Video is one of the fastest growth areas online. Statistics from MarketingSherpa suggest that having a short video on your website will attract two to three times as many monthly visitors, double their time on your site and lead to 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines.
Corporate videos are a great way of showcasing your brand and communicating your benefits to your customers. Get your corporate video wrong though and you could damage how potential customers perceive your brand.
Follow these ten pointers for an attention-grabbing corporate video that makes a great (and positive) impact:
1. Less is more
Although people consume online videos at an incredible rate (100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and the site is visited by one billion unique users per month!), they also have short attention spans. Aim to keep your corporate video to 60-90 seconds in duration. Any longer and you risk boring your audience.
If you have loads to say, you might want to think about creating several short, snappy videos that serialise different services.
2. People love stories
If you think about the corporate videos that go viral or you have personally enjoyed, the chances are they tell a story. The reality is that people buy from brands that they connect with emotionally. You could use your corporate video to tell your story, a customer’s story or even the story of one of your products.
Talk to the principle dentist (even if it’s after hours) because nobody is more passionate than a person talking about their own business. Or capture client testimonials on film because social proof has huge currency and is almost as good as a word of mouth recommendation.
3. It pays to have a plan
We would always recommend that you work from a script or at least a pre-agreed list of points to talk about. Planning the content of the video carefully in advance will help you stay focused, relevant and engaging. Of course, it’s important that you come across as natural on film but ad-libbing isn’t advisable.
4. Show off your practice
If you have a bright, modern practice, that’s something your potential customers need to see. By showing your clean, tidy interior – perhaps as a backdrop – you can help people visualise what it will feel like to be a patient at your practice. When they step into the reception for the first time, the practice will already feel familiar. It’s usually best to stick to one location for continuity and flow.
5. Involve the whole team
Before making your corporate video, bring your team together so that they can all add their ideas to the melting pot (even if all of them aren’t possible). Depending on their role within the practice, team members may have different perspectives on what makes the practice stand out or what matters to patients.
6. It’s not all about you
Although you might think a corporate video is the right tool for a sales pitch, it isn’t. Videos invite engagement when they’re subtle. Demonstrate the benefits of using one of your products, for example, don’t just tell people about the features. Get to the point and let your customers know what you can do for them. Instead of going for the hard sell, show them how their life will look better if they buy from you. Create aspiration, empathy and confidence, and shelve the hard sell.
7. Be creative
Spend a few minutes on YouTube looking at corporate videos and you’ll quickly realise how boring some of them are. Corporate videos can be creative. How can you show your products? What story can you tell that would communicate your brand?
A word of warning – in trying to be creative, lots of companies try (and fail miserably) to capture the kind of humour that makes videos go viral. A recent white paper by Unruly suggested humour can come off as cheesy, embarrassing and clichéd. It’s probably best to avoid it. Concentrate on evoking other positive emotions.
8. Good production quality
Although a corporate video doesn’t have to have all-singing, all-dancing Hollywood blockbuster production values, it should be well lit and professionally presented with good sound quality. After all, your video reflects how you want customers to see your business.
Good graphics on the video are important too because they add a professional finish. It isn’t advisable to feature your logo on the screen the whole way through the video – it’s overkill and will detract from the content – but you should feature it alongside your contact details in the final few frames.
9. Create a branded and optimised YouTube channel
In June 2013, YouTube launched its ‘One Channel’ redesign, which has enabled users to create a brand that looks the same across all devices. By creating your own YouTube channel to feature your corporate video, you can add live social media and web links into your banner, which is great for brand consistency and creating those all-important backlinks to your website for SEO purposes.
10. Tell people about your video
Too many companies take a ‘film it and they will come’ approach to their corporate videos. Once your video is complete, the work to promote it has only just begun. How else will people know to find you on YouTube or visit your website?
Invite people to like, comment on and share the video on social media platforms. Pin a link to your Pinterest page, post it regularly to Facebook, Tweet some of the key points on Twitter, shout about it on Google+, showcase it in your newsletter – these are all fantastic tools for getting the word out to potential customers.
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