People are overwhelmed with content. Blogs, emails, ads, and infographics — a variety of content is competing for our attention. But the human brain has limited capacity and struggles to wade through this content overload in a meaningful way.
An average American spends over 7 hours a day consuming digital content. Meanwhile, overall attention spans continue to drop. Businesses like yours need to connect with their target audience in creative ways, without adding to the sensory overload. But how?
There isn’t a magic bullet, but there is video. It cuts through the noise better than any other medium. Yet, many businesses still rely on traditional mediums, whether it’s to promote products, communicate internally, or train employees.
The widespread misconception among business teams is that video is expensive and complicated. The good news? It’s not. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be — if you know what you’re doing.
Now is the best time to invest in a video-first culture and reap the benefits. Here's your 6-step guide on how to get started.
At a glance:
- Create Your Video-First Strategy
- Get Buy-In from the Team
- Decide What Should Be a Video
- Choose the Right Tools
- Enable Your Teams to Go Video-First
- Measure and Adapt Your Video-First Strategy
Why Video-First is the Way to Go
There is compelling evidence to prove why businesses need to prioritize video communication.
Sabba Keynejad, CEO at VEED, says, “We’re seeing a change in how people communicate at work. It’s a mindset shift from, ‘oh, we should do a video,’ to, ‘of course we’ll do a video. What else would we do?”
The numbers tell a similar tale:
- 96% of video marketers say that video drove higher user understanding of their product or service and 95% saw an increase in brand awareness.
- A majority of the current workforce — millennials and GenZ — are huge video consumers.
- 80% of employees prefer video over other communication methods.
- Generative AI, the force behind video tools like VEED, is not just here to stay — it’s growing exponentially at 46% per year.
Convinced? Here’s how to get started:
[#TOC1]1. Be Clear on the Who, Why, What, and How with a Strategy[#TOC1]
It's essential to outline a solid strategy to steer your workplace towards a more video-centric culture.
A video-first strategy is a blueprint to help you follow each step with careful consideration and stay on track.
Since the goal is to drive a company-wide shift, you need to treat this as a typical organizational change. Like any organizational change, there will be some resistance towards embracing video.
Without a clear strategy, the resistance and lack of direction will stop this shift from ever happening.
Before you begin, ask yourself a few questions to set the foundation of your strategy. Here’s a small checklist to help you get started:
✔️ Which of your internal teams could benefit from investing in video?
✔️ Who are you making videos for? (i.e. your employees, customers, partners, etc.)
✔️ Where are they getting stuck and why?
✔️ How can videos help them get unstuck?
✔️ How could it help your business?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can start creating your video-first strategy. Here’s how you should approach it:
- Identify Relevant Teams: based on the goals, determine which teams would benefit the most with video. Run internal surveys to assess interest, use cases, and pain points. For instance, how could the L&D team benefit from shifting the focus on video lessons? What potential challenges might they face?
- Pinpoint the Goal(s): the goals of your video-first strategy will also inform the ‘why’ behind your video-first mindset. Depending on your audience and the problems they’re looking to solve, outline how video will help you meet them where they’re at. Do you need to increase productivity by improving internal communication? Are you aiming for higher conversions through social ads? Or is your objective to boost sales with outreach initiatives? Whatever the goal, outline why and how video will help you achieve it.
- Identify the Types and Formats of Video: think about the types and formats you will focus on, whether it’ll be screen recordings, talking head videos, or something else. For example, if your goal is to improve sales outreach, talking head videos serve as a great replacement for a blog post or a text-based email campaign.
- Set Aside a Budget: assess the resources at your disposal and determine how much you would be willing to put aside for the types of videos you want to create. Keep in mind that most day-to-day videos don’t have to cost anything. For reference, an average video costs between $0 and $500.
- Choose the Distribution Platforms: the best distribution platform is one where your audience is most likely to watch, engage, and take the desired actions. For an L&D team, your company’s learning management system would be a suitable platform. Similarly, the marketing team should identify the best platforms to share promotional videos. You can also host your videos on VEED and simply share them with a link — ideal for sales teams and day-to-day communications.
This overarching video-first strategy will then act as the foundation for the individual video strategies that the relevant teams in your company will create.
For instance, it can serve as a seeder for your company’s video marketing and video training strategies.
[#TOC2]2. Get Buy-In from the Team[#TOC2]
To truly drive impact, a video-first approach requires a cultural shift, which entails getting buy-in from your entire team and organization.
Managing cultural change doesn't have to be hard or complicated. Start by sharing your strategy and the “why” behind going video-first with your entire team. Encourage participation, communicate and demonstrate the change, and be receptive to feedback.
Keep in mind that this isn’t as simple as sending out a memo. Instead, you have to be the memo. The best way to drive home the point is to lead by example.
For example, managers can record video messages for internal communications and gauge the reactions from team members.
Encourage receiving feedback or comments through video, giving direct reports a chance to try it out in a low-stakes environment. Start slow and keep your expectations realistic.
Most importantly, have an open conversation about the vision, the strategy, and success stories from other businesses. Acknowledge that there will be learnings along the way so they’re not afraid to experiment and make mistakes. This gives team members an opportunity to ask questions, share ideas, and feel ready for the mission.
Consider the technical requirements. Involve IT in the process to assess video editing needs based on internal feedback, and look for reliable software that can be used across the organization.
