Many businesses make a big mistake when they decide to produce a corporate video, and that big mistake is failing to understand exactly what it is that they want to achieve, and what would be the best method of going about it.

Corporate videos are any videos which a company or business wishes to produce that are not actively engaged in selling the company’s products or services. These days, most of them are installed on the company’s website or promoted on social media – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and so on.

Corporate videos can cover a number of different functions such as staff training, product or service explanation (but not overly promoting anything), health and safety in the workplace, plans for the company’s future, keeping shareholders up to date, and so on. Two of the most usual corporate videos are explainer videos and corporate brand videos. The first of these is designed to explain anything at all about what the company is doing or why it has decided to manufacture a certain product or provide a certain service.

The second type of corporate video production is made to promote the brand of the business and its’ mission, without actually promoting a product or service. It is designed to tell your audience what good guys you are and why it is important for your audience to continue to support you.

One of the biggest problems when planning a corporate video is – believe it or not – failing to understand exactly what it is that you want the video to achieve. There is no point in producing a video if you are in no position to measure its’ success or otherwise. Furthermore, unless you can explain to a corporate video production company what it is that you want to achieve, it makes it almost impossible for them to suggest the right type and style of video. Do you want an animated video, tour of your factory, actor reading your company’s mission statement, or what? If you don’t know exactly what it is that you want, how can they be expected to know?

This is why you really do need to sit down and make certain that you know what the video is supposed to achieve before you start to talk to a video production company. So you need to have some idea that will produce measurable results. For example, "increase turnover by 10%", "double up the number of enquiries received through our website". That will give a video production company some idea of what you want to achieve, and a good company will undertake some research in order to try to ascertain why it is that you are not already achieving those goals. When its’ people understand what it is that you want and why you haven’t got it already, they can then begin to suggest the best type of solution.

Of course, you also have to figure out your budget for a corporate video or videos. If your goal is to increase turnover by 10%, one way of doing this is to work out how many new customers you would need each year in order to do that, and then work out the lifetime value of each customer. You then multiply the first figure by the second. So if you need 1,000 new customers and they each spend £100, that’s £100,000 – but remember that that is turnover. If your profit is, say, 25%, you can then afford to invest £10,000 in a video or videos in order to achieve that goal. You will still come out well ahead of the game.

So what sort of art style is best for your video? It really depends on the purpose of the video, and your brand. You also need to take into account your budget, and above all produce a video that your audience can connect with. A company that provides good corporate video production services should be able to advise you about the best type of art style that will enable your video to achieve your ends, and should also be able to back up their suggestions with evidence of the work that they have produced for other people and show examples of the results.