Case Study: How to Create a Corporate Video in Perth
Perth Corporate Video Case Study
Every business has a story to tell. How do you cut through the noise and get your message in front of potential customers? One of the most popular kinds of video businesses create is a corporate video, also called an overview video or a business story video. How do you create a business story video? What do you need to include? What mistakes do you need to avoid? In this article, we’ll go behind the scenes on a recent business story video project to give you an insight on how to create a business story video for your business.
What is a business story video?
Business story videos are focused on brand awareness and identity: they explain who you are, what services or products you offer to the market and your unique selling proposition, makes you unique as a business. With video being a leading way that new customers learn about a business and decide to engage with them, it’s critical to understand what goes into a business video and how to make it work for you.
Business story video example:
How to write a video production brief for your business story video?
In order to consult a videographer or video production company, and figure out if they’re the right fit for your business, you’ll need to first write a video production brief. In this brief, you should include: (1) information about your business; (2) what your primary and secondary marketing objectives are; (3) information about your customers and why they buy; (4) the content you want to include in your video; (5) notes on style including example videos; (6) any content repurposing opportunities you’re interested in; and (7) a project timeline and deadline.
In this article, we’ll explore these stages by using a business story video we made with the Perth M&A team of BDO as an example. BDO is one of WA’s largest full service accounting firms, offering advice in advisory, audit, business services, corporate finance and tax.
Identifying the marketing objective for your business story video
It’s vital to understand why you’re creating a video before you contact a videographer or video production team. Identifying your marketing objective will help your video production professional to craft a video that works best for your business. To do this, review your current marketing material and ask yourself what problem you’re trying to solve by creating this video about your business. The answer is likely brand awareness, identity or clarity: you want people to understand who you are and what you do. If your answer isn’t along these lines, another video may be more effective for your marketing strategy.
Before working with the LP Visuals team, BDO had extensive traditional marketing material, some digital assets and had created video before, but only global content for the BDO brand, not bespoke material for an individual team. BDO was interested in testing video marketing as a means of communicating their brand and engaged us to create a business story video of the Perth M&A team.
BDO’s primary marketing objective was to have a brand awareness asset. Something that quickly communicated who they are and what they offered to a business owner looking to engage in M&A (the buying or selling of a business). A secondary objective was to position the team as the go-to experts in their field and expand their reach online.
Take Away #1: understanding the marketing objective behind your video is critical to planning and executing it effectively. Your marketing objective should stay front of mind throughout the entirely of the video production process and this can be done by thinking about what makes the most sense for the audience watching this video on the homepage of our website?
Why you need to think about your potential customers first
When creating a business overview video it’s important to deeply understand your customers and the psychological motivations underpinning their decision to buy from you. This information needs to be included in the planning of your business story video so that the end product is something that resonates with your target audience and encourages them to take action. If you fail to understand your customers and why they buy, your video will fail to be effective.
BDO’s customers are established business owners who have built their business from the ground up and now, after decades of hard work are looking to transition out of the business. There is also a secondary customer market, businesses who are seeking to purchase other businesses to expand their offering and increase profit. Both of these potential customers need to feel one thing while watching a business overview video: this is an M&A expert I can trust.
Customers engage BDO for both their global network of established and experienced professionals, as well as their boutique feel and personal approach to service. When selling a business, something you’ve spent the good part of your life building, you want both security in expertise as well as an advisor you can trust personally. It’s this balance that hits home with their customers and was vital to convey on our video.
Take Away #2: by considering your customers and the videos target audience throughout the video production process, you’ll be able to make key decisions in terms of content and style that will influence your videos success.
What content should you include in your business story video?
This is a question we get asked all the time and the answer should always be: include whatever information your potential customer needs to hear to take the next step and not a word more. When creating an effective business story video video, it’s vitally important to consider who the target audience is and what their likes, dislikes, values and questions are about your product or service. By reverse engineering those likes, dislikes, values and questions, we can structure a video that is designed to to engage and connect with your audience.
We have short attention spans, with most viewers deciding if they’ll watch a video within the first eight seconds and as a result it’s important to start strong with something that hooks your viewer in and gives them an overview of what the video will be about. From there, you should build rapport with the audience by showing you understand the problem they face, before introducing your business as the solution and talking about the benefits of working with you.