Once this culture of prioritizing video in your company’s day-to-day starts becoming widespread, you’ll start noticing it within teams as well. For example, video training instead of slide decks and Notion docs. Or video explainers instead of text emails for your outreach efforts.
[#TOC3]3. Decide What Should Be a Video[#TOC3]
You can make video work better by looking at data to see where and when it fits well.
Dig deeper into how your employees and ICPs are consuming and engaging with content.
This analysis will point you in the right direction as to which output should be video. In short, embrace, test and learn. If it turns out a project isn’t well-suited for a video format, you don’t lose anything by having tried.
Largely though, you’ll be surprised at how video breathes new life into much of your work, like swapping long emails for an engaging talking head update.
Here are a few real-world examples from companies making use of videos:
🔎 Will Yang, head of growth and marketing at Instrumentl, says, “We use video for product demos. Instead of just describing the features of our platform, we show them directly to our customers, allowing them to better understand the value proposition. We use screen sharing and live demos during these sessions to walk customers through the platform, highlight its key features, and answer their questions in real time.”
🦾 Yvonne Gettins, training content designer at Whirlpool Canada, says, "Video is the best way for us to demo and show our products to the retail sales associates. We literally have thousands of different products and thousands of sales associates that we need to train. The best thing for us to do is to take a video of a product and put that into a smart course, which the sales associates can then watch to educate themselves."
🚀 Learn how the Whirlpool team scaled their training content with video.
[#TOC4]4. Choose the Right Tools[#TOC4]
The right tools will help empower your video-first strategy.
Not surprisingly, the most important tool in this context is an easy-to-use video editor.
Once seen as a complex skill for the tech-savvy, video editing is now accessible to all. This is thanks to the launch of AI-powered editors that enable anyone to make impactful videos.
VEED’s suite of tools, for example, helps your teams create screen recordings, use diverse AI avatars, add subtitles, translate your content, and a lot more — all on one, highly intuitive platform. What makes VEED especially suitable for teams is its templates and collaboration features that allow your teams to synergize and work together smoothly on video projects.
Depending on your goals and team setup, you might want to include other collaborative tools in the process as well. For instance, storyboarding and brainstorming tools like Miro and Figma can break down silos and help teams convey their ideas.
If you are planning to create large amounts of content, you need a database to store everything in a central spot.
VEED's workspace helps store your content and make it accessible to team members, but you can also use Google Drive.
For video processes that involve several people, lean on project management tools like Trello or Asana to track progress and maintain visibility.
[#TOC5]5. Enable Your Teams to Go Video-First[#TOC5]
Setting the strategy and getting buy-in is just half the battle. To truly make that cultural shift happen, you have to set everyone up for success.
In other words, ensure all the teams have access to the right tools and resources they need to make videos themselves.
Besides providing them with access to the right tools, here are some key things to keep in mind:
- Provide a Fully-Stocked Brand Kit: ensure everyone has access to all the relevant brand assets, including logo variations, fonts, themes, etc. That way, the videos turn out on-brand and consistent each time, regardless of who makes them.
- Empower with Templates: set up ready-to-use video templates and share them with your busy or less creative colleagues, so they can also create high quality videos with ease.
- Set Up a Video Creation Workflow: set up a formalized process for more high-effort videos, such as social content, product overviews, training material, and ads. Determine the best course of action that should be taken when approaching a new project, going over steps like brainstorming, planning, shooting/creation, editing, and feedback.
- Facilitate Review and Feedback: identify key roles in the feedback process. Who will be responsible for what? Does the project require the input from a subject matter expert? Where and how can you invite team members to share their feedback? A video collaboration tool, like VEED, can come in handy here.
[#TOC6]6. Measure and Adapt Your Video-First Strategy[#TOC6]
Your video-first strategy is as good as the key performance indicators (KPIs) you set to measure the impact.
Keep these metrics front and center as you roll out your strategy and evaluate how well it met the goal you first outlined:
- View Count: simply put, this tells you how many people viewed your video. However, make sure you evaluate this metric in the broader context of view duration and engagement, like reactions and number of comments.
- Play Rate: this metric is important because it tells you that a viewer took an action by clicking on the play button to watch your video. It conveys intent, and tells you a lot about things like the relevance of the platforms where you’re sharing them, timing, and quality of thumbnails.
- Clicks and Clickthrough Rate: if your video has a call-to-action button, you want to measure how many people clicked it to land on the page you directed them to, whether it’s a product page, a service, or a quiz following a training.
- Productivity: did your L&D team ship out training faster? Did video-first free up time for Customer Success who previously spent hours sending out email updates? Tricky metrics, such as productivity, can be measured in a number of ways, depending on your goals (for L&D, one way could be to measure the number of video lessons created per quarter). For the more qualitative metrics, we recommend sending out surveys to gauging performance.
Remember that the same metrics are named differently across platforms, so if you’re comparing, make sure you bucket them right. Don’t forget to share the numbers with your team and get their feedback on how video is working out for them.
Ultimately, video is not a one-and-done episode but an ongoing effort. To truly become a video-first company, and reap all the benefits that come with it, you need to consistently measure, adapt, and learn.
That is how you grow, and consistently keep reaping all the benefits of creating a video-first culture.
