5 content ideas for a company video

Summary

Company videos are aimed at specific audiences and have the main goal of building and enhancing the brand identity and reputation. They constitute an important strategic resource within any company’s marketing plans. We have collected the content ideas that offer the best results today, both in terms of brand equity and economic performance, all in these 5 tips. 

What is a company video?

Before we delve deeper into the topic of this article, identifying and describing the types of content most suitable for creating an effective company video, let’s pause for a moment and explain what company videos are, the goals they help achieve, and the trends that influence them.

Company videos differ from adv video (traditional and digital) in two main ways. 

1. They are intended for specific audiences, usually less broad and often internal to the corporate structure: investors, stakeholders, employees, talent to be attracted. Added to this are selected external segments, i.e., leads that are already qualified to some extent, i.e. those who may be called upon to comment on a project, product, or service, for example. 
2. They aim to present and reinforce a company’s or other organization’s visual identity and reputation and do so by employing different tactics, since the communication goals they help to achieve are different. We’ll mention a couple of them: showing how your corporate structure is organized (human resources, infrastructure, logistics, production and so on); defining and communicating your company’s position in the market (its mission, values, goals, history). 

The goals of a company video: between company profile and marketing strategy

One of the main purposes of company videos, which we can liken to the corporate communication mode we talked about in a previous post, is to strengthen the company profile, for example through presentation content that provides a broad overview of services or products.

In this scenario, company videos can be used to introduce people to the institutional world of the brand and represent a kind of business card; they can include information about the company’s mission and history, and even the biography of the founder(s). 

Company videos are also used as marketing tools by embedding them in touch points spread throughout the path to purchase. Amplifying their effectiveness requires shrewd design in multichannel or omnichannel modes. In this type of approach, which enhances video content at different moments in the funnel by distributing it across multiple channels, videos are often shared via social networks. 

The “typical” language of social, which tends toward immediately activating an emotional reaction and shifts the focus to the brand, has the great advantage of conveying messages, including those conveyed by video companies, to reach much more profiled, often niche, groups of consumers. Brand storytelling becomes more central through association with current and newsworthy stories, events, or news.

Social responsibility and personalization: how company video translates the contemporary

One trend that is gaining momentum is also one that is pushing more companies to adopt socially responsible behavior. Within a general awareness of issues of environmental stewardship and inclusion, company videos are designed to show what the company is actually doing in its efforts to return wealth and well-being to the community. They are charged with communicating a vision above the contingencies of business. Such videos can play an important role in building brand awareness and identity.

Another trend that has become established and permanently characterizes the digital marketing initiatives of companies both large and small in any sector is personalization.

Today, in order to establish a trusting relationship with its target audience, the brand must know their tastes, preferences, buying habits, and positions regarding certain issues, even sensitive ones. Put another way, it must accrue in-depth knowledge of its customers in order to extract the most accurate insights, thanks to which it can provide useful suggestions, design relevant content, and establish the basis for a reciprocal relationship. 

But how? If personalization is the solution, the starting point is Big Data, into which flow the many “digital traces” left by users when they visit both off-line and on-line company areas. At this point, companies can design tailored communications targeted to the individual customer in order to achieve a one-to-one dialog over time.

Personalization, when applied to company videos, creates new opportunities to establish a relationship with the consumer that is more open, transparent, and long lasting.

Tips for making company videos interesting, engaging, and effective 

Digital transformation has created a real revolution in the communication system of brands, and this has also impacted the production of company videos. On the one hand, digitization has led to a decrease in production costs (especially those related to recording and editing equipment), while on the other hand it has multiplied the possibilities of content distribution on digital channels.

In addition to being inexpensive, company videos are now an extremely useful and effective tool: when embedded in a website, they can significantly improve both the quantity and the quality of traffic; they can increase engagement (in fact, people tend to spend more time on touchpoints where videos are embedded); and they are perfect for explaining complex projects or products because they convey a large amount of information in a relatively short time. 

Now that we have outlined the general framework where company videos are born and deploy their communicative power, let’s look at the content ideas that can increase their effectiveness.

1. Try to express values and purpose

In today’s noisy, hyper-competitive world, it has never been more important for brands to be able to carve out a space for themselves, to make themselves the bearers of a value system, to develop coherent messages that create meaning for the people they are addressing and at the same time come across as credible and authentic. As told by company videos, brand stories elicit more powerful emotional reactions from their target audiences because they are built to resonate with them.

The stories, which populate the brand’s world, with which the viewer is asked to identify and onto which he or she can project parts of his or her own life, tap into common sensibilities and end up producing increased brand awareness and a domino effect that leads to a series of intended actions: such as downloading a piece of content from a product landing page or sharing it social media channels. 

