Have you thought about how video can help YOUR business? Here are ten ways (there are many more):
1. Corporate Overview
Corporate overviews or “image pieces” are often the starting point for companies using video to promote their products or services. Corporate overviews are usually brief (2-3 minutes typically, though some are as long as 10 minutes) and can include a short history, some location/facilities shots and introductions from your senior management team or employees.
2. Customer Testimonials
You probably can't bring your customers with you on sales calls -- but with a well-produced video, there they are on your TV screen, tablet or notebook computer, happily talking about the virtues of your products and services and explaining how you and your company helped them achieve their business goals.
3. Video Success Story
Sometimes it's tough to get customers to agree (especially in larger companies) to appear on camera to talk about your company. You can still present the customer success story using your own presenters (or recreating the success using actors).
4. Video Case Study
A video case study combines customer testimonials with a more in-depth explanation of how your company's products and services helped your customer to be successful. These case studies usually incorporate a narrator along with the voice of your customer to tell the story.
5. Product Demonstrations
Show how your product works and highlight the features that differentiate it from your competitors. Through video you can transport your customer, investor or prospect to a working installation of your product or the environment where your service is actually being used and appreciated.
6. Product Presentations
Product demos shows the details of how your products work. These are best used in helping your customers and prospects differentiate between your products and services and those of your competitors. Early on in the sales cycle you need to talk more about benefits (always from the customer's perspective). Product presentations explain how your product can help your customers solve their business problems.
7. Executive Presentations
Whether you are preparing for a quarterly update, responding to a major event in your industry or making a regularly scheduled presentation there is great value in presenting the 'face' and 'voice' of your leadership team to all of your stakeholders.
8. Staff Presentations
The prevalence of the Internet has caused companies to reconsider how they communicate with their external audiences. Your senior leadership team should not be the first and only consideration for representing your company. It is becoming more important to consider showcasing the people that drive the day-to-day operations of your company. Customer service representatives, technical experts and legacy workers are all valuable considerations for this new category of corporate video. Surveys show that there is more trust associated with these employees than with senior management. When you are selling to influencers in organizations - versus economic buyers or the decision makers - it is especially important you represent your company with people that your customers and prospects can relate to. A video can give your customers access to these workers.
9. Corporate Facilities or Equipment Tour
While corporate overviews serve many purposes, a corporate facilities or equipment tour can be used to highlight the unique characteristics of your building, and infrastructure, to show the breadth of your operations and reach or to highlight special equipment that sets you apart from your competitors.
10. Employee Training
If your company needs to train groups of employees on an ongoing basis, nothing is more efficient than a well-produced training video. Only so much can be accomplished by a live presenter standing at a podium or making yet another PowerPoint presentation before the class "zones out" and stops paying attention. A properly designed video will capture and hold their attention, provide a diversion from a series of lectures, and guarantee that the information is presented the same way every time -- the way you wanted it presented, not the way the live presenter interpreted it.
And here's a bonus use:
11. Post Sale Support and Maintenance
No one reads manuals. You can save thousands of dollars of post sale support by creating informative assembly, installation and maintenance videos for your products and services.
As with all things, you get what you pay for. A well-produced video will typically cost between $1,000 - $6,000 per minute of running time (depending on how many days of shooting, how many locations, how far apart they are, the use of complex graphics or animations, original music, the need for actors, etc.), but statistics show that it can pay HUGE dividends that are well worth the production cost.
If you'd like to start using video to improve YOUR business, give us a call or send us an email! We can provide anything from a producer and small crew to a semi trailer with multiple cameras, satellite links and whatever else you might need to cover a large event. We can nurture your idea from the development and scripting stages through storyboarding and production and the edit, and tailor the support we provide to your specific needs.