Corporate Video Production: The Ultimate Guide

With this article, we are taking a 360 degree look at corporate video marketing, starting from why it’s so important to infuse it into your marketing strategy, to the types of videos you can equip.

After reading this guide, you will have the necessary knowledge of when and what kind of format of corporate video production you might use, and what kind of cost you would be looking at for these videos.

Why is Corporate Video Production Important for Businesses?

If you were browsing the internet for a while – then you know for sure: too many companies are usually putting together a set of stock pictures, benefit-praising and text-heavy marketing materials; paired with plenty of brochures with polished fonts, and then the PowerPoints – the dread of our existence.

All of this is joined into a mish mash of marketing messaging, which engages nobody.

We know, we know – everybody is doing that nowadays, and it’s become the norm. But what do you do now, to actually stand out in a sea of bland marketing, and create a piece of corporate content that actually stands out?

We are here to tell you exactly that – here’s where corporate video production flies in to save the day. Take your pages and stacks of nonsense PowerPoints, brochures, and bland copy – and compare it with a solid corporate video production. In times where attention is the actual currency (which has an incredibly high rate of inflation) corporate videos can grab attention, and deliver even the B2B corporate messaging in a way that’s engaging, powerful – and trumps any other marketing material with a huge advantage..

So what is corporate video production? It’s communicating with your B2B audience, with video content, using a set of different formats.

And there’s a variety of those – from simple, brand awareness social media videos, to even high end, stunning productions that support tough negotiations and investor pitches.

One thing is clear: the use of videos in corporate communication is non-negotiable (pun intended).

So, let’s inspect the ins and outs of corporate promotional video production.

How Much Does Corporate Video Production Cost?

Let’s start with the most important point – the marketing budget, and let’s address the elephant in the room, head on.

When it comes to animated corporate video production costs, there can be all sorts of answers floating around the Internet, but a short answer is: somewhere between a single cup of Starbucks coffee (if you subscribe to online template video creators) up to even $300,000 thousands USD (more in some cases).

But, here’s a more realistic and concise estimate: for an Explainer video, or Brand Video based on animation and stock footage – anywhere from $4,000 to $8,000 per video. These costs usually cover the full production, starting from the concept, and up to final revisions and voice over.

Of course, if you are looking for a live action production, given the need to hire actors, costly cameras, and multiple filming days – the costs can skyrocket to easily reach $20,000, or even more.

As mentioned, every production is unique – but these ballparks should give you a fair idea into how the pricing structure would work. Video is a house that’s built of multiple bricks: from scriptwriting and concept creation, designing and storyboard, and of course, making everything happen during the animation stage and editing.

At Zelios, we know that corporate video production for business is an important investment, and there are a lot of stakeholders involved in its creation – so we always like to have at least a few calls before the start of the project, to better understand the scope, align on the deliverables and message.

Oh, and don’t forget to upgrade to unlimited revisions, in case the C-level would like to chime in with a ton of revisions (because they usually do).

What Type of Video is an Example of a Corporate Video?

But, given that there’s a price range, and every video is unique in terms of its scope, does that mean that there are different types of videos? What exactly counts as a corporate video? Here’s a quick list of the video types:

Training videos

We’d say that nobody likes to read, but that would mean we would be punching ourselves in the nose (given that we’ve written a whole article for people to read).

But that’s the reason why training videos are so popular; people vary in the way they process information, so if you combine all of it into voice, visuals, text – mixed into an engaging video – they are more likely to retain the information.

These are used for both the internal onboarding of new employees, updates in the polices and other important changes in the company life. Just imagine hours it would take to inform all of the 1,500 employees during meetings – instead, now you can shoot the video for them to view and process.

Depending on the topic, this format can average anywhere from 1 minute, or even 10 minutes if more complex topics are portrayed (like Cybersecurity).

This video from ReachOut Australia brings a unique narrative and style of the characters, which makes sure you are fully drawn to view the experience.

