Recruiting with your identity, story and culture
The ability to demonstrate human character and culture is video's greatest strength. This asset makes it an excellent tool for businesses looking to recruit top staff.
Recruitment is too often a remuneration drag race, where the business with the deepest pockets wins. Not only does this cost lots of money, it misses the opportunity to recruit staff who are engaged with your brand’s identity, story and culture from the beginning. Illustrating these assets of your business is where video comes into its own.
Marriott International
“Shoppers who view a website video are 1.81X more likely to purchase than non-viewers.”
– Adobe
Video brings ideas to life. Because of this it’s an excellent tool for communicating sales messages. This is probably why films designed to sell things are some of the most conspicuous in our everyday lives. Advertisers have been using moving image since the dawn of the medium. They use every trick in the filmmaker’s book to introduce, promote and explain their products. This type of video peppers our screens and remains the kings of corporate films.
Promoting causes, encouraging donations
Whatever cause you are looking to engage people with online, video is a great tool to use. Video’s most potent attribute is its ability to capture and share emotion. This makes it useful for communicating all sorts of news, ideas and messages. When that message is a powerfully emotional one in the first place, the format comes into its own. This attribute should not be over used, as your audience don’t want to feel manipulated. As you can see from this film for Breast Cancer Now, used responsibly and efficiently it can be a game changer for a charity campaign.
Why use video to boost sales and donations?
Video brings your value proposition to life.
Video’s emotive power makes your message far more impactful and memorable.
This is why video has been proven to boost website sales and donations.
Video helps to build communities among your customers online, empowering them to assist in the sales process.
Video can be recut and re-shared across all platforms, adding to its longevity and cost effectiveness.
“4x as many customers would prefer to
watch a product video than read about it.”
– Animoto
Animation is particularly efficient at communicating relatively complex messages. Which is why it used so often by businesses, as can be seen in this film for Microsoft. Animation is used because it allows us to break down the message, and explain it using both audio and visual elements working together. This reinforces the facts being communicated in the minds of the audience. Animation also allows communicators to use metaphor to illustrate abstract concepts improving their memorability.
Another effective way to promote a service is through interview-based testimonial videos with experts, clients or customers. You can see this in action in the video for Glint on the right. Video of this nature increase the audience’s trust in the product by borrowing from the featured subject’s standing: their expertise or experience. Interview-led films or ‘talking heads’ are useful because they are relatively inexpensive to produce and can be extremely effective.
Videos can be used anywhere that you need to introduce something. This is particularly useful on your website. Most companies assume their visitors have a greater degree of knowledge or understanding than they actually do. This miscalculation makes most company websites difficult to interpret quickly. If you consider how fast your visitors make decisions about your site, it is essential to capture them as soon as they land. A 30- to 60-second landing page overview film is the most effective way of doing this.
Five reasons to use video to explain / promote:
All the video content that you share has the effect of building (or potentially damaging) your business’ brand. An increasing amount of content is produced specifically for this purpose though. Your online audience are empowered to choose exactly how they spend their time online. This means the content that you share needs to deliver value to your audience in its own right. This raises the bar and means that to ‘cut-through’ you need to find and share the best quality stories you can find. This makes this a particularly exciting time to be working in this industry.
Building trust with video
This type of content aims to build trust with your target audience. Video is hands down the best way to communicate online. Combine this fact with brilliant stories, that your audience will actively seek out, and it makes for some of the most effective content there is. To make the most of this you need to find great stories and tell them creatively, sensitively and skilfully. Do this well and you have one of the most effective ways to reach and build trust with your audience online.
Wall Street Journal
This trailer is for a series we produced with Wall Street Journal. Star Alliance challenged travel journalist Robert Reid to go beyond the usual experience of travellers in the locations they serve. It made for a very watchable and engaging content which was watched, shared and loved by the airline group’s target audience.
Action Sustainability
Which is right: live action vs. animation?
Both animation and live action video are used for this type of communication. The format chosen usually (but not always) depends on what is being communicated. Animation is typically used to share ideas that are more challenging to show with live action (like the Modern Slavery film for Action Sustainability above). It is also used to communicate more intricate information, as you can see in this film for IBM. Animation is good for this because it allows the communicator to ‘show-and-tell’ what is being explained, using visual metaphor to illustrate abstract concepts.
Interactive Training
Interactive video, which allows the audience to ‘choose their own adventure’ has been growing in popularity over recent years. It makes information accessible and allows staff to explore and learn at their own pace. Keeping score and injecting competition also increases the contents sharabilty. These points drastically increase user engagement.
This is a case study film for an interactive platform was developed for Allianz Global Investors. It allows potential new staff to learn what the job entails before and during the recruitment process. We are proud to have produced a number of award-winning platforms of this nature.
Five reasons to use video to train or motivate staff
1. It reduces the cost of training vs. traditional techniques
2. It makes your messaging more engaging and memorable.
3. It allows you to track exactly how much has been engaged with and by whom.
4. It reduces travel by allowing staff to access it wherever they want.
5. It allows staff to take part whenever they want.
