Producing a video isn’t always about acquiring more customers. A well planned and executed video can streamline your internal processes, cut down on customer support time, reduce returns, attract the right people, or make new hire training more efficient. Here are just a few ways you can use videos to make your business run like a machine.
- Company news, announcements and reports.
- Pre-purchase FAQ videos about your products and services
- Post-purchase support and product tutorial videos.
- Talent recruiting and company culture videos.
- Employee training and development videos
Let’s dive in a little deeper:
Motivate and Align Your Team: Video News
Supplementing your regular newsletters, memos, or other internal corporate communication with video content can increase engagement, and get everyone on the same page. This can take the form of a single video or a regularly scheduled series, distributed either company-wide or to specific groups. A video is much more likely to be watched and retained when compared to a written memo, newsletter or powerpoint deck.
- A regularly scheduled company or shareholder focused video newsletter or leadership announcement.
- Monthly videos highlighting company-wide or department specific progress or goals.
- A timely video announcing or commending a recognized team member or recipient of an award.
- An internal pitch to stakeholders or partners pitching a proposal or telling the story behind a major decision.
Simplify Your Sales Process: FAQ & Explainer Videos
Videos that help answer customer pre-sales questions regarding a process, policy or feature can free up crucial time for your sales team, and ultimately result in better informed customers prepared to buy even before contacting you. Any concept, package or feature your sales team finds themselves repeatedly having to explain or clarify to customers might make a good subject for a video. You will waste less time getting prospects up to speed and more time communicating benefits and outcomes. A carefully chosen set of FAQ videos on your website will result in more contact with pre-qualified customers who are ready to buy.
- A series of short videos that answer common questions about your product or services.
- An explainer video on your pricing page that details your pricing packages or buying process to website visitors.
- Create a video that helps pre-qualifies prospects by clearly explaining prerequisites and requirements.
Empower Your Customers: Support Videos
Many of us can’t bother to read the instructions… but we would be more than happy to watch the video. It’s the perfect medium for communicating a complex process in a simple way. Walkthroughs, tutorials, and how-to videos aren’t just about making customers feel good about their purchasing decision.
Helping customers help themselves will likely reduce customer support time, keeping your support team focused on real issues and less on dealing with trivial or routine explanations. Set-up, assembly, installation, and maintenance videos can help reduce unnecessary product returns and negative reviews resulting from customer confusion or frustration. Showing customers how to maintain, protect or use products properly can reduce malfunctions and warranty claims down the road. As an added marketing bonus, customer support videos can offer unique opportunities to up-sell existing customers with add-ons, upgrades or complementary products and services.
- How-to videos for your customers explaining how to properly set-up or use products.
- Screencast tutorials explaining how to use your software or a specific feature within.
- Videos explaining how to perform maintenance or simple repairs to your product.
- Videos that explain add-ons, complementary products or upgrades your customers can take advantage of.
Build a Better Team: Recruiting & Culture Videos
HR professionals know that attracting the best people is more than posting a salaried job description to a job board. Today’s work force is motivated by much more than money. They want purpose. They value things like work/life balance, autonomy, skill-sharpening, transparency and organizational culture. A culture-focused recruiting video helps you attract the kind of people that believe in your mission and fit in with your culture. You can hyper-target with videos for specific departments, geographic regions or job type. Videos can help foster a culture by highlighting and sharing stories from individual employees, managers, or teams.
- A video that highlights your corporate culture and work environment.
- A series of testimonial videos that feature individual team members sharing why they love working for the organization.
- Short attention grabbing recruiting video to target candidates on job boards, Linkedin, or other social media sites.
Oil the Machine: Training & Development Videos
Scalable companies rely on clearly defined processes. The challenge lies in relaying these processes to new and existing employees in a way they will retain the information. Most of us remember the corny orientation and safety videos of yesteryear. Whether you loved or hated them, they probably helped you retain the information better than an operations manual. Traditionally, organizations use written manuals, one-on-one teaching, group training, live webinars, or even expensive corporate retreats to facilitate employee development.
An on-demand training video series will help workers learn both high-level concepts and low-level procedures efficiently, complete with visual and voice, all on their own time. You can scale training further by integrating videos into a private online learning management system (LMS) complete with user accounts, progress tracking, quizzes, and course completion certificates. Whatever you produce, be sure to keep each video relatively short (1-3 minutes) by breaking concepts into multiple chapters.
- A sales training video that helps your sales professionals understand and respond to common objections properly.
- A video explaining a specific workflow or process to be followed by all employees in that position
- A video highlighting best safety practices to be followed when making a product or performing a service.
- An training video library organized into private web platform or LMS.