Product demos

Instead of hoping that a static landing page will do the heavy lifting for the new product – you can take a proactive approach, and create an engaging Product demo.

Even if you simplify most of the visuals and dashboards – it’s much easier for the viewers to understand the workflow, which significantly improves the adoption of the product.

With their primary use case being educational, these are usually some of the longer videos in our list, ranging from 90 seconds and up to 3 minutes at times.

With the release of DropBox Capture, the video companion is really simple, and really effective – which can help with onboarding and increase the amount of people trying it out.

Brand story videos

Wanting to set the stage for the company agenda? Celebrating a big company milestone? Hit an important client number?

Tell a story with video, centered around emotion, to build a deeper connection with the viewers.

Brand story videos have an average length of 30 to 60 seconds, depending on the use case, and mostly used for intrigue and to build the hype.

Once again, we are looking at Slack to see what the best of the best are doing; zero real product screens, stock footage – just a full focus on the story, and why Slack’s solution is the problem solver for messy communication.

Corporate advertising videos

These are your classic, battle tested video formats we love to hate and hate to love: ads run across YouTube and on TV screens, to deliver your marketing message to the masses.

Similarly to Corporate Explainer Videos, they hover around 1 to 2 minutes in their durations, to give enough room to identify the problem, and show the solution.

Look at what Google did with the release of Gemini – this video ended up being such a versatile tool, that it could be used across ads, and also social media alike. That’s another important point with the video – quality should be pristine!

Social media teasers

Short, sweet, and effective!

These are short pieces of content (often cutdowns from long form content), that are used for brand awareness, and also building anticipation for features.

In their ideal form, they are 15-20 seconds long: just enough to intrigue, but not too long to give away too much information.

Looking at Slack again – which have these little snippets at the forefront of their video marketing, garnering millions of views, both on YouTube and across social media.

This type of corporate video production for social media is widely used by more modern and techy brands, but is often overlooked by brands that have a more reserved brand identity.

Corporate Explainer Videos

Leaving best for the last! These videos come in different shapes and forms, but usually these are 60-90 second videos looking to encapsulate the core offering and mission statement of the company, while calling out the problems that the viewers would resonate with.

Corporate explainer videos are extremely effective in a number of environments, from elevator pitches down to landing page use case.

This example from Upsend can be a great indicator of just why these videos are so effective: great, branded illustrations and engaging narrative, made that much better with the use of fluid animation.

So now, we have covered the most popular corporate video formats – they cover everything, starting from the internal training videos, to get everybody up to speed on company agenda, and up to the client facing content, which varies from being education demo’s, up to short brand awareness teasers.

Corporate Video Production Process: Key Steps

So, how do you go about creating a really effective piece of corporate video marketing?

The short answer is: you don’t. It’s always better to hire a team or an agency who knows what they are doing, and have plenty of successful cases.

You would benefit from both their expertise in the formats, and from the premium look and feel of the final product, once the videos are produced.

It’s better to not attempt doing the video on your own, as it’s a lengthy process, consisting of at least a few crucial stages, which can’t be overlooked if you need a niche defining video.

1. Planning And Onboarding: The enthusiasm is always high when the project is just getting started – as everybody is pumped to get the ball rolling and create a great video.
   But that can be the very first mistake; it’s important for the video production team to do the necessary research, and look around for inspiration for the video. A lot of unnecessary reworks can be avoided, if this stage is not skipped and given the proper attention that it deserves.
2. Scriptwriting: What’s to say about scripting? Just throw a few lines of marketing copy, and you are good to go, right?
   
   Well, not exactly – a polished and finalized script is a fully finalized concept, that consists of the voice over part, visual description for action in each scene, and preferably – some visual inspiration to make it easier for both sides to align on the architecture of each scene.
   
