How To Make a Great (and Profitable) Product Review Video
By: Thomas Smith
Tags: YouTube, Videos, Product Reviews, Marketing, Influencer Marketing

How To Make a Great (and Profitable) Product Review Video

Photo by Matthew Osborn on Unsplash

As the owner of a home automation YouTube channel and an Amazon Influencer, I’ve made a lot of product review videos — more than 800, to be exact. A good product review video can be extremely helpful to your audience as they decide whether to purchase something online. It can also generate a nice profit for you — as I’ve shared before, I average about $53 per hour when I make review videos for my YouTube channel.

Making a great product review video isn’t hard or time-consuming, but there are some important things to keep in mind, and important steps you can take as a creator to make your video as useful as possible for your audience. This is especially important if you’re making videos to market your own product or brand and want to help your audience really understand why the product will help them. There’s also a few key things to avoid in product review videos, many of which aren’t obvious if you’re new to the genre.

Here are my tips for making a great (and profitable) product review video, whether you’re on YouTube, Instagram, Amazon Influencers, or any other creator platform, or even if you’re making product-centered videos for your own brand.

Get Physical

Everyone has had the experience of ordering something online and finding that it looked totally different when it arrived than it did on the website. Maybe you meant to purchase a little box of paper clips for your home office, and instead ended up with a giant case of them which you could never make it through even if you used paper clips every day for the rest of your life. Or maybe you bought a bicycle for your toddler and found that it was actually sized for their doll.

As a creator, your product review videos can help your audience avoid these kinds of ecommerce surprises. A great review video should always show the product in action. To do this, get physical with the product you’re reviewing; pick it up, hold it, use it, and demonstrate it for your audience. Give them a sense of the product’s scale, what it’s made out of, how much it weighs, and whether it feels solid and well-built or shoddy and cheap. Show them how it sounds, or even in the case of cosmetics or food, how it smells and tastes.

Think of yourself as a physical stand-in for your viewer. If they’re shopping online, they can’t pick up the product they’re considering and try it for themselves. So you have to do it for them, showing and describing the experience (both good and bad) in as much detail as possible, so that your audience feels like they’re there with you and are physically using the product themselves.

To help achieve this, I always like to use the products I review in a real-world environment, instead of isolating them on a desk or in a lightbox. If I’m reviewing a kids’ basketball hoop, I’ll show it in my backyard. If I’m talking about the best chicken feed, I’ll demo it in my chicken coop (poop and all!) and let my backyard chickens sample it on camera. I once reviewed a survival food bar for use during natural disasters and ate one myself on screen in all its oily, nasty glory.

Physically show your audience how a product performs and what it’s used for, and you’ll deliver a ton of value as they consider whether to buy it.

Don’t Regurgitate (Share Your Thoughts Instead)

A lot of new reviewers make the mistake of talking too much about a product’s features in their review videos. Don’t get me wrong — sometimes it’s important to share a few key features of the product you’re reviewing or to highlight aspects that you feel are most important.

In most cases, though, your audience is totally capable of reading the product’s Amazon page or Googling it in order to learn about its basic specs. They’ve almost certainly already done this by the time they’re viewing your video. For that reason, talking at length about features isn’t helpful. You’re basically just regurgitating the product’s spec sheet back to your viewer. It’s like the person who puts a ton of text on a Powerpoint slide and then reads the slide verbatim during a presentation. Not fun or helpful.

Instead, focus your review videos on your own thoughts and impressions about the product. Are the company’s claims about it accurate? Does the battery really last as long as the spec sheet claims? Is it really as durable as its manufacturer says it is? How is the company’s customer support? What do you like (or hate) about the product’s design? Is there an overlooked feature that you think is great? If you’re the product’s creator, what was the journey that lead to creating it, and what problem did you hope it would solve?

Your thoughts are valuable because they provide a real-world reality check for the product’s features, specifications, and advertising claims. Any company can say that their product is the best. As a reviewer, you’re there to say whether or not they’re right — or to provide compelling evidence that your product is the best if you’re on the brand side.

