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Corporate video is about more than reaching out. It can help your company work better together

Anyone working in business knows that corporate videos can work wonders for your brand., but most businesses focus on TV and web advertisements. While very effective—hailed as “the most effective medium” by CNBC—these adverts barely scratch the surface of how helpful a video can be to a company.

Aside from reaching outside a business to customers, corporate video is hugely effective when used to communicate within a company. Here is why.

Video is the future

By 2019, 80% of internet traffic will come from video. This is a huge jump from the already impressive 64% in 2014. This rise in internet video shows us one thing above all else: video is popular. And its popularity is only growing.

Video is also accessible and easy to engage with. Psychology Today reports that the human brain can process video 60,000 times faster than written text. With this popularity and accessibility in mind, it is natural to want to send messages to your employees in video form.

As production company Tellyjuice says, “Video is instantly accessible to employees and integrates perfectly with their daily online experience”. Busy employees can watch an internal communications video with their morning coffee, or between replying to emails. They could even bring the video up in a different window on their screens while they work, or watch it on their phones as they commute.

Talking to employees directly or using presentations communicate may still be effective, but they are disruptive to the workflow. And emails, like all written communication, are much more of a drain on employee time and energy. We spend nearly a third of our work week reading and answering email. With the way most modern workers function, video is a far more appropriate internal communications choice, and we will only see more of it going forward.

Video helps people learn and remember

There will come times in your business career when you need to explain complicated things to employees, business partners or coworkers. This could be anything from a new health and safety measure to the company position on a current affairs news story. (Shoemakers New Balance, for example, would have had to explain their pro-Trump stance to employees.)

These don’t just have to be theoretical ideas either. At many companies, even the way a job is carried out can be difficult to wrap your head around.

To explain things like this, there is no better medium than video. We have already covered how much easier it is for your brain to process video than text, but does this increase of ease equate with a lack of engagement?

Research published in the Huffington Post says no. In fact, for many, it seems video is a better educational tool, and a better way to explain complicated concepts. Hundreds of educational professionals agreed unanimously that video has a positive impact on learning.

It is thought that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and approximately 65% of people are thought to be visual learners. This means explaining something in video format can have a far wider reaching impact than explaining it in writing.

Once viewers have learned information from a video, they are far more likely to retain it than if they had read it. One study found that participants were able to recall 60% ofinformation presented on a video vs only 10% from that same information as text.

Video saves time

Internal communications is not just a battle between video and text. There is another way. Giving presentations and talking to coworkers directly are legitimate ways to communicate internally. But for the most part, these approaches take up far more time than they need to.

Teach someone how to use a new piece of equipment and you may have to teach them again tomorrow. Send them a video that teaches them how to use said new piece of equipment, and you will never have to teach them again because they can just watch that video repeatedly if they need to.

Yes, making the original video with take up some time. But if you do it right, it will be the only time you have to give that lesson.

For things like the office security routine, tips for negotiating with clients or even how to clock in and out, recording lessons on video means you get all the benefits listed above with the added bonus of never having to repeat yourself.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Caitlyn Stevens .