Big corporations in the UK will have a corporate communications strategy. These plans are typically put together once a year, but constantly refined & added to – as business objectives evolve. If you want to incorporate video content into your communications strategy, it’s best to think about the possibilities of video during the initial planning phase. Too many brands are thinking of video as an afterthought and slotting it into their comms plan at a later date, when in reality it makes sense to map video to the messages which best suit that format.
What Should Go Into Your Communications Plan
Traditional businesses can modernise their communications strategy with video, but first it’s vital to understand what goes into a communications plan & the process. Below are the core areas your plan should be based on:
– The key messages you want to communicate & their objectives
– The exact timeline for conveying new business communications
– Stakeholder analysis of the people you will talk to & how best to reach them
– The internal processes that will be followed when implementing the plan
– Bespoke tactics for each company message, which outlines the platforms you will use to communicate, what content needs to be created & the tone of voice
That final point is the critical one when it comes to including video in your communications plan. Once you have got all your corporate messages mapped out for the year, you need to be deciding how you will deliver those messages and that’s where video comes in. Clearly not all the messages will be perfect for video, but by choosing the messages which greatly benefit from visual storytelling, simplifying the content or a more engaging format– you are well on the way to convincing more people with your brand propositioning.
Which Corporate Messages Suit Video
This will vary based on the company, but if you want to include video in your communications plan then there are several messages which are a good fit:
Using Video For Internal Communications – this one may be obvious, but staff want to feel engaged when communicating with their employer. Video is a great way to get the workforce more excited about the brand & what is in the pipeline. It’s also a much more accessible way to consume content, removing the need to physically read time-consuming PDFs & reports.
Company Updates To Existing Clients – when communicating with their whole client base, most businesses will revert to tried & tested email tactics. Email is a great way to reach specific individuals with company updates on service offerings & accounts – yet busy clients can easily ignore what is being sent if it’s not concise & to the point. Embedding video into your email content is now extremely easy to do & can modernise your corporate communications by improving the retention rate & accessibility of your content.
Condensing Quarterly & Yearly Financial Figures – a lot of big firms have to report their financial results to the market & investors. This often results in a combination of PDFs, Financial Reports, Press Releases & Charts – all of which contain lots of details. Stakeholders such as investors are often looking for a brief overall summary to condense all of these findings – a professional video from the figurehead of the company can be a great way to achieve this.
Important Company Updates – every now and again there are mission-critical messages which need to be heard by the masses. These could be related to technical problems with an app/service, business ownership changes or updated ways you will be interacting with customers in the future. The beauty of using a corporate video for these kinds of messages, is that once the video has been created it can be published in a wider variety of places – think your company homepage, social profiles or even on external websites.
We hope this blog got you thinking of how you can incorporate video content into your communications strategy, and if this is something you haven’t tried before then we would urge you to give it a go. Including video in your communications plan is actually relatively easy to do – it’s all about mapping video to the messages which make the most sense!