11 Types of corporate video to help grow your business (with examples)

Corporate videos are a powerful tool businesses around the world increasingly use to reach customers, boost sales, engage employees and more. In this article you’ll learn about the different types of corporate videos and how to use them to grow your business.

If your company isn’t using corporate videos as a core part of your business strategy, you’re going to lose ground to your competition.

It’s a bold claim but the data backs it up.

According to global technology company Cisco, by 2020 82% of all consumer web traffic will be video.

When it comes to sales and marketing, 81% of businesses currently use video as a marketing tool while 83% of those using video think it gives them a good ROI.

Most importantly, corporate video is what your audience wants. 72% of people have said that they’d rather use video to learn about a product or service.

We could go on but you get the point. Corporate videos are an essential tool for any business regardless of your industry.

They give you the opportunity to connect with and engage target customers in a way other digital mediums can’t match.

At its most basic, a corporate video is any video produced by a company or organisation.

While many people associate corporate videos with promotional company profile videos, the truth is you can use them across all channels of your business and for different purposes.

Which is why you’re reading this article, to learn about the different ways your business can take advantage of corporate videos to boost both your internal and external communications.

Maybe you’re starting from scratch and need an idea for your first video. Or you’re already using corporate videos as part of your business strategy and, having seen success, you need inspiration for more ways to take advantage of it.

Whatever the reason, in this article we’ll go into detail about the different types of corporate videos successful businesses around the world use to engage their customers, boost company efficiency and effectiveness and, last but not least, grow their business.

The types of videos we’ll cover are divided into 4 categories, Sales Videos, Customer Experience Videos, Brand Awareness Videos and Internal Use Videos.

Although not a comprehensive list, (the only restriction to how you can use a corporate video is your imagination), the videos covered are the most popular ones which have been proven to deliver the most value.

Video Advertising

Using corporate video content to sell has been around since the mass adoption of television. The adverts you see on TV and online today, have their roots in the early days of commercial television in the 1940’s and the 1950’s.

With the growth of e-commerce and the increasing reliance on marketing on the internet, the use of video advertising has become ubiquitous. Which makes sense. When done well, video advertising is an effective way of pushing your product or service in front of your audience.

They help you inform customers about your product or service while showing them the different features and benefits you have to offer.

Despite popular belief, taking advantage of video advertising doesn’t require budgets in the tens of thousands. Affordable video recording technology means finding video content production companies that fit your budget is within the reach of most businesses.

Alternatively, if you’re feeling creative enough, you could even make your own low-budget video advert to increase sales.

This low-budget video advert for a local animal shelter in Atlanta, USA was created by volunteers and shot in 30 minutes. The advert’s charming use of humour saw it go viral and at the time of printing it has over 5 million views on YouTube. Not bad for an advert that cost “a couple of cans of cat food for the cat stars”.

Viral cat videos aside, using video advertising is no longer the reserve of large global brands. Easily shareable and rewatchable, every business should be taking advantage of video advertising to push their product or service to larger audiences.

Product Explainer Videos & Demo Videos

One of the main roles of marketing is to communicate to your target customers what exactly your product does and how it will benefit them.

A subset of sales video content, product explainer videos and demo videos can be used as video advertising, but often have a specific role to play in the buyer funnel.

With these corporate videos, the aim is to make your viewer understand what you’re offering, how it works and why it’ll benefit them, all in no more than 90 seconds. It’s common for these types of videos to be animated (particularly for tech companies) as animation gives you more freedom in what you can display within this short time-frame.

Product explainer videos are particularly beneficial for businesses with complex or innovative services the typical consumer isn’t immediately familiar with.

This ad for Mint.com is often brought up as a premium example of product explainer videos done well.

A big target customer segment of Mint’s are small business owners who aren’t tech-savvy. In their 90 second advert, Mint are able to connect directly with this audience by opening with a statement about a problem that they definitely face, and then walk through the solution to that problem by demonstrating how their app works.

Product demonstration videos are similar to an explainer video but often have a slightly different use case. They’re more focused on specifically showcasing a product in action, demonstrating its different features.

These types of corporate videos can be used in conjunction with a live sales pitch or as a substitute for a live demonstration.

Video Testimonials

Customer testimonials are an established marketing and sales tool, proven to help customers overcome objections and fears they have about your offering, pushing them towards the sale. Whatever the industry, any company worth their salt will have a handful of written testimonials spread across their website and other marketing material.

Testimonials from real people work because they come across as an unbiased and truthful account of your business.

But while many businesses rely on only using written testimonials, you can double up on their effectiveness by asking customers to share their experiences with your product or service through corporate video testimonials. Being able to actually see and hear the customer increases the authenticity of the testimonial.

This customer testimony from Codecademy is a great example of a video testimony. Codecademy is an online education platform that teaches anyone how to code. Notice how rather than having the customer simply list the details of what the online courses involved, the testimonial is framed around the actual outcomes they achieved.