If you’re struggling to come up with things to say about a product, give yourself a framework to build on. Here are some simple frameworks you can use to make a high-performing video if you find yourself lost for words:

The Three Best Things About Product X

This Feature of Product X Surprised Me

Here’s My Favorite Way to Use Product X

Product X is Better Than Product Y Because ____________

Two Things I Wish I Knew About Product X Before I Bought It

Why Product X is the Best _______ On the Market Today

I find that all these prompts have yielded videos that my viewers love (and which earn well).

You can also follow a preset genre. Unboxing videos, product setup videos, and simple tutorials about product features all do well and follow a consistent format. Don’t overthink things. One of my best-performing recent videos is a tutorial about changing batteries on a Swiffer. It has 59,000 views.

You Don’t Need to Be On Camera (Usually)

Good news for the camera-shy: you don’t need to be on camera in order to make a great product review video. Or at the very least, you don’t need to be identifiable on camera.

Some of my best product review videos show only my hands. It’s a style called POV (Point of View), and it’s great because you can shoot your videos yourself (hold the camera in one hand and the product in the other), and don’t have to reveal your identity unless you want to.

Viewers love POV videos because they automatically imagine themselves in your place. Your hands become their hands, and they can picture themselves holding the product, interacting with it, etc., as they see you doing these things in your video. There’s not the distraction of your face and body language to pull them away from the product.

The exception to this rule is cosmetics, beauty products, fashion, and to some extent, food. If you want to show your viewers how to apply a particular kind of makeup, you’ll probably need to put it on yourself in order to give a useful demo. If you’re in these genres, work on getting comfortable being on camera. If you’re reviewing electronics, home products, toys, and the like, you can let your hands do the talking.

Leave These Things Out

In making great product review videos, what you leave out is just as important as what you include.

Firstly, here’s a surprising one, and one that beginners often get wrong (and I got wrong for years myself). Unless you’re making a video about a limited-time deal, you should never mention a product’s price in your videos. Why? Because prices change all the time. You want your videos to be “evergreen," generating income or driving sales of your own product for years. Nothing dates a video faster than a price which has changed dramatically since the video was shot.

Likewise, never reference interface elements or features of your platform in your videos. Ever seen a video where the presenters asked you to “Press this button to subscribe," gesturing to a button that no longer exists? It’s embarrassing and confusing to viewers. Also, you never know what platform you’ll put your videos on in the future. Take it from me: editing references to “subscribe buttons” out of hundreds of videos so you can publish them on a new platform that doesn’t have subscriptions is no fun. Save yourself the hassle, and avoid these references in your videos, so you can be as flexible as possible about where you share them.

You can always make a “clean” video with no platform-specific references and then add on a platform-specific call-to-action clip at the end before you publish the video. I now shoot my videos without platform references, and then add in a “please subscribe” clip to select videos when I put them on YouTube.

One thing you should never leave out is disclosures. If your video contains affiliate links, a brand paid you to make the video, you’re talking about your own product, or you got a free product to review, always disclose this. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s the law.

Be You

Above all else, remember that your thoughts about a product matter. They’re important, unique to you, and worthy of sharing.

Be you. Too many product review videos are made by professionals who use the product for a day (or even just a few minutes at a trade show or press event), shoot a quick and cursory video, and then move on. In many cases, the person reviewing a product has never actually used it.

The existence of all that low-value content makes real product reviews that share the perspectives of an actual person who has actually used a product (especially in their own daily lives) incredibly helpful for your audience. One of my most popular videos shares my thoughts on my Leica Q camera. I waited four years to review it, and my viewers appreciate the long-term perspectives I can provide based on nearly half a decade of actual use. Likewise, passionate videos by a product’s creator are engaging and helpful, too.

If you’re reviewing other brands’ products, your videos are incredibly valuable not just to viewers, but for companies too. Videos from real product users are a hot commodity for brands, in a world where people are increasingly skeptical of traditional ads. A single video by an independent creator can drive tens of thousands of dollars in sales for a company.

Keep that in mind if you’re negotiating a sponsored content deal with a brand, or if your channel grows and you find yourself feeling guilty that companies keep sending you free products, or that YouTube sends you hundreds in ad revenue per month. It’s easy to feel imposter syndrome if you’re not a professional sitting in some giant studio reviewing products for a major tech news outlet.

But you shouldn’t. Your thoughts and impressions about a product matter. Your perspective as a real user matters. Your videos matter. Go out and make them.