It might seem trivial, yet it is a step (symbolic even before it is practical) that many companies don’t bother to take when creating their content. The first step that a company must take to stay both newsworthy and memorable is to draw on the company’s values–updating them, where appropriate, regarding contemporary matters.

2. Choose animated company video to show things you can’t tell

Complexity makes it more difficult for content creators to create the revelatory moments, those little epiphanies through which an emotional connection is activated between the viewer and the brand. 

The visual metaphor, often used in company videos, and particularly, as we shall see, in animated company videos, is the rhetorical device by which a complex message can be simplified without trivializing, distorting, or betraying it.

In animated graphic videos, virtually everything – people, animals, physical objects but also concepts and processes – comes to life through the animation of powerful visual metaphors.

In addition to making complicated things easier to understand, company videos made with animated graphics make it possible to visualize the invisible, to use moving images to show what audiences cannot see in real life. For example, in the field of digital technology products, services and features tend to be intangible, impossible to “touch” as they unfold, yet animation allows them to be shown.

In addition, brands need content that can consistently communicate the company’s values, which cannot be experienced directly. To take full advantage of the potential of company videos, publishers, producers, and marketers can rely on animation techniques that, thanks to continuous innovations in computer graphics programs, are constantly being enriched with new features.

Their essence, however, remains that of the early, pioneering cartoons, and that is to tell engaging stories. Company videos in animated graphics furnish imaginary worlds, allow moments of strong abstraction, and correspond to the real needs of viewers.

3. Speak up and be the best version of you 

Each company video contains a chapter, which can be introductory or final depending on the effect sought, where the brand talks about itself and shows itself to its audience for what it is, what it does, what it would like to be, and what it sets out to do: the business, the solutions to specific customer problems, the reasons that drive business decisions. Sharing solid, authentic stories is a must if trust is to be built.

An effective company video does not contain overused formulas but strives to find new words or resignify words that are already part of the company lexicon to describe the distinctive quality that makes the brand, product, or service unique. Sharing brand stories – about its history and the present is not as easy as it might seem, but there are some tactics that are now widely employed. Here are three that are particularly effective.

• Share your company’s story: from its origins to the present day, the company shares, and while sharing rework, anecdotes, moments of crisis, unexpected victories, fortuitous incidents, and events that have made it what it is. Additional tip: try to integrate the voices of customers, partners, and collaborators into the narrative voice, i.e. the voice of the brand, in order to create a choral narrative.
• Focus on a meaningful topic that relates to your business: the perception of authority comes from the widespread recognition of a correspondence between professional expertise and results achieved. Showing that you have extensive knowledge on a given topic is a great way to validate your company’s expertise.
• Share your achievements: giving public prominence to your achievements, even internal ones, such as an important company anniversary, is a great way to let your audience know about your company’s progress, which, if it has received an award from a third party, is inevitably more objective.

4. Reality effect: give concreteness to the company profile

Behind-the-scenes videos show the work that will later result in a company’s product or service while it is in progress. Footage of a factory tour explaining steps in the production process or an account of the day in the life of employees in a store or office offers a peek into places where viewers are usually excluded.

“Behind the scenes” can also show – preferably rough and unpolished – the making of the official company video or corporate event video. In short, anything that contributes to creating a reality effect is allowed, as long as you never lose sight of consistency with the editorial line and purpose of the brand.

5. With interactive videos you enhance the knowledge you have gained about your audience

Interactive videos empower viewers to exercise control over how the story they are watching is organized, and consequently, over their viewing experience. Interactivity enables direct intervention in video content, for example, by answering questions and calls-to-action, or by allowing a choice between multiple alternative paths or by administering quizzes, allowing viewers to choose which viewing perspective to adopt, or setting up clickable menus.

The interactive video company offers a whole world of new opportunities, and not only in reference to creative possibilities. It transforms a linear narrative arc into a branching structure in which even the direction of travel can be reversed: it is possible to stop, turn back, choose another path.

Interactive video companies also offer another notable advantage: interactivity allows different content to be built for different audience segments, leveraging the data that is captured each time the viewer interacts to tailor the story based on their profile.

Regardless of the form they take, all interactive videos allow the audience to actively participate in building the brand story. This type of engagement also creates greater empathy. It’s the same mechanism present in gaming: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person or people not only by virtually experiencing their events but by acting to bring about a deviation in the course of the story.

Now, all you have to do is put one or more of these five ideas to the test and design an effective and engaging company video!