Telling a story around the benefits of using the service, rather than listing out features, gives this video testimonial an appeal which will resonate with prospective customers.

Educational (How-To) Videos

Creating content that helps people to learn something new, do something they don’t know how to do, or just answer a question they may have, is one of the most effective ways of connecting with target audiences and establishing trust in your brand.

When people have a pain point or difficulty with something, one of the first places they’ll ask for help is Google. If your brand can be the one to give them the most informative answer, they’re not going to forget you.

What’s more, the next time they have a similar question they’ll come directly to you since you’re now an authority on the subject in their eyes and they trust you.

Having a relationship that’s built on authority and trust makes it easier to convert leads into paying customers. In fact, often you won’t even have to make the hard sell.

Prospective customers who become familiar with your educational material will often organically check out your offering because of the interest in you that’s been generated by the educational video content they’ve watched.

These corporate videos are also a great form of building brand awareness. Viewers who find your educational videos useful are going to be more likely to share them across their networks.

A great example of these types of videos are the “how-to” videos British chef and author Jamie Oliver posts on his YouTube channel. These short, yet helpful free tutorials cover everything his target customers are likely to be interested in, from cooking popular recipes to getting the most out of kitchen tools.

Customer Onboarding Videos

You’ve completed the sale. Your prospective customer is now an actual customer. All done? Not quite.

With increased competition, getting the customer isn’t enough. You need to make sure their entire experience with your product goes smoothly. Doing so can be the difference between a one-time customer and a repeat customer who becomes a brand ambassador for you, bringing in more customers.

An effective way to ensure customers are able to get the most out of your product is by using customer onboarding videos.

Customer (or User) onboarding videos are instructional videos that act as a welcome message and ‘how-to’ for your product rolled into one. These corporate videos are important because they help your customers get the most out of your product as soon as they get access to it.

If your business often sees a significant drop off in engagement from newly activated customers, then integrating a customer onboarding video into the customer journey is a good idea.

The best onboarding videos go beyond highlighting the different features available and showing you where things are. Instead, like this video from Canva, they achieve the same thing by walking the viewer through a typical task or goal they’d want to accomplish with your product.

Demonstrating the product through such a narrative is more engaging as it links directly to the reason why your customer became a customer in the first place.

Customer Tutorial (How-To) Videos

These corporate videos are similar in style and substance to the ‘Educational videos’ mentioned above but with one main exception. They’re more specific in their scope. That is, the purpose of these videos is to help existing customers get the most out of the product they’re using.

Regularly used for software products, they can act as a supplemental aspect of the customer service you provide.

You can use them as introductory instructional videos that teach new customers how to use different features or tools available in your software. Or you can also tailor tutorials for your more proficient users who want to know advanced tips and tactics.

A great example of advanced tutorials are those provided by Adobe for their different tools. Adobe Creative Cloud is a comprehensive design software suite aimed at professionals and businesses. The different apps and design tools within the Creative Cloud suite are technical with a whole host of specialized tools that require specific training.

To help customers get the most out of their respective design tools, Adobe frequently publishes short tutorial videos that demonstrate how to use specific tools to create designs.

Supporting your customers with insightful and useful tutorial videos does more than optimize their experience and increasing their satisfaction with your offering.

By including these videos in your FAQ or Help sections, you can help customers try to solve their own problems before getting in touch with you, reducing the number of support calls you receive which in turn reduces costs of your customer support team.

Brand Values Video

Unlike video advertisements or product explainer videos, the main purpose of brand values videos isn’t to go for the hard sell.

Instead these corporate videos have a specific purpose of building awareness of your brand by promoting your organisation’s value proposition in a way that connects with your target audience.

The key is to do so without making the video just a brochure of the company’s list of beliefs. The best brand values films achieve this by creating a story your target audience will relate to thereby building an emotional connection between the brand and audience.

Often made with high production value, the aim of these eye-catching promotional corporate videos is to share your values, mission, and ultimately your brand with your target audience.

The content of your videos need to be consistent with your overall brand but at the same time you want to share those values in a way that’s interesting and unique to your company.

In the corporate video example below, Microsoft piggy-backed on International Women’s Day to associate their brand with the value of inclusion and empowerment, values that form part of their core company values.

While this focus on ‘values’ can seem opportunistic, the truth is when it comes to business and marketing, consumers like and want to be customers of businesses with whom they share values.

Turning prospects into customers isn’t just always about just the transaction, in fact more and more it’s about building a relationship and brand awareness videos like the Microsoft video are a perfect example of this.

Company Profile Video

One of the most powerful attributes of corporate videos is their ability to help brands create a meaningful connection with customers.

Company profile videos, a mainstay of corporate videos, are one of the most effective way for you to create that connection. They act as a sales brochure for your business, showcasing to prospective customers the people behind the company, your service/product offering and the company philosophy.

