5 Steps to Creating Corporate Videos That Employees Will Actually Watch

Like many organizations, we pay close attention to how our corporate videos perform – especially the video view statistics. Why do we do that? By knowing which of our videos are performing well, we can learn more about our employees, and what they want to learn.

These statistics can also show if people are tuning out earlier than should be; it’s no use having views on your video if your employees aren’t reaching the main point of it.

We have assembled some of the top tips to help make your corporate videos more engaging. These tips will help make your videos more interesting while ensuring that your message gets across to your viewers.

1. Make Your Video Move

Adam Westbrook writes about digital storytelling and publishing on his blog, and has a great tip for all video creators: Keep your video visual!

Okay, it sounds obvious, but let’s get dive a little deeper.

So many of the corporate videos that we see feature a person sitting in front of a camera talking. That’s it. Here’s what Adam has to say about that:

“At its most simple: if you’re filming an interview with an IT specialist for your website, don’t just film a straight interview. Make it visual: film them at work, going for a walk, cycling to work, eating lunch, playing squash whatever – it’s the eye-candy video is made for. Done well, visually led films can turn an interview with a blogger (snore…) into something quite wonderful.”

It’s a little more work, but at the end of the day, you’re giving employees something that engages them at a much higher level.

2. Guide the Conversation

Simply having someone without media training speak in front of a camera can come out a little awkward. I’m sure we’ve all seen at least one painful Zoom presentation in the last few months – it’s worse when it’s recorded.

This is where having a script can be a lifesaver. However, having someone read a script in front of a camera can be devastatingly boring if it’s not done properly.

This doesn’t mean that you need to have professional actors speaking on behalf of your internal experts. It means that you should have a guide for your on-camera speakers, to help keep them focused on the subject at hand, and while inspiring some more original takes.

This is what Jourdan Aldrege recommends for keeping the tone conversational with a guide:

One of the best ways to entice the best out of your subjects is to get them talking to you in a conversational way, straying away from rigid, scripted reciting of information. Get them comfortable in a spot in the room and focused away from the camera. If they’re any good at their jobs, they’ll usually be excited to talk about it — just, you know, to another person, not a camera lens.

You can keep your interviewer off-camera the entire time if you so choose, but the fact that your interviewee is speaking to another person instead of a camera, will make sharing their knowledge and experiences far more interesting. You know that look someone gets when they get to speak about a passion of theirs? That look translates very well to video.

3. Get Your Viewer’s Attention Immediately

How long does your video have to capture your viewer’s attention? Ten seconds, or fewer, depending on the study you’re citing.

There are a few ways of capturing your audiences’ attention from the start – one of the popular methods in corporate videos is by asking a question. This question not only piques your employees’ interest, but also informs them of the video’s subject.

Now, this does not mean that once you’ve piqued their interest at the beginning of the video, that you can simply let off the gas and expect them to wait ten minutes for the answer to the question. Viewer engagement research done by Visible Measures shows that you will lose viewer interest as time goes on:

Source: AdAge

Does that mean that you need to wrap up your entire video in fewer than two minutes? No. It does however mean that you need to ensure that you are making the effort to reengage your viewers with your video as it progresses.

4. Make your Cuts Count

This tip is a little more subtle from a viewer’s perspective, and far more technical for your video editor. It comes courtesy of the TED Blog.

For videos where you have multiple camera angles, especially for CEO all-hands addresses, or another live event that is being recorded, cutting between camera angles is important to keeping your employees engaged and interested.

And how you cut between camera angles and scenes can help to spark that engagement. Note these two helpful tips:

Cut on action. One way to make the edit between two shots seem invisible is by cutting on a gesture. The viewer watches the beginning of a motion that begins in one shot and follows it as it crosses the edit and finishes in the next shot. The completion of the gesture masks the edit.

Cut on words. The sound of a word, especially if it contains a hard consonant, can make an edit feel less obvious. When the word is one that is relevant to the main point of the speaker’s talk, the edit can also highlight that word and make it more memorable. Let’s listen to an example of an edit cut on a word.

These small changes to the viewing experience will make a big difference to viewer engagement.

5. Use Captions in Your Video

This tip is so important that we actually have an entire post dedicated to the importance of captions for audience engagement.

Captions help keep your audiences focused and help them to retain your video’s message. And in the case of corporate videos, isn’t that the point?

In certain areas, captions for your videos may actually be legally required for accessibility in the workplace. Mandatory or otherwise, the benefits of captions are quite clear, as summarized in this research paper published in Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences:

“More than 100 empirical studies document that captioning a video improves comprehension of, attention to, and memory for the video.”

The research also shows that individuals who watched video with captions are more likely to remember facts about the video. In addition, they were more adept at drawing inferences, giving them a much greater understanding of the message presented.

Make Your Videos Easy to Watch

The above strategies will help make your corporate videos more interesting, improving viewership numbers and raising employee engagement. However, the most important factor in making corporate videos that your employees will watch is to make sure that the content is relevant to them. If the subject of the video is something your employees are already curious about, keeping their attention will be much easier.

Another important factor is increasing your views is by ensuring that your employees can actually watch these videos. A good way to do that is by using an enterprise video platform that is easy to use, like Haivision Media Platform. With broadcast-quality video, and an easy-to-navigate interface, Haivision Media Platform allows organizations to organize and share video with employees, keeping them engaged with video.