5 tips for producing corporate videos

Tasked with creating a video for your organization? If you’re new to the video-production scene, this mission can seem challenging, foreign and downright scary.

Fear no more. Simply follow these five basic steps and you can create effective, professional videos.

1. Identify your viewership

Understanding your audience is key. Who’s watching your content can vary based on whom you’re targeting be it customers, business partners or various other departments within your organization.

So start by asking yourself these fundamental questions:

• Who’s going to watch this video?
• What voice and tone should I use for it?
• How do I expect my viewers to respond to it?

If, for example, the video you’re creating contains Human Resources (HR) content that’s beneficial to employees, your voice and tone may have to be formal. Reference your organization’s marketing style guide just to be sure.

2. Keep it brief

Maintaining your viewers’ attention between to-do items and meetings is always tough. So make sure the content for your video is clear, concise and smart.

Begin with a short, clever introduction. Then quickly build up to the key points of the video. A runtime between three and five minutes is typically recommended with content that’s short and easy to understand.

If you find your content’s running over five minutes, script it such that the video can easily be segmented either into multiple videos or chapters.

Enterprise video platforms such as Cruizemedia Content Server allows for the logical creation of chapters within a longer running video.

3. Preserve your video quality

Viewers can be picky. So before you dive into a recording or filming session, ensure the content and video are well captured and of high quality. Poor sounding audio, bad lighting and visual elements can convey a negative perception of the content and its authority making it distracting to viewers.

Many audio issues can be addressed by simply using the right microphone. Clip-ons, condensers and ‘desktop’ mics (usually targeted towards podcasters) are all viable options for corporate video production. A soft audio compressor can help even out the sound.

Did you know using natural light could minimize indoor lighting issues? In most cases, no adjustments are necessary when recording from screen capture software.

When recording, use uncompressed codecs or codecs that feature loss-less compression. Use a high-quality encoding solution to encode the final video files.

4. Enhance your video

Take that extra step in creating proper metadata for the content. If you’re using Cruizemedia Content Server, the process of enhancing content with meaningful metadata and resource material is extremely simple and straightforward.

Spend time considering the following:

• Create a short but descriptive title, a short and long description, and attribute authors, producers and publishers, if applicable.
• Think of all the keywords a user may plug in to discover your content. If the content has chapters, name them and create keywords for each.
• Is there artwork, copyright information or any other piece of data that might be useful to the viewer? If so, include it.

Including supplemental resource material can enhance some content. Word processing documents, spreadsheets, and other types of files may be useful to the viewer during or after the video.

5. Wear your marketing hat

Want your video to summon viewers to a call-to-action? If so, you may need to consider marketing vehicles such as print, digital, emails, media outlets and more to get the word out about your video. This holds true for any content in any business environment and not just external-facing consumer content.

While a marketing hat may be necessary to introduce the content to your audience you still need to distribute the content so your audience can discover and learn about it.

Enter Cruizemedia, where we’re redefining video content management with Cruizemedia Content Server. Content Server provides an ideal environment for the storage, searching and delivery of your corporate videos. Check it out by downloading your free trial.