While there’s no strict format for company profile videos, they’re typically anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes long and tend to include company founders, executives and other in-house talent talking about the company’s story.

They’re also traditionally done with a high production quality, with deliberate thought given to the images, pace, editing and music included. Every element of the company profile video plays a role in painting a picture of your brand in the minds of the viewer.

Your company profile video should be featured prominently in your online marketing and ideally you’ll want to have a permanent spot on your “About Us” page.

This company profile video for 8th Light, a software development company, is an excellent example of the type of profile video you should be striving for.

What really makes it stand apart is its focus throughout the video on the “why” behind the company. That is, their driving belief of software development as a craft and how that approach influences every aspect of their business.

Recruitment videos

We’ve already spoken about the different uses of corporate video to showcase your company’s beliefs, personality and values to create a connection with prospective customers.

But as well as connecting with customers, corporate videos can also be used to create connections with prospective employees.

Recruitment videos give you the chance to illustrate the behind the scenes of what it’s like working at your organisation in a way not possible through any other medium. It gives you the chance to show what it’s like to work at your company rather than just talking about it.

Employee Training Videos

Whether it’s for onboarding new employees, ensuring your team are aware of new legislation or product features, or simply for developing existing skills, every company has a responsibility to provide training to their employees.

Using corporate videos to deliver training is proven to be effective, scalable and affordable.  Once a training video has been created, it can be delivered repeatedly without any additional investment.

Having an internal video platform solution where you host these training videos in a library provides your employees with the flexibility to access them as and when they need to.

The training video from The Cosmopolitan hotel chain is an example of how what’s typically a boring subject can be presented in an engaging way through corporate videos.

Workplace safety training is often mandatory yet it’s delivery can follow a boring checkbox format. With their training video, The Cosmopolitan have managed to make the training entertaining while also pointing out the salient points in a way that will stick in the employee’s mind.

Internal Communications Videos

Every company understands the need to communicate with and engage customers. Unfortunately, there’s another set of stakeholders key to any organisation’s success that often gets ignored in communication efforts, employees.

Regular internal communications to your entire team helps build a sense of purpose in their roles, keeps employees on brand and message, and most importantly gives them a feeling of ownership in the company’s story.

Typically businesses rely on email newsletters or other written media for their internal communications needs. Yet corporate video communication is a much more engaging alternative.

Using video for your internal communications is going to be much more effective than simple written text as, again, it’s that much more engaging. Corporate videos give you freedom to communicate both ideas and emotions in a way you just can’t do in written text.

Paypal’s “Paypal in 90 Seconds” videos are a weekly video series sent out to employees all over the world to provide an update and overview of the company’s activities around the world. This type of internal communication video is a great way to connect a disparate workforce working towards a unified goal.

Ok, so you’ve gone through the list above and you’re burning with ideas for your next corporate video.

But before you run off to channel your inner Spielberg, it’s important to think about where your videos are going to ‘live’ within your business ecosystem.

While some businesses choose to use free video player tools to host their videos, these come with serious drawbacks that can restrict your business from getting the most out of the corporate videos you create.

A significant problem with these platforms is you give up ownership of your video content, which means you don’t have full control over how it gets used. This can be a big risk. If you don’t control how and where your video content is used it could end up being associated with content that damages your brand.

But it’s not just about ownership. Everyone is already using video as part of their business strategies, soo it’s not enough to just have video content. To really stand out from your competition you need to be able to get the most out of your video content. This requires advanced tools that free platforms just won’t provide you.

So what’s the alternative?

VIXY’s Video Platform.

It’s an all-in-one, cloud based video suite through which your business can achieve everything it could possibly need to with your corporate video content.

The flexibility that VIXY’s ‘Online Video Platform’ (OVP) provides businesses gives you the chance to both optimize how you use your video content, and control the way in which your audience consumes it.

Instead of having to feature another brand on your videos, with VIXY your videos will only display your own branding meaning you’ll never have to share attention with any other brands, keeping your audience focused on you.

Comprehensive and advanced analytics provided within VIXY’s Video Platform help you get a targeted understanding of which of your videos are performing best. You’ll also be able to collect data about your audience to customize the content you create and develop a more intelligent data driven video content strategy.

VIXY’s Video Platform also provides flexibility regarding the content management system. Depending on your needs and existing setup, you can either use the platform as an external content management platform, OR seamlessly create your own content management workflow that integrates with your existing website or mobile app using VIXY’s API.

Most importantly though, with VIXY you’ll get a partner who’s committed to providing you an exceptional service.

We believe our business thrives when the people we work with succeed. So whether it’s an account manager you want to speak to or even directly to one of our developers, we’re always available and committed to helping you get the most out of your corporate video content.

So what are you waiting for! Get in touch and let’s transform your business.