Within the confines of video marketing, the promotional video can a difficult format to define. As the name implies, the objective of a promotional video is just to raise awareness and promote something...anything! It could be an event, an product, a new initiative or just an exercise in brand building. This makes it difficult to ascertain what a promotional video should necessarily imply, especially as people and clients use the terms promotion and corporate video interchangeably. In this article we're going to attempt to clear away some of the misunderstanding of what a promotional video is. be far-ranging in content and style with the only real objective of informing the viewer of something...anything! It doesn't necessarily have to sell or persuade, but just raise awareness of a relevant item. It might be an exercise in brand building, or the benefits of a product. In this article we're going to take a look at defining the promotional video format a little more.

To begin with, the promotional video can take any stylistic form. However, to reach as many eyeballs as possible and create some sort of return, no matter how soft the sell is, the videos content must be universal enough to appeal to as many people as possible.

To achieve this level of universal appeal the video content should be light enough to avoid alienating or confusing your audience and ensure you include some sort of call to action at the end to encourage response. It could be argued that promotional videos are not unlike television adverts albeit not constrained to the 30-second timescale. In this way promotional videos have more opportunity to include further information, interviews, talking heads and testimonials.

Many brands choose to battle short attention spans and distrust of advertising through what has been coined as 'advertainment' - essentially choosing to entertain their audiences over selling to them in the hope that they will indulge in their commercial material more attentively. Notable videos include 'The man your man could smell like' promo from Old Spice, the Evian Roller Babies, Ken Block's Gymkhana for DC Shoes, or any of the GoPro aspirational shorts.

So, the promotional video is designed as a maximum reach tool (within your chosen demographic), light-hearted at least and entertaining at most. It should revolve around a clever concept where possible in order to maximise share ability and attempt to encompass as large a swathe of your key audience as possible.

In the next series of articles we'll examine the structure and definition of other video marketing formats that you can use to raise the profile of your business online, engage with new customers and of course, sell more.