How Do You Find Great Promo Video Ideas That Work?

If you're an entrepreneur or a marketer, chances are, you're always looking for ways to effectively launch your product or service for your upcoming promotion. At VEED, we know how using effective promo videos can make this product launch memorable through a potent mixture of personality, creativity and vision.

In this blog post, you will learn:

What promo videos are and why you should use them
Where to get creative promo video ideas
5 tips on how to make a great promo video
5 examples of great promo videos

In video marketing strategy, promotional or promo videos or product hype videos are used to market and sell a product, service, or initiative. Most of the time, you want to create promo videos that have a clear goal in mind and will compel viewers to act.

Promo videos convert, and effective ones can help you build your reputation! According to a study regarding online fashion retailers, videos in product pages saw a 134% boost in conversions. On Kickstarter, a big crowdfunding platform, if you don't use a video, your campaign is 85% more likely to fail.

So if you want to successfully launch a product or a campaign, you might want to include a creative promo video. To do this, you need to find some creative promo video ideas to get inspired.

If you want an easy-to-use promo video maker, you can use VEED's free commercial video maker to get started.

Where Can You Get Creative Promotional Video Ideas?

Believe it or not, Kickstarter is a good place for effective promo video ideas and teaser videos that get a lot of video views. Many successful projects have one thing in common: darn good, creative promo videos. If you need a crash course on creating promo videos that entertain and sell, just go on Kickstarter.

Producthunt, a platform for launching (mostly online) products, can also give you creative promo video ideas and for different types of videos to launch with. Producthunt launches typically include videos that showcase the product and its usefulness. If you're launching an online tool or content, this can be a good place to find relevant promo video ideas.

Vimeo's Staff Picks also has great different types of videos videos and short films curated by the team. If you need to get inspired by creative video editing techniques and storytelling, this is the website to visit. While it may not be directly related to generating promo video ideas, it's a good platform to get creative inspiration from.

Of course, YouTube and social networks like Facebook or Twitter are still the best platform to search for promo video ideas, both corporate and otherwise. For this, you can search for your favorite (and relevant) businesses and see how they've done their promo videos. These social channels have time-sensitive promotions that you can learn to effectively generate hype for your launch.

5 Tips on How to Make a Great Promotional Video

1. Keep your viewers' attention throughout

If you're new to creating promo videos, keep it short and clear. Why? Because people get more bored after every minute that passes. Video views for short clips also tend to rank up faster (because you just need to watch them for a short amount of time).

promo videos - attention span

You want your promo video to fulfil its purpose. And boring videos that are too long won't give you the conversion rate you want.

Whatever promo video ideas or product hype videos you have in mind, people need to watch the video, like it, and feel compelled enough to act afterward. Your conversion rate will shoot up when people want to act after watching your videos, so couple your short videos with compelling CTAs (call-to-actions).

2. Creativity and character can compensate for a lack of budget

These are things that big budgets can’t buy: personality, creativity and vision. If you don’t have enough money for a big production, turn this limitation into strength. Get creative.

At VEED, we're all for scrappy promo videos that outperform overproduced ones in terms of return on investment.

You don't need a big budget to create a successful promo video. In fact, a big budget does not mean that it will a high conversion rate. You just need your creativity, (maybe) yourself, and an easy-to-use video editor that can quickly get the job done.

VEED's promo video maker lets you create great product videos and other types in no time. It features easy-to-use video maker tools that help you rapidly create professional videos.

Try it now for free. You'll realize how darn intuitive and easy it is to edit a professional video from scratch.

3. Have a clear outcome in mind

You need a primary goal for your promo video ideas, and most of the time this involves getting conversions of some kind. Sometimes, this is quite straightforward. For example, in a Kickstarter campaign, you want a promo video that inspires people to back your project:

This Kickstarter promo video works darn well because it shows:

Why you should back this project (it teaches how to make money as an illustrator)
About the creator’s experience and career trajectory
Why this book fulfils an important demand in the market

Find the most important goal that you need to achieve and base your other objectives out of achieving this.

4. Remain authentic to your brand

For all the sales tactics and slick editing, your promo video ideas should tell your brand story and show how you interact with your clients and their brand awareness of your product.

In concrete ways, your promo videos should follow your branding guidelines on the way you communicate, the colors you use, your logo placement, and so on. You really need to bank on the brand awareness and make sure people remember you.

After all, if your current branding has been working well with your current clients, then it should also work well for your promo videos.