   Oh, and it also has to fit in the required duration – which is always a tall task, given that there’s a lot to be said and delivered, usually within 1-2 minutes of runtime.
3. Production: Depending on whether you are creating the live action or animated corporate video, the production stage will either consist of filming days where the crew does the on set filming, or animation video production process within the professional software (usually Adobe After Effects).
4. Editing: Both the animated and live action production ends up in the editing, or finalizing stage where all of the finetuning is made, and the final cut becomes set in stone. 
5. Delivery: And with our last step, the main assets will be delivered, and it will be time to strategize around the distribution strategy: do you need resizes? Gifs, or cuts from the main video? A shorter version, adapted for social media? All of this will be finalized before the project is concluded.

The Dos and Don’ts of Corporate Video Production

Do:

• Your audience comes first. As previously mentioned, it’s always easy to get lost in the sauce and drone about your features, benefits, achievements, numbers, quantity of decks produced, millions of trillions of quintuples earned, and so on and so forth – but you have to keep in mind, that real people are watching, and their attention wanders off really easily. Also, pay close attention to your target audience: a flashy, fast paced animation can be appreciated for a tech startup, but can be a real miss with older audiences, within corporate environments.
• Make sure you are not dropping the ball with quality. People judge you for your content – if the quality is off, they will associate the sloppiness and low quality of it with your brand – so the stakes are too high to rely on low cost solutions and freelance vendors that usually overpromise and underdeliver.
• Try new things, and hit ‘em from EVERY direction. Make sure that you focus on reach, and look beyond just one video; it’s much better to plan ahead for the distribution strategy of your content, as that helps you create additional resizes (like 9:16 for phone orientation), or creating shorter form cutdowns (use longer form content on LinkedIn, and shorter form content cutdowns on Instagram).

Don’t:

• Spam the jargon and terminology – Simple Is Right. As mentioned above, don’t just spam things that are important to your agenda and try pushing it out to your audience – the new “AI based cryptography LLM” might sound good to your engineering team, but for people to digest it – you can say that you will receive a faster project generation, or additional computing power.
  
  Remember: it’s always benefits over features.
• Create the video without strategy and purpose. This is another thing why it’s important to plan before jumping into the production right away. Creating a compelling brief, that looks at your goals and why you are looking to create the video, will help the video team understand your project better, while giving room for valuable suggestions from the video team, based on their previous clients and experience.
• Commit the sin, and skip distribution planning. A great video that no one sees is a wasted effort.
  If you are going to create one, pretty video that just sits in one portion of your marketing funnel – you are setting it up to fail. The power of video reach comes when you are able to multiply the reach of content, in a form of snappy cutdowns, illustrations from that video, used across social media, and snippets used across your social pages.

How Do You Measure the Success of Your Corporate Video Production?

Of course, there are a few ways how you can see if the video performs:

• Views and shares. See if your video is being shared between the target audience, and if it’s gaining traction across social media.
• Click-through rates and conversions show direct engagement. Is your video generating clicks? Are people actually watching? These together with conversions show if the direct engagement is high, or if the video is severely underperforming.
• Audience retention. It’s always a good thing if people engage with your content in a form of comments, discussions, reposts etc. If you see that audience is sticking around, you know that the video was a real hit.
• ROI. Can be measured if you are implementing paid ads, using the video content produced.

But beyond that, there is also intangible feedback, which is still really important for: if it’s training videos, do employees enjoy watching it, and retain information better? Or, maybe your corporate advertising video production was so good, it just made a potential lead book a call and talk with your salespeople?

The strength of the video and its impact comes in a number of forms, both in numbers that can be easily seen and tracked, but also in the narratives and clout that are brought about by these videos.

Closing Thoughts

So, that’s about it for this guide! As you can see – traditional spray and pray solutions like walls of text in brochures, PDFs and other assets are no longer the option, given the fierce competition and rise in quality of marketing. 

This makes sure that creative corporate video production has ensured its ongoing presence as a part of corporate marketing strategy, covering needs like showing off your brand achievements, explaining the newest products in your product line, or even engaging your social media presence – with the right video type, you are sure to stand out.

If you are looking for video production for corporate needs – book a call and let’s kick things off!