Choosing to create a corporate video to help promote your business involves an investment of energy and time. A well-made corporate video that communicates the right message and connects with the correct audience can make a strong impact. So it’s important to ensure that you give yourself the best chance of success. By avoiding these errors, you’ll greatly enhance the prospects of your next corporate video production.

Mistake #1: Not Having a Clear Purpose for Your Video

Sometimes it can be tempting to create an “all purpose” corporate video to cover a range of purposes. But the more generalised your video is, the less impact that it will make. On the other hand, crafting a corporate video that answers a specific question, or drives an audience to take a certain action, will be more likely to succeed. Because it’s created with one sole purpose.

So the first thing to do is to actually define what you want to achieve. The right video production company will help you to do this. What is the specific challenge that you want to use corporate video to help solve?

- Do you want to increase the number of people that visit your website to enter their details into a contact form?

- Do you want to engage prospects already within your sales funnel?

- Will the video be used as part of a video brochure sent to prospects within a particular industry?

The specific needs you have will determine the video production strategy.

And when you are defining the challenge that you want to solve, ensure that all stakeholders are part of this process. It’s a lot easier to get things right in these early stages than having to work backwards during the edit stage to try to make your video content fit a goal that you have decided on later.

Mistake #2: Filmmaking by Committee

As mentioned, it’s important to involve all stakeholders early on to define the aims of the project, and to contribute ideas. That way, all interested parties are able to contribute to the final product, and receive a video production that helps to further their aims.

At the same time, it’s helpful to appoint a single point of contact that will interface with your video production team. That way, you will ensure that you are communicating one consistent message regarding your requirements. If you have multiple people giving feedback to the video production company, you risk communicating different requirements, and diluting the main message of the video.

 Mistake #3: Not Striking an Authentic Tone

The videos that work best are the ones that involve clear, direct and simple communication. In a way that feels real and natural. So it’s important to avoid jargon, overly technical language or fancy terminology designed to sound impressive. It’s important that the style and personality of your business shines through. In an age where more and more business communication is conducted online, it’s really important to try to give your audience a sense of the real people behind your business. Remember: your audience has many things competing for their attention. And they are highly media literate. Unless you are able to deliver engaging, human video content, you risk losing them.

 Mistake #4: Your Video Runs for Too Long

If your video feels like it’s running for too long, your audience will lose interest. They’ll click away to something else. And this will create a negative association with your brand. 

So how long should your video run for? Long enough to communicate specifically what you need to, and no longer. In making this decision, it’s also important to think about how motivated your audience is to watch your video. If it’s content that is training them in a particular discipline that they are interested in, or a problem they want solved, it’s likely that they will have the capacity to consume a longer video. On the other hand, if it’s a branding video to present to audiences with no affiliation to your business, it may be more challenging to hold their attention.

Mistake #5: Not Having a Distribution Strategy

How will you get your video out there in front of the right audience? It’s best to think about this before you make your video. Because this will have an impact on a range of factors already discussed, such as tone, style, length, etc. Remember, YouTube is not a distribution strategy. It’s a channel. It’s unlikely that simply uploading your video to YouTube will suddenly attract a mass audience. So it’s important to be strategic. It’s also a good time to have this discussion with your video production company, as well as other members of your team that may be involved in distribution, such as your web designer, pay-per-click manager, etc.

Mistake #6: Not Having Any Way to Measure the Success of Your Video

It’s important to put in place some mechanisms to track the success of your video. That way you can improve your odds of reaching the goals that you initially defined.

Set Key Performance Indicators that you want your video to help you achieve.

If possible, track conversions - the number of times that people take a desired action based on watching your video.

Analyse heat maps of your video’s performance. This will give you useful insights such as the average amount of time people watch your video for.

Different types of videos will offer different opportunities for measuring and testing. The important thing is to have a mechanism to evaluate the success of your project.

Mistake #7: Choosing the Wrong Production Company

By choosing the right production company, you will be selecting a trusted partner that will help you to avoid the mistakes outlined in this blog post. When deciding on a video production partner, here are some useful criteria to help your decision making process:

- Does the production company have experience in your industry? Can they show you examples of work that will be similar to the video you require?

- Who will actually be doing the work? Some production companies simply contract out the work to third-party operators.

- Has the production company invested time to ask questions specific to my goals? Have they listened carefully? Or have they spent a lot of time talking up how good they are?

- Does the production company offer a guarantee? It’s reassuring when service providers are sufficiently sure of what they offer that they shoulder some of the risk.

- Do the people in the production company seem pleasant to deal with? You’ll be working closely, so it’s important to choose providers that are compatible with your culture and values.

Conclusion 

Commissioning a corporate video is an interesting and rewarding experience. By avoiding the mistakes outlined above, you will greatly increase your chances of success.

Ryan Spanger, Managing Director - Dream Engine

Ryan’s Bio:

Ryan Spanger is one of Australia's most respected and sought-after video production professionals. His mission is creating incredible business videos that get results.