A good promotional video should do more than make your business look good.
It should help people understand what you do, give them a reason to trust you and, ultimately, encourage them to take the next step.
That could mean visiting your website, making an enquiry, booking a consultation or simply remembering your business when they are ready to buy.
Video continues to take a growing share of marketing investment too. According to IAB UK, investment in digital video advertising increased by 20% in 2025, reaching £9.3 billion.
The businesses getting the most from video are thinking about what they want it to achieve, where it will be used and how one piece of content can work across multiple stages of their marketing.
So, what makes a good promotional video for business, and how can you make sure yours delivers more than views?
What is a promotional video for business?
A promotional video is content created to introduce or promote your business, product, service or offer to a specific audience.
Unlike a video created purely for entertainment, a business promotional video should have a clear purpose.
For example, you might want to introduce your company to potential customers, explain a complicated service, demonstrate a product, build trust through customer testimonials or encourage people to make an enquiry.
There is also no single format a promotional video needs to follow.
It could be a polished company film for your website, a 30-second campaign video, a customer testimonial, an animated explainer, a product demonstration or a series of short social media videos.
The format should come after the objective, not before it.
Why does video work so well for businesses?
One of video’s biggest strengths is its ability to communicate a lot in a relatively short amount of time. For businesses selling services, particularly those that are technical, specialist or difficult to demonstrate with a single image, that can be incredibly useful.
A potential customer can see your team, hear how you work, understand what makes you different and get a feel for the business before they ever speak to you.
Build familiarity and trust
People buy from businesses they feel comfortable with.
Video gives you an opportunity to put real people, places and personality behind your brand rather than relying entirely on written claims.
A professional services firm might introduce the team a customer will actually deal with. A manufacturer can show its facilities and processes. A construction company can take potential clients behind the scenes of a completed project.
Instead of telling someone that your business is experienced, professional or approachable, video gives you an opportunity to show them.
Support enquiries and sales
Views are useful. But views on their own do not pay the bills.
A promotional video should ultimately contribute towards a wider marketing or sales objective. That is why we prefer to think about what happens after somebody watches.
Are they clicking through to your website? Are they watching a customer testimonial before requesting a quote? Are sales teams using the video when following up a prospect? Are viewers moving from a social clip to a landing page?
How can promotional videos help small businesses?
Video is not just for businesses with enormous advertising budgets.
In fact, promotional videos for small business marketing can be particularly valuable because the same footage can often be used in several different places.
One filming session might give you a main promotional film for your website, alongside shorter LinkedIn clips and vertical videos for Instagram.
The same footage could also be used for paid advertising, customer testimonials and content your sales team can send directly to prospects.
Suddenly, you are not investing in one video. You are creating a bank of content that could support months of marketing activity.
Examples include:
- Talking-head interviews with business owners, team members or subject experts
- Customer testimonials that add credibility and social proof
- Behind-the-scenes footage showing your people, premises or processes
- Product or service demonstrations to show what you do rather than simply describe it
- Drone footage for premises, construction projects, events or larger sites
- Animation and motion graphics to explain more complex products, services or processes
- Short-form vertical clips created specifically for Instagram Reels, TikTok or YouTube Shorts
- Case study footage showing a project, customer journey or before-and-after transformation
- Branded captions and graphics to make videos easier to follow when watched without sound
For a smaller business where marketing budgets need to work hard, that can make the investment far more valuable.
What type of promotional video should you make?
The best video for business promotion depends on what you want your audience to understand, feel or do after watching.
Company and brand videos
Company and brand videos are useful when people need to understand who you are, what you do and why they should choose you.
They can introduce your team, show your premises, highlight your services and give potential customers a better feel for the personality behind the business.
Customer testimonial videos
Customer testimonials can be particularly effective when trust plays a big part in the buying decision.
Rather than your business making claims about itself, an existing customer can explain their experience, the problem they faced and the difference your product or service made.
Product and service demonstrations
Demonstration videos work well when seeing something in action is more convincing than reading about it.
They can be used to show how a product works, explain a process or give potential customers a clearer idea of what they can expect from your service.
Explainer videos and animation
Explainer videos and animation can make more complicated products, services or processes easier to understand.
They are particularly useful when the subject is difficult to demonstrate visually or when you need to simplify a lot of information into a short, engaging format.
Short-form social videos
Shorter videos can be created specifically for platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
These can be used to share quick tips, project highlights, behind-the-scenes footage, customer stories or individual messages taken from a longer promotional video.
How to create a promotional video that actually drives action
Start with your audience
Who are you trying to reach?
