The Most Effective Way of Using Video for Your Corporate Content
Have you begun using video as a means to better engage, educate, and inspire your teams at work? If so, are your employees finding that they’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content that’s coming their way? Do you know when to broadcast live, and when to record?
Video is most effective when it’s hyper focused, with a clear intention. It can be tempting, at first, to overuse video, but the reality is that enterprise video is not meant to be used for every message that you send to your employees.
The question is, then, when should you be using video at your company? Should it be live, video on demand, or will text suffice?
We use our own enterprise video products here, and we’ve gone through the trial-and-error period that inevitably ensues when designing a corporate video strategy.
With the help of a few others here, I’ve put together some information that you can use to ensure that your videos are as impactful as you need them to be, while also ensuring that urgent information is being communicated when and how it should be.
Let’s look at a few tactics you can employ to make sure you’re communicating with your employees the best way possible.
When you should be broadcasting live
CEO addresses, all-hands, and town hall meetings should be on the top of your list of impactful and inspiring video content.
The message in a CEO address or town hall is both emotional in tone, and urgent in terms of information dissemination. A CEO is your company’s visionary and they set the tone for the organization.
According to our Director of Marketing, Lance Boulet, all hands meetings have been crucial to communicating our company’s direction to everyone within the organization.
“What’s been really important,” Lance told me, “is that we have been able to get every employee together, no matter where they are in the world, in the same ‘virtual place,’ and all share the same experience together. It’s been an amazing way of bringing us all together and moving towards the same goal.”
When you broadcast these events live, everyone across the company feels engaged and gets to be a part of the magic.
When to use on-demand video
On-demand video is crucial to internal training and helping HR departments to engage employees.
For example, when you want to get employees updated on a new product or an HR policy change, both quickly and effectively, video can be an effective platform for communication.
Maybe you have a product update that employees need to be aware of. In this case, video can be a great way to show your employees the changes to the product, explain how your customers benefit, and deliver the content in an engaging way.
One thing you might want to consider here: user engagement tracking can be a very useful means of ensuring that everyone has seen the video. In addition, it helps to track which videos are performing well, and which of your videos might need to be rethought.
And make sure that your HR and training videos can be viewed on any device!
What you should keep in mind is that videos of this nature need to be simple, and easy to follow. And you might even try using captions in your videos to make sure you’re holding people’s attention.
Sometimes text is best
We often have to communicate complex ideas to our employees. Content that is heavy on procedures or granular details won’t make the leap to video.
For example, ISO certification procedures rarely make the kind of videos that people find helpful.
Hint: If you think someone might have to rewind the video multiple times to fully grasp the steps or the message, you’re better off with text.
Let’s not forget the approval process. It’s complex enough trying to get a text document approved. Whether it has to pass through the marketing, legal or another department, video doesn’t easily lend itself to on-the-fly changes.
Imagine creating a video on the latest process or a product security update, only to find out that there are additional changes. You’ll be forced to reshoot the video.
Make your videos more effective by starting with a plan
In order to create an effective series of videos for your employees, it’s really important to start with a plan. We learned early on that creating videos is not always as easy as it looks, but once we started implementing strategic planning methods, we were able to be way more effective when producing our internal videos.
Make sure that you’ve written a script, and get feedback from your colleagues. Start rehearsing well before you shoot your video, and make sure to have at least one dry run to make sure you’ve got the hang of it.
The most important thing is to know what you’re communicating to your employees, and why they need that information. Start from square one, and you’ll be far more effective the whole way through.
Creating impact with video
Ultimately, you want video to be impactful. If you’re sending your employees great content, then they’ll want to watch your videos. You don’t want your employees to view this as a chore, but rather as a privilege.
Video content can be powerful because it creates more personalized and emotional communications, which helps drive both engagement and connectedness in the enterprise. With great power comes great responsibility.
When you’re in front of a camera, you’re responsible for creating amazing content, which not only informs your teams but connects with them on an emotional level. Make sure you’re creating impactful content that is both engaging to your teams, and gets your message across.
