Company stories, also known as culture videos, are a powerful tool to bring into your marketing tool belt.

Their primary purpose is to show the audience your company’s soul. Showcasing “behind the scenes” content and providing a glimpse into the efforts of the people who work to make your products or services possible.

Culture videos are meant to humanize your brand by putting the spotlight on the values, mission, and personality of your brand. This makes them ideal for connecting with your audience on an emotional level!

As any skilled video production team will tell you, culture videos can be a fantastic asset to generate brand awareness and early-stage conversions… if you do them right!

In this piece, we are going to talk about how to do just that. Looking into several key aspects that you'll need to account for if you want a company culture video that delivers on your expectations.

Let’s get started!

A Focus on Your Company’s Values, Mission, and Vision

If you haven't already, you should start by defining your company's values, mission, and vision, as that will serve as the foundations for your piece. This may sound basic, but if you don’t understand them well yourself, you won’t be able to use them properly for your video.

In a nutshell, the “mission” refers to the purpose of your company, why it was created. The vision refers to something similar but it’s not the same. It is tied to the future projection of your company, where you want to go, and the objectives you want to accomplish.

Lastly, core values are the guidelines, priorities, and principles that conduct your company’s processes and decisions.

No two companies have the exact same set of these concepts and form a unique personality that you can use as the baseline to your fledgling culture video.

Don’t Try to Cover All of It!

Elements like your company’s vision and core values are but guidelines though! And if you try to speak about all of it in a single video, you’ll probably end up with a confusing, long, and ineffective piece in your hands!

The last thing you want is to put together a boring video. Or one that feels “preachy” to the viewers.

Take these elements more like a recipe to define your brand’s (and video’s) tone. Do you want to go for a more “professional” feel? Maybe you are shooting for a more “casual friendly” approach.

Whichever it is, do mind that runtimes will be a concern (more on this later), so try not to do too much with a single vid!

Goodbye Actors! Hello, Real People!

There is no better strategy to humanize your brand than by using real employees in your company videos. Unless you can afford Julia Roberts or Robert de Niro, actors can hardly convey the spontaneity and earnestness a true employee has when talking about your company.

Culture videos are a great place to let your employees do the talking and showcase their honest testimonies about whatever topic you are basing your video around. If you are doing a behind-the-scenes video, let them talk about what they do. If you are showcasing an event, let them tell the story behind it or how they contributed to it! There’s no shortage of stories they can tell if you find the right approach.

Best of all, that genuine sense of honesty will come through and help your video shine! Your employees are, after all, the heart of your business. What better voice to bring the better side of your brand to your customers than theirs?

Tell. A. Story.

A culture video is far from being a lot of clips edited together without rhyme or reason! They actually follow a narrative structure fairly similar to the ones used in explainer videos, where you use three-act stories to drive your message home.

Think about breaking down your video into three conceptual acts.

The first act should be all about grabbing your viewer’s attention. Setting up the stage for the tale you are going to tell them: Give them the premise of your business or invite them to listen!

Then move on to the core of your message: This is the meat of your video, the event showcase, or the story behind your brand.

Close with an act that invites them into taking action: Maybe that's finding out more about how your brand can help them, or support the same cause you supported in the event you are showcasing!

Not only is this “three-act" formula something we've grown accustomed to already; it's something that we humans respond to and can identify with!

Keep it Short and Casual

Much like any other marketing piece, your company culture videos need to be short to remain effective. Attention spans being what they are nowadays, you have about two minutes to make your point and convey your message with your culture video.

That’s why focus is so important. It would be awesome to have a way to ensure a viewer’s mind will stick with your content longer than that. But the fact is that most won’t! So, you have to make every word in your script (about 270 for a 2-min video) add something to the piece.

It Doesn’t Work If Nobody Sees It!

Once you finish the production process, you’ll need to decide where you will place your brand-new company culture video to get the most out of it. Please avoid burying it only on your website, hoping some interested clients can have a look at it.

Instead, you have to get the most out of your video to make it worth all the effort! You can place it on video-friendly social media platforms, like YouTube or Facebook, or include the company culture video in your next newsletter for the customers on your mailing list.

The key is to integrate it into your marketing strategy, making it work as a tool for attracting new customers or as a way to increase the audience’s engagement.

Wrapping up

Company culture videos are one of the best ways to display the human side of your brand, showing its unique personality and characteristics, along with the core values that identify your brand.

Moreover, when done right, they help you form a tighter bond with the customers. But as you just saw, there are plenty of important aspects that come into play to do it “right.”

From having a clear sense of your company identity to guiding your content, to minding the length and distribution, company culture videos are hardly a "set it and forget it" type of deal.

But why do companies keep making them, then? Because they work! Culture videos address a need for today's audiences to know who they are in business with. And do so in such a way that takes that relationship one step further.

So, even though they take a lot, your effort will be more than worth it!