Corporate videos have a great track record of success in helping businesses achieve results. It’s the most effective form of business communication ever devised. These corporate video tips will help you to create business videos which are well-targeted to your audience and convey your message as effectively as possible.
Here are some ideas and tips to help you create your next corporate video success:
1. Set the Purpose of Your Video
It’s important to establish the purpose of your video before you do anything else. Sometimes this is obvious – you might want a training video to show new employees how to do a specific task, for example.
Your video might fit in a specific category, like one of these:
- Recruit new employees
- Promote a product
- Build brand awareness
- Introduce the business to new prospects
- Train employees in a new process, task or skill
Try to narrow the purpose of your video down to a simple objective like the ones listed here.
You might want to consider factors like these:
- What business problem do you have that could be solved by this video?
- What broader business goals do you want this video to contribute to?
Express your problem as one or more objectives, which will help achieve your broader goals.
Make sure they are S.M.A.R.T. goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound.
What criteria do you use to measure success? How do you decide whether your video has met your objectives?
2. Know Your Audience
Your understanding of the target audience for your video is of critical importance. If you don’t know who they are, how they think, what they like and don’t like, it’s going to be difficult to create content which interests and engages them.
The creative decisions you make during the production of your video should be based on facts and research. If you are already using personas in your marketing strategy, this is a good time to use them.
Although the demographics of your target audience are important – their age, gender, location and so on – you need to drill down and find out more.
What problems do they have? What are their aspirations? What kind of music do they listen to, what social media channels do they use, what TV shows do they watch? Who and what do they connect with?
Ask for feedback on your social networks, look at the questions your target audience ask online and conduct interviews to reach a deeper understanding of what your audience is about.
3. Decide on Your Key Message(s)
You now have the first two essential components for creating a terrific corporate video: A well-defined purpose, and an understanding of your audience. The next step is to decide on the specific message you want to convey in your video.
What is your end goal? Is it to sell more products? To make sure your employees can perform a specific task? To get more people to opt-in on a landing page? What do you want them to do, how do you want them to feel, and what should they be thinking after watching your video?
For example, you might want them to sign up for your newsletter. You might want them to feel excited, and to think that they’re going to be learning something which will help them do their job better.
Once you know what you want them to think, feel and do, you need to work out what the one thing is that they need to know that will make them act, think and feel that way This will be the core message that your video needs to convey.
You might need to use multiple messages in your video but try to make them all fit under the umbrella of one core message. Remember that the more messages you try to get across, the more chance there is of confusing your audience.
4. Plan Your Video Strategy
Does your business have an overall video strategy? If it does, you’ll want to make sure that the video you’re creating fits in with the overall strategy. If there is no corporate video strategy, now might be a good time to start planning one.
Here are some elements your video strategy might cover:
- Branding – How will your video enhance your brand?
- Creating – will your videos be created in-house, or are you going to work with an outside production company?
- Targeting and Distribution – How will you target your audience? Will you use paid advertising? On what platforms will your video appear?
- Hosting – Where will your video live? A paid service like Wistia or Vimeo Pro offers the best balance of performance, metrics and professionalism.
- Re-use – How will improve the ROI of your video by repurposing and re-using it?
- Budgeting – what percentage of the company’s overall marketing or communication budget is allocated to video? How will you achieve your production goals within the allocated budget?
- Performance & Analysis – How are you going to measure the performance of your videos?
You might need to use multiple messages in your video but try to make them all fit under the umbrella of one core message. Remember that the more messages you try to get across, the more chance there is of confusing your audience.
5. Create a Production Brief
Create a Production BriefBefore pre-production starts, you’ll need to create a video production brief. This is a guide which makes sure that everyone is working to the same goal. The brief will contain all the information and research you’ve collected, such as:
- The objective of the video
- The target audience and any useful insights into their likes, dislikes, problems and aspirations
- What you want your audience to feel, think and do
- The core message your video needs to convey
- Your deadline and budget.
Your production brief should not be overly long but should contain as much detail as necessary.
6. Develop Your Creative Approach
The creative approach is developed from your production brief, and it explains the core idea or concept of your video. Bearing your objectives in mind, think about your target audience, and the insights you have into their lives. Take those ideas and develop an interesting and engaging way to deliver your core message.
One way to develop a creative approach is to brainstorm it with the creative team, starting with lots of potential ideas which are filtered down until you’re left with only the very best ones.
7. Create a Video Map
The most effective corporate videos use a tried and tested 5–part structure:
The Intro
It’s common knowledge that you only have around 7 seconds to grab your viewer’s attention. You need to give your audience an idea of what to expect and coax them to keep watching your content.
Setting The Story
This is where you establish the right mood, showing them that you understand their frustrations and problems. You reveal the characters and conflicts in your story, and let them know that you can offer a solution.
Main Value Proposition
A good business solves its customers’ problems. Your focus here is on how your solution will impact their lives. This is where your core message gets delivered – how your solution will transform them. Your video and should show that you understand where they are now and where they want to be.
The Hook
Your hook sets you apart from the competition. What makes your business different? People want solutions, not brands.
The Ending
Tell them what you want them to do next. Wrap up the story and give them a clear call to action.
Conclusion
Once you have done all the above steps, then it’s time to go into the next step: video production. Before you start production, be sure that your production brief is clear and concise in order to create a corporate video that is as effective as possible. This will also help save production time and eliminate unnecessary miscommunication problems. As they say, the more you sweat in planning, the less you bleed in production — something like that