With all the previous points in mind, your promo video probably won't work if it's blatantly just a thinly-veiled sales pitch. Sales pitches work in the right context. In a promotional campaign, people need to discover why they need your offering. Building hype means that people will want to try your offering out upon release.

With a promo video, you need to get them interested in your product or service, your brand, and what you want to achieve. These are elements that make great video promo ideas. If you lack one of them, you have fewer chances of achieving your main goal.

1. Mailjet partners up with Producthunt for a great customer testimonial video

In the tech world, Mailjet and Producthunt are well-known companies. Mailjet uses Producthunt’s name to attract potential customers potentially interested in its email marketing services after discovering how it powers such a reputable tech company.

What makes this a great promo idea?

Well, Mailjet’s video testimonial is well edited. This video doesn’t skimp on quality.
It also uses well-known names to attract viewers.
It focuses on Mailjet’s great tool and customer support to help Producthunt achieve its email goals.
Mailjet then tells their brand story and what they're about (sending emails straight to the inbox).
Finally, it is short and clear. This promotional video can also work well as a video used in sales pitches or sent via email.

2. Quuu addresses a pain point and positions its service as the solution

Quuu’s company videos show how you don’t need fancy editing and other tools to get the job done. In this promo video, Quuu starts on a pain point and puts its service as the solution to this.

When thinking about your promo video ideas, focus on your strengths rather than your shortcomings. If you don’t have the budget or the skills to edit a video like a professional, then use a webcam and a screen recorder to get the job done.

What Quuu does very well here is that it focuses on a specific pain point that many content managers face. This is particularly effective when you’re operating within a quite specific niche that people might not understand.

Here, the pain point isn’t content curation. It is about the time and energy it takes to find great content to share online. And Quuu can help you save hours as the platform for well-curated content.

3. Remember that Dollar Shave Club video that went viral?

When it first aired, this Dollar Shave Club video on YouTube got viral, and for good reason. It’s dang witty, has a personality, and describes the value behind the product quite well.

But you know what’s even more impressive? This video only cost $4,500 to make and was filmed under a day. In 72 hours, it reached millions of views.

Humor is a very powerful way to tell a story, and this promo video uses it very effectively. While the key message is still quite attractive — trying out high-quality razors every month at very affordable prices — it uses humor to connect with its target audience.

But do you know what’s even more impressive? Dollar Shave Club effectively used the momentum from this promo video for another important announcement: their $1 million seed round of funding. As a result, many big publications like TechCrunch covered this news, too. It’s a masterclass on how to do an effective launch.

4. Webflow sells a vision in this impressive video ad

Webflow’s social media video ad is effective because it is darn inspiring. It’s not a glorified spec sheet that illustrates the visual editor's best features. It’s not a sales pitch disguised as a promo video.

Rather, it’s selling a vision. A website building platform, Webflow tells the story of a future, in which everyone can create websites without code. Webflow wants to make website creation accessible to everyone.

5. Chatterbug uses a great mixture of product marketing and storytelling to highlight its language-learning app.

This video ad shows you Scott’s process of learning German using Chatterbug for 210 hours. What makes this promo video effective is that you can see the improvement throughout.

While he might have been stumbling over words in the first few hours, we see his journey of improvement — in 1 minute. By the end of these 210 hours, he’s reached a B1 level, indicating semi-fluency.

This is a great example of customer-centric marketing that works because it focuses on the journey of the person learning the language, which is tough. 210 hours is a lot of time and investment. But talking to native speakers through Chatterbug is a foolproof way to learn the language.

By now, you should know where to find great promo video ideas and product hype videos that work. We've also given you some tips on how to turn this promo video idea into reality, and some examples of well-executed promo ideas.

As I've shown throughout, key takeaways include these. You don't necessarily need a high budget to make effective promo videos (or for whatever type of video you want to make). Ultimately, your passion, creativity and vision matter the most. After all, at VEED, we're all for creative promo videos that work.

Focus on your strengths. Whether you're an entrepreneur wanting to create a promo video from scratch for your next product launch or a social media content creator wanting to create a video for your upcoming promotion, these 3 elements can compensate for a lack of money. And if you have the budget, use this to be creative and unique!

Of course, you also need a handy video editor to help you edit awesome videos. With VEED, you can add text to video, add music to video, change video aspect ratio, trim, crop, and split your videos and so much more.

Stay up to date! Get all the latest & greatest posts delivered straight to your inbox. And if you want a reliable promo video maker that's easy to use and quickly gets the job done, try VEED, a powerful tool for whatever type of video that you want to create.

What Are Promo Videos and Why Should You Use Them?