Unfortunately, a lot of businesses do the opposite. We see a lot of business story videos that start with the businesses logo on screen for five seconds and then talk about how great the business is. We’re strongly against this approach because it isn’t engaging and feels unauthentic for viewers. As highlighted above, the first eight seconds of a video a critical for viewer engagement and simply having your logo on screen won’t engage an audience. Further, when you talk about your business before you talk about your customers, you position yourself as more important than them. It’s like having a conversation with someone who talks about themselves but cant listen to you. Your customers want to feel like you’re in it for them and the best way to do that is by building rapport and showing you understand who they are.
For BDO the structure of our business story video looked like this:
Hook the audience into your video by asking a question
Build rapport by discussing the difficulty of building a business and transitioning to the next phase of life
Introducing BDO as the solution and discussing why its a market leader with a personal feel (BDO’s USP)
Take Away #3: only include content thats relevant to your target audience or ideal customer. Structure your video with a hook, rapport and solution section to provide for a natural flow and authentic feel.
How to decide on the style of your business story video?
There are a lot of different video production styles out there and each has its place. So how do you decide on what style is best for you video? As usual, our approach is to consider the audience first. What does the audience need to think and feel while watching your video to take the next step? Do they need to be excited or encouraged? Do they need to see how interesting or dynamic your product or service is? Do they need to feel you are a large corporate, or an intimate business with a personal touch? By answering these questions and many more you can identify how you want your audience to react when watching your video and reverse-engineer the style from there through consultation with your videographer or video production company.
Taking this approach with BDO, it became clear to us that BDO’s customers need to feel the team is equal parts professional experts and personal advisors. They needed someone they could trust and what that meant for our video is that:
1. The video needs to be unscripted and conversational to give it an authentic feel;
2. Be interview led, showing the key members of the team, to start building a personal connection with the viewer; and
3. The video needs to include cinematic drone and office working shots to show the teams professionalism and expertise.
Take Away #4: the style of your video should be determined by your audience and what you want them to think and feel while watching your video.
How to repurpose content in a business story video?
Lastly, it’s important to consider what content repurposing options you can pursue while creating your business overview video. Often when we’re creating video content a lot of material goes unused on the cutting room floor. That content is still great content, it just wasn’t the right fit for the business overview video. As a marketer, it’s worth considering your secondary marketing objectives and what you can do with this leftover content to ensure you get value for money from your video production.
BDO’s secondary marketing objective was to position themselves as thought leaders and expand their reach online. We knew exactly what this meant as soon as we chatted with the team: creating videos to answer FAQs, to be released via LinkedIn. These videos answered frequently asked questions to:
1. Show the strong knowledge of the team, positioning them as industry experts;
2. Provide for an opportunity to increase lead generation by sharing on social media; and
3. Ensure there were multiple pieces of content for ongoing marketing efforts.
Take Away #5: before completing the project, review your secondary marketing objectives to see what content repurposing options you have for your business story video.
BDOs Business Story Video
FAQ Videos
Feedback
We really enjoyed working with the BDO M&A team and are very happy with how the business story video turned out. It might be one of the best overview videos we’ve made! And BDO has seen some great results, not only is the video exactly what they wanted, but customers have commented that they are now seeing the BDO M&A team everywhere, achieving our goal of increased brand awareness. Let’s have a look at the videos to see how they turned out. What makes us happiest overall is the feedback we got from Tami at BDO ‘It isn't often you work with a vendor that absolutely nails the brief, relationship, communication, and end product. Don't bother looking elsewhere.’
Special thanks to Tami Halley, Justin Boyce-Cam, Todd Grover, Cassie Adamini, Emily Reilly and Dhyana Ishibashi.
How to create a corporate video or business story video?
Your marketing objective (brand awareness) should be front of mind throughout your project;
Understanding your customers and focus on them as you make decisions through the video production process';
Only include content thats relevant to your target audience or ideal customer. Structure your video with a hook, rapport and solution section to provide for a natural flow and authentic feel;
The style of your video should be determined by what you want your audience to think and feel while watching your video; and
Before completing the project, review your secondary marketing objectives to discover content repurposing options.
If you need a corporate video or business story video and need a video production partner who understands both strategy and beautiful visuals, we’d love to chat with you.