A video aimed at someone discovering your company for the first time should look very different from one being sent to a potential customer who is already comparing suppliers.
Think about what that person needs to know, what questions they might have and what could stop them from taking the next step.
Your video can then be built around answering those questions.
Get to the point
You do not need to spend the opening ten seconds revealing your logo.
People need a reason to keep watching. Start with the problem, the outcome or something visually interesting.
If you manufacture specialist equipment, show it working. If you have transformed a property, lead with the finished result.
If you are solving a common customer problem, address that problem immediately.
Show rather than tell
“Excellent customer service.”
“Industry-leading solutions.”
“A trusted team.”
Anyone can say those things. Video gives you the opportunity to prove them.
Show the team speaking to customers. Show the product being used. Show the project before and after. Let a customer explain the difference you made.
Plan for more than one video
One of the biggest missed opportunities in video production happens before filming even begins.
A business commissions one two-minute landscape video, films exactly what is needed for that edit, then realises afterwards that it also wants vertical footage for Instagram, shorter LinkedIn clips and a 15-second paid advert.
Think about those outputs beforehand.
If you know the footage will be used across your website, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, email and advertising, the filming and editing can be planned around those channels.
Give people somewhere to go next
Every promotional video does not need an aggressive sales message. But the viewer should understand what they can do next.
That might be visiting your website, exploring a service, reading a case study, getting a quote or contacting your team.
If your aim is to generate enquiries, finishing with nothing more than your logo is a missed opportunity.
Where should you use video for business promotion?
Your website is an obvious starting point.
A well-placed promotional film on your homepage or service page can quickly introduce your proposition and give visitors another way to understand what you do. But your website should only be one part of the plan.
LinkedIn can be particularly effective for B2B businesses because video allows you to turn projects, expertise, customer stories and behind-the-scenes content into regular posts. Shorter edits can be used across Instagram, Facebook and other social channels.
YouTube provides somewhere to host longer content and can give your videos an additional opportunity to be discovered.
Video can also be used in email campaigns, sales follow-ups, presentations, proposals and landing pages.
That is why we prefer thinking about video as part of a wider marketing system. Your main promotional film might introduce the business.
A shorter social clip grabs attention. A testimonial builds trust. A case study provides proof.
Your website then gives the potential customer somewhere to take the next step.
Can promotional videos help SEO?
It can, but not because Google automatically ranks a page higher simply because it contains a video.
Google can surface video content across different areas of search when it can properly discover, understand and index the content.
A useful video can also improve the overall experience of a page by helping visitors understand a topic in another format.
From an SEO perspective, it is therefore better to think about video as part of a useful page rather than a shortcut to rankings. The surrounding page still needs useful written content, clear headings, relevant information and strong internal linking.
If you are publishing videos to YouTube as well, optimised titles, descriptions and thumbnails can also help people discover the content through another search platform.
How should you measure whether a promotional video worked?
Start by going back to the objective you set before filming.
If your goal was brand awareness, reach, impressions and video views might matter. If you want engagement, you might look at watch time, completion rates, comments and shares.
If the video was designed to drive traffic, clicks and website sessions become more relevant. And if it was created to generate leads, you should ultimately be looking at enquiries, calls, form submissions, booked meetings and opportunities.
Views tell you whether somebody watched. They do not, on their own, tell you whether the video worked. This is where connecting your creative, marketing and analytics becomes important.
A video that receives 5,000 views and no meaningful action may be less valuable than one that receives 500 views and generates three qualified enquiries.
How much does a promotional video cost?
There is no single price for promotional video production because there is no single type of promotional video.
The cost will depend on the idea, filming requirements, locations, crew, equipment, animation, drone footage, voiceovers, editing and the number of final assets required.
A simple one-location shoot will naturally be very different from a project involving several locations, customer interviews, animation and a large bank of social edits.
The more useful question is often:
What do we need this investment to produce?
If one filming day creates a main website video plus enough short-form footage for several months of marketing, it should be evaluated differently from a standalone video that will only ever be uploaded once.
Make your promotional video work harder
The question is no longer simply whether businesses should use video. It is how to make that video useful.
A strong promotional video for business should have a clear audience, a defined objective and a plan for what happens after somebody watches it. And when the footage is planned properly from the start, one video shoot can become far more than one finished film.
At Dialled In, our video production and creative services cover everything from promotional films and customer testimonials to social reels, animation and drone footage. Because our creative team works alongside our wider marketing team, we can also help make sure the content has somewhere to go once the editing is finished.
So, if you want a promotional video that generates more than views, get in touch with the Dialled In team and tell us what you’re looking to achieve.