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4 killer tips to make a corporate video

When your audiences have short attention spans and high expectations, you need to know how to make a good corporate videos. Mediocre won’t cut it but these four tips will.

YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. A substantial number of people start their search for information in YouTube. A video is the only answer theyre interested in.

Visual learners respond better to videos than written communication

A good corporate video has an unequalled ability to explain. But the bar is set higher now  everyone has a camera in their pockets and  some editing skills.

But not everyone knows how to make a corporate video interesting.

Business communicators the world over are now expected to know how to make a video. They might not be expected to shoot and edit, but they’ll be expected to know how to write a script and direct. But being interesting in 90 seconds or less takes some know-how and practice.

How to make a corporate video…

1. Make every second of your video count

Your audience will only give you so much of their time. Words are time, so word count is crucial to keeping peoples interest.

Video transcript

One problem people make for themselves when writing a video comes from concentrating so hard on all the things they want to say, they forget about the time that will take to say those things.

There is only so fast you can speak before your audience wont be able to take in what youre saying. How fast that is depends on how well your audience knows you and the subject. If you have a specialized audience, you can talk fast.

Professional broadcasters aim for 110 or 120 words a minute. Thats how fast I am talking now.

You also need to think about how long people will give you to say what you want to say. Research shows that somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute you might lose as much as half of your audience. If youve decided your audience will give you 1:30 and your script looks like this, youre in trouble.

2. Start with a “silent” movie

Every video is really two videos. Using pictures properly helps keep the word countdown, so you’ll videos can be shorter.

Video transcript

The other day I had a meeting with a fashion retailer who told me that they were having a bit of a problem getting bloggers interested in their more everyday lives. They had no trouble getting blog coverage of high-fashion items where celebrity models are wearing the outfit down the runway. But the more everyday, affordable outfits just dont appeal to fashion bloggers in the same way.

The problem they were facing was a common one that people face in PR as much as in social media. Thats when youre trying to make yourself the story. With the high-fashion item, it is the story that youve got a $10,000 handbag, but with more everyday wear, the clothes themselves are probably not going to be the story, which is why youre not interesting bloggers.

My suggestion to the retailer was that they looked at what the bloggers needed to give their audiences. What stories did the blogger need to be telling, and how could they fit their clothes into that kind of story.

To give you a ridiculous example for instance, if there had been a tennis outfit in this line of clothing, why not hold a tennis party and invite bloggers who dont even need to be fashion bloggers. They need to be bloggers who are interested in tennis or they need to be bloggers who speak to your demographic.

You have them come to the tennis party. The tennis party is the story, not the clothes. But, your clothes are going to be featured, your clothes are going to be photographed.

Sometimes getting attention in social media is about thinking tangentially to the information you actually want to convey.

3. Work out where your corporate video fits in the overall campaign

Most corporate videos are only one piece of a communications campaign. You shouldn’t try to cram every message into every video.

Video transcript

Car companies dont expect you to find out all you need to know about their cars, from their TV ads. No one is going to buy a car solely on the strength of a 30-second commercial, no matter how many Italian villages they see it speeding through.

The ad is there to let you know the car exists, to highlight some features, to persuade you to go and find out more. The video is part of a campaign, but often people treat the videos they are making for work, as if each video has to have all the information for that project, as if they have only one shot at reaching people.

They have to say absolutely everything in one video. That makes for overlong, over-complicated videos. Your videos should be part of the puzzle, not the whole puzzle.

4. Tell a story

Facts and figures are 20 times more likely be remembered when theyre presented in a story. They’ll also be remembered longer. And stories are more interesting to watch, too.

Video transcript

Five years ago I watched a corporate video in which an airline CEO explained his pricing policy. Someone had asked him why they were so much cheaper than their competitors on the LA to Las Vegas route. Why not just be five dollars cheaper? The company would make more money and still beat the other airlines on price.

The CEO told the man hed misunderstood the situation. The airlines competition wasnt other airlines, its competition was the car. He had to persuade customers to fly, not drive, which is why his tickets were the same price as driving between Vegas and LA.

That video could have shown me figures about ticket prices; comparisons between flying and driving costs and travel time. If it had, I wouldnt have remembered it.

Research shows facts shared in stories are 20 times more likely to be remembered than facts on their own, and theyll be remembered for longer. Like I said, I watched that video five years ago. Stories are hard to find and they take time to refine, but theyre worth it.

What all four video tips have in common…

All these things should be thought about before you get anywhere near the record button. The success of a corporate video turns on the time and thinking you put into the preparation of the message and how you’re going to present it.

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