There is no perfect formula for creating a successful corporate video. A set of ingredients do exist, nonetheless. Here’s your step-by-step guide on using them for desirable outcomes.
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A corporate video is more than just a way to send the word out on your business, culture, and bottom line. Rather, it’s the best form of business messaging, helping you strike a chord with the audience, and drive conversions, sales, and allegiance. Let’s quantify the video edge.
- For 87% of online marketers, video is a staple marketing tool
- Videos guarantee a 157% upturn in organic traffic
- Initial emails with a video shoot the CTR by 96%
- Video on the landing page ensures above 80% conversions
- 53% of landing pages with videos end up with first-page rankings
- Marketers using videos earn 49% higher revenue vis-à-vis those who don’t.
The value of corporate video production in a marketing mix cannot be overemphasized. But what does it take to make a corporate video with better engagement, higher recall, and more impact? How to use these videos for corporate messaging? What approach would work? Let’s discuss it all and more to give you a jumping-off point for a successful corporate video.
Step 1: Define your objective:
First things first, the corporate video serves a purpose. It’s crucial to define it at the get-go. The purpose could be anything, from company introduction, showcasing work culture, raising brand awareness to employee training, and more. Besides factoring in the video’s goal, also consider the success measurability of the video on parameters like views, completion rate, and more.
Step 2: Know the target audience:
The next step in the corporate video production journey involves some due diligence. Research your target audiences, and specifically, about their behavior, interests, and aspirations. This will help you determine the three vital aspects of a video – theme, content, and tonality. Since different people react differently to the same video, being mindful always helps.
Step 3: Draft a communication strategy:
Once the target audiences are identified, it’s time to strategize on engaging them through the video. An ideal communication strategy has three aspects to it, each critical in its own right.
- Content: Inform or educate viewers with facts, or connect with them emotionally
- Tonality: What would be the tone of the video – loud, subtle, funny, lively, or sensitive
- Call to action: How would you like the audience to act after viewing the video
Regardless of the specifics, the corporate video has to be relatable to viewers, enticing them into investing in your brand. Also, factor in whether the video will be created in-house or outsourced, how it’ll be reused and repurposed for better ROI, and how you’ll distribute it.
Step 4: Create a production brief:
Now, focus on creating a brief that can be shared with the video production services providers or your in-house production team. The brief is a key document and has to be comprehensive, reflecting all the data you have gathered so far. It should clearly state your video goals, target audience, communication strategy, along with deliverables, budget, and deadlines. Keep it detailed but not overly long. Back it up with a couple of sample videos for reference sake.
Pre-production:
You finalize an external agency or prefer to have the job done in-house. Either way, the next step is pre-production. It’s perhaps the most gruesome aspect of a video production process, involving content and approach development, scriptwriting, and storyboarding.
Step 5: Content development:
You have two choices when it comes to content development, either repurpose successful content or try out something untested. Either way, creativity has to be the cornerstone of your content development. Add to it the insights into your target audience, you have the ingredients of an engaging corporate video that conveys your core message and helps achieve your goals.
Step 6: Scrip writing:
The script is the essence of an impactful corporate video. The emphasis has to be on creating a script that’s natural, informative, engaging, emotive, easy to understand, sharp, and concise to convey the message effectively. The communication can be broken into a variety of parts – an introduction, build-up, and climax. Scriptwriting is a specialized job, better left to professionals.
Step 7: Storyboard:
Once the script is ready, visualize it with a storyboard. For the uninitiated, storyboarding represents a series of illustrations and images to help visualize sequences, lighting, coloring, framing, and other aspects in a video. Call it an all-inclusive version of a script detailing the video’s video, audio, and text parts. Drawings or stock footage can be used for storyboarding.
Step 8: Production:
It’s time for lights, camera, and action. But not before you secure a location, and put together a production team, actors, costumes, equipment, licenses, backup plans, and whatnot. Or just rope in a video production services agency, and breathe easy. They do it all minus your involvement. Expect them to work to your brief. Voice over is arranged separately, later on.
Post Production:
By now, you have a prototype of a video, lacking the impact. It needs the post-production edge.
Step 9: Editing:
Involve a professional editor to create a cohered video in line with your script and storyboard. The expert will do away with worthless footage, and put together the best shots, and an impactful and well-nuanced corporate video that’ll enable your message to shine through.
Step 10: Graphics:
Let graphics make your corporate video come alive. A video without proper graphics and special effects reflects badly on your company. Going cheap with graphics should always be avoided.