product ingredients
• Captivating customers with a quirky visual style

Whichever of the video marketing ideas you choose, keep the focus on the product, make it fun, and you can’t go wrong.

Product Explainer Video

Product Explainer videos, like this one for Korres skincare, explain how a product works and why you should use it. They’re a bit like having a live sales associate in a store explaining to you why a product is effective. Since you’re in control of the content, they may even constitute an improvement on that scenario. 

Why It Works

By highlighting the most compelling aspects of your product and also saying how to use it and why it works, you’re doing the work that consumers may not want to do themselves by Googling ingredients or asking questions they care about, such as “is this cruelty-free?” or “is this nontoxic?” as in the Korres ad above. 

Product marketing videos are very economical, so you can convey a lot of information as well as an emotional tone in a short amount of time. In the Korres spot, friendly, relatable on-screen talent helps create a personal bond with you the viewer, making it one of the best video marketing examples out there.

How-To Video

How-To videos help explain, step-by-step, how you should use a product. They’re a good choice if your offering involves a process, like hair care products or furniture you need to assemble at home. 

How-To videos illustrate a pain point, then walk viewers through how your problem addresses it. This appealing spot by Hask shows how to use their conditioner to strengthen your curls — and makes it look fun. 

Why It Works

How-To videos can reduce skepticism and make it easier for consumers to imagine buying and using the product themselves. Of course, while showing helpful facts about how to use your product, you’re also strengthening the consumer’s conviction that your product works and underlining its value propositions. That is one of the video marketing benefits that you can’t get from written content alone.

Engaging on-screen talent can help create an aura of positivity around your product, and create that all-important bond between your brand and potential buyers, as in the Hask spot. If you have a more technically complex product and need to convey some dense information in a breezy fashion, you may want to consider animation or motion graphics, which can put forward a lot of useful facts in an easy-to-digest way.

How-To eCommerce videos also work in another sense, in that they are easy to repurpose for other parts of your website, and you can even send them post-purchase to consumers to help boost customer satisfaction with your product. 

Unboxing Video

Unboxing videos, in which onscreen talent unwraps a product and effuses over how exciting it is, have become rather popular in video marketing strategies, and for good reason. By showing consumers what to expect when they open your product’s packaging,  a well-made Unboxing video can help your consumer envision receiving, opening, and using your product.

Unboxing videos build anticipation and showcase the various components of your offering. They can also be used to feature additional products as a subtle upsell play. A live-action tabletop approach like the one used by Colgate in this spot is popular in these types of videos, but stop motion is also a fun way to catch a customer’s eye.

Why It Works

Unboxing is simply fun and works incredibly well for social media video marketing. It may well remind you of being a kid on your birthday and getting a gift (one of the pluses of eCommerce is, after all, the enjoyment of getting your package in the mail).

Unboxing videos also further remove any lingering sense of anxiety that what you’ll receive isn’t exactly what you signed up for online, which is why Colgate used them to introduce their first Direct to Consumer Advanced LED Whitening Take-Home Kit to the market. Once you see exactly what’s in your box, it feels like too solid an offer to turn down.

Product Commercial

Product commercials are glossy ads of the same quality as the ones you’d see on broadcast TV, like this one for Palmolive.

Why It Works

Product commercials mix a wide variety of shots to give your audience a comprehensive overview of your product. Product shots, lifestyle shots, and product application shots are often married with voiceover or on-screen text to deliver a narrative-driven video that showcases your product in its natural setting. They work because they’re high-gloss, mini-narratives that deliver a 360-degree look at what makes your product special and innovative.

How to Make a Product Video

Step 1

Planning. Decide what aspect of your product you want to highlight most during video production planning. That will dictate the kind of product video you create — or if you want to shoot a suite of product videos, and help you decide if you want to go the live-action or animation/motion graphics route.

Step 2

Pre-production. Plan your shoot during pre-production, including (if live-action) such elements as :

• Overall look and feel of your spot
• Location (bearing in mind that most of the above genres involve putting your product in its natural habitat, whether that’s the backyard, shower, home office, etc.)
• Casting

All while bearing in mind your budget limitations.

Step 3

Production. This involves the actual gathering of footage and ideally should be so well-planned that you can do it in a short and efficient shoot. The fewer the locations, the easier your shoot will be. For animation, your process will look a bit different, but simple, colorful graphics will look better on small screens and also be less expensive than an elaborately textured approach.

Step 4

Post-production. Post-production involves editing (including possibly multiple spots), scoring, adding visual effects and onscreen text, as well as any other polishing.

Good to Know: Social Media Ad Specs and CTV Ad Specs

Step 5

Distribution. This could mean putting your videos in emails, on your site or social media pages, or a combination of all of the above.

Step 6

Refinement. If your videos aren’t hitting the mark, you can tweak them by changing elements like onscreen text or even completely recutting them.

eCommerce Video Marketing at Scale

eCommerce video marketing can be fun, but it’s also a high-stakes enterprise. You have to deliver high-quality, good-looking product videos that adequately convey that your product is going to add value to consumers’ lives. 

That can be hard on a budget — but there are strategies to get the most out of your dollar when it comes to video marketing. For example, if you’re shooting live-action, you can batch-shoot footage that can be repurposed for different ends (eg, social media, emails, perhaps even CTV spots). That allows you to make the most of your resources and deliver a deluxe-seeming campaign. 

QuickFrame knows and loves the process of making product and eCommerce videos that stand out and can be made at scale. And we know how to use data to constantly improve your campaign until it meets your goals. Contact us today to see how we can put our expertise to work for you using our intelligent video production platform!

eCommerce Product Videos: Final Thoughts

Product videos can be an effective tool in your arsenal — if done well. Let QuickFrame guide you through the process so you can effectively market your product.