7 Innovative Ways to Use Video for Internal Communications

Cisco’s onboarding video gives serious vibes and is successful at explaining new hires what Cisco is.

Additionally, with teams in different locations and time zones- for example, Wipster is in Wellington, New Zealand and Portland - it can be hard to get everyone together for an announcement.

A video that gives the latest company news in a concise, simple, and layman-friendly manner is a great way to keep everyone engaged and up-to-date.

Here’s a fun example by Wipster.

3. Training

Training can be costly, difficult, and hard to scale.

There are all kinds of trainings; from sales training for your front-line employees and field training, to compliance and other boring trainings. Every training regardless of how complex or simple it is, needs to be communicated in an engaging and easy-to-understand way. This is where videos come in.

A short, snappy and informative video works great to reinforce the learning process and get your employees attention. Even a simple screen share video that explains the process really well works better than a text-based manual or oral instructions.

Companies are understanding the need of providing effective training to their employees and more and more of them are investing in video. Training magazine's 2016-2017 study showed the average annual training budget for companies under 1,000 employees was $290,000. For companies between 1,000 and 9,999 employees, that budget grew to $3.7 million. And for companies with 10,000+ employees, the budget balloons to $13 million.

4. Shareholder update

A great way to build rapport with your shareholders and build a positive brand name for your company in the industry is to use videos to send shareholder updates.

Instead of frequently sending long emails highlighting trading updates, KPIs and other important updates, create short videos and send them to the shareholders and everyone else involved.

Learn from Xero’s shareholder update video.

Videos will make the entire process efficient, understanding the update a lot easier, and inspire trust within shareholders and all concerned parties. You can also add a transcript of the video for better understanding, along with a section that states key highlights.

Gooroo creates interesting monthly shareholder update videos.

5. Staff spotlight

Employee of the month. New hires. Employees with unique job positions. Employees who’ve gone above and beyond in helping your company. Employees who’ve been with you for a certain amount of time.

Show employees that you care about them by sharing their experience, their stories with the world. Even within the company, you can share these videos to boost morale and encourage all employees to give their best. Outside of your company, sharing these videos can show your brand’s human side to consumers and audience.

An increasing amount of brands and companies have jumped on this bandwagon and are using video to bring their employees in the front. This not only evokes emotions in their audience, but also shows potential employees that your workplace is the absolute best to work for. You can also add these videos to your website under the ‘Meet our team’ page, or upload them on social platforms from time to time.

Get inspired from Deloitte.

6. Conference/event highlight

Conferences and events can be a great opportunity for brands to create stunning video content and use it over and over again. By capturing conference and event highlights, you’re not only creating stellar marketing content, but also becoming a video-first brand and leveraging the latest content trend to get an edge over competitors.

Whether your company organized the event, or you took part in a conference organised by some other brand, creating a video or a vlog of it is proof that you’re an industry expert (or in the process of becoming one).

You no longer have to send event details and highlights over email and a few pictures. You can record highlights and send it to your employees along with your consumers so that everyone can experience it. More and more brands (in a variety of industries and niches) are now uploading their events highlights on social media to share it with their audience and brand themselves as an authority in their niche.

Wipster’s one of them.

Bonus: Use video to teach the team to make video

By 2020, online videos will make up more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic (85% in the US). (Cisco)

Internal video teams are being inundated with requests for video, forcing them to think outside the box and leverage non-video specialists (people who run away from making videos) in their organization to help them scale video. They need all the hands they can get. In-house video teams are turning into video advisers for the rest of the organization and internal video opportunities represent a perfect opportunity to dip their workmates toes in creating video.

One way to train at scale is to provide video tutorials of how to shoot video, find suitable locations and record audio. Once you’ve created simple video-production training videos, ask employees to participate in creating internal videos. Show them the ropes and get them to participate.

We’re all a little camera shy, and that’s alright. We’re all a little video-technically challenged, and that’s okay, too. The only forward is to start creating these short videos for the organization that outsiders won’t see. Start small. Use in-house videographers expertise to improve yourself. And then once you’ve got the hang of these video, you can start creating bigger videos for your consumers.