Beauty How-to Videos

Shea Moisture

Brief: To produce a series of beauty how-to videos featuring celebrity hair stylists showing you how to create a range of hair styles using Shea Moisture’s extensive product range.

Working with director Nick Sneath of TV Commercials UK, these beauty how-to videos are for Superdrug to help them market Shea Moisture’s wide range of products. So far we have created eight videos, all of which have two versions, one version for social media sites such as Instagram and Twitter and a longer version for YouTube.

These types of how-to videos are a great tool for companies who produce products as they can be used as free content on all the social media channels. The main reason you would want to distribute free content is to get your brand out there and to increase trust and credibility in your brand.

Internet users are a pretty savvy bunch and they can smell an attempt of a direct sell a mile off, so in order to get them viewing and ideally sharing your content it’s important to educate them and to make them feel that you are enriching their lives for free. To build trust and credibility in your brand you want to position yourself as a leader in your industry and one of the ways to do this is to show them that you know what you’re talking about through the use of how-to videos. To take this idea one step further you can have a known professional or celebrity present the videos so you automatically create an association with them and receive a very powerful endorsement. The advantage of using a well known person is that you get direct access to all of their followers which could be a quick win for views and shares.

In order to produce a successful how-to video campaign research is the key. You need to know who your audience is, what products/services they like to use, where they conduct their online activity, what they watch and what problems they face. Once you have this information you can then start working on the production brief and slowly build up a picture of the video series that best suits your audience.

We shot the videos on location at a hair salon in London to make them look authentic and each of the videos featured Jason Collier who is a hairstylist to A-list celebrities and magazine editors. Both the location and Jason elevate the videos and they are much powerful compared to a video filmed with an unknown presenter.

Each video was shot with two cameras, one was capturing a wide shot which Jason presented to and the second camera was capturing the close-up shots which showed the different stages in more detail. As they are how-to videos for products it was important to include product shots and have each product introduced so the viewer knew which item they needed to purchase. We also included a beauty shot of the completed hair style at the beginning so viewers were clear about what the video was about and one at the end which tied the video up nicely and left a lasting image in the minds of the audience.