The “Cool” Company Video

Not long ago the “Corporate video” was a long-form, 10-15 minute video that always hit the same angles, regardless of the industry or trade:

• A brief history of the company.
• The given industry, as a whole.
• Why that company is the best, or unique.
• Structured values of the company.
• And (if you like to brag) some notable achievements.

When done right, these videos would be very successful and worth the relative investment because of the way they were presented. If you could get potential clients, customers or investors around the video screen and take them on the guided tour of the best parts of your business, you would have a significant advantage over your competitors.

As patience and attention-spans have decreased with the rise in technology, the 10-15 minute video is not as practical in many external marketing communication channels. There are less instances of gathering a group of decision-makers together around a video screen. Now, attention must be caught in a matter of seconds. The key is to get your viewers to stop “scrolling” or keep them from hitting the “Next” button.

The best way to reach your viewers is to adapt to their habits. These are the three big habits that the average viewer has picked up in recent years:

• Research Competence

It has become second-nature for us to whip out our phones and look up anything we may have a question about. If you can generate enough intrigue with a video, then you are sure to get a viewer to seek additional information. This is an easy transformation from the traditional 10-15 minute video because you no longer need to spell out 100% of the info about your business on one video. Make sure to have the video properly embedded in landing pages with extra info or tagged with links to additional sources. This way, the viewer has easy access to all the info they need. So you can afford a short and high-impact video to catch their eye. Having multiple short videos have appeared to be more successful than one long-form video.

• Ad awareness

Perhaps this isn’t the newest development, but it should not be ignored. People generally know when they are watching advertisements. Even if a video piques their interest, when they get a whiff of something being sold to them, they immediately look at the video timeline to see the duration of the ad. In this situation, a 10-15 minute video is NOT going to retain their attention. This leads to the next (and most obvious) new habit…

• Impatience

It’s no secret that patience is a dead virtue. We’re all guilty of impatience, especially with technology. We used to pop in a VHS and rewind the whole thing before watching any movie or show. Now, we lose our freaking minds if we can’t skip the previews on the Blu-ray. This is exceptionally bad for web users. If a video on a web page doesn’t load within a couple of seconds, a typical user will back out of it and choose a different site instead.  After about a minute or so, the user will likely forget the experience happened at all. It is crucial that the corporate video workflow adapts to this behavior. One way is to kill introduction slates. All corporate videos used to have an intro slate that would play for a few seconds over music. It would state what the video was about, usually the name of the company and the slogan. Now, it’s best to start in the action. Get the viewer to stop scrolling and engage with that’s being placed in front of them. By the time they realize they are being marketed to, they see there are only 30-60 seconds left. You have to be careful about the runtime of your video. The patience to commit to a 5-minute video is something that the average viewer won’t afford. It’s a commitment that could turn them away from a product or service that they might even be interested in.

Video is a formidable investment. In relativity to print and digital media, it can be a wider expense in your campaign. The payoff is being able to guide a viewer through a pre-planned ingest of information about your company. Any decent salesperson will tell you it’s not always just about the facts, it’s about the way you present the facts to the customer. Video can deliver your approved sales pitch 100% of the time. The Bottom line is that the “Corporate Video” is still very much alive and efficient as a tool for external marketing. To wield it to its full potential, you just need the insight to adapt it to modern digital standards.

To see an example of some of our short-form company videos, go to https://triad-inc.com/video-production-services/.