Corporate Videos: How to Find Music for Videos That Won’t Suck
Soundstripe Team
Sep 10, 2018
- Bland. Cheesy. Lifeless. Corporate videos don’t exactly have a great reputation.
No doubt you’ve had to suffer through dry explainer videos or corny training videos yourself.
As an advertiser or digital marketer, you now have the power to break the cycle and save others from terrible corporate videos.
When a client comes to you requesting a corporate video production, it’s time to put on your awesome-pants and create a fabulous corporate video. Yes, it can be done!
There are so many ways to improve corporate videos, including finding high quality music for those videos. Let’s look at why so many corporate videos suck and what you can do to improve the reputation of this much-maligned video category.
Why Companies Make Corporate Videos
Corporate videos are often treated like the red-headed step-child of the digital marketing and advertising worlds. That’s a shame, because they can be incredible assets when crafted with skill and care.
Too often, clients are willing to pour money, attention, and affection into sleek marketing campaigns for their latest and greatest products, but when it comes to corporate videos, the money and attention dry up in equal parts.
This perspective can be both dangerous and damaging. It’s easy to see why marketing is an important investment, but communicating effectively to internal stakeholders is also valuable.
Some of the most common types of corporate videos are:
- Training videos – These videos may provide on-boarding to new employees, ongoing training to current employees, or training on new products, systems, or initiatives.
- Brand videos – Brand videos introduce businesses to customers and stakeholders by telling the company’s story, highlighting its mission, and showcasing products and services. This video is likely to be the first introduction many potential customers receive to the company.
- Initiative Videos – When a company launches a big new initiative, these types of videos can help announce it to investors, employees, customers, and other stakeholders in a compelling and exciting way.
- Internal Communications – Internal communication videos may present yearly earnings to investors, showcase the results of a restricting to board members, or announce a new policy to employees.
- Corporate Social Responsibility – More and more companies are investing in corporate social responsibility initiatives to support the mission of their brand and build greater brand loyalty among customers. One of the best ways to build visibility to these efforts is with well-designed videos, like this great example from Coca Cola showcasing its 5by20 Campaign to empower 5 million women entrepreneurs by 2020.
The Value of Corporate Videos
Corporate videos are typically not aimed at customers, but that doesn’t mean that they should be overlooked or undervalued. In fact, corporate videos are often aimed at a company’s most important audiences, their employees, their investors, and the general public.
A well-made corporate video can provide a significant return on investment.
Think about the value a great employee brings to an organization. For example, a customer service representative interfaces with customers all day long and has the power to solve problems, cross-sell, or upsell a company’s products.
Now, what would happen if a business’s newly hired customer service representatives were subjected to a poorly crafted and insincere onboarding video that bores them to tears?
Here’s another example: let’s say a company wants to roll out a huge initiative to target a completely new audience for its products. It will need to get its sales team on board, since they will do the hard work of breaking into an unfamiliar market.
If the video announcing the initiative is bland, poorly made, and/or confusing, a company will struggle to get buy-in from the sales team. They’ll keep selling to their old, familiar clients, and that company will miss out on all the potential revenue of the new market.
With all this in mind, it’s clear that marketing and advertising companies need to change the conversation about corporate videos and give them the TLC that they’ve always deserved. It may even be worth hiring a video company to help you create the content you need. At the very least, you'll need the right video software to create something of quality.
Either way, let’s look at some of the ways you can make great corporate videos that don’t suck.
Make Corporate Videos a Priority
The biggest challenge in creating a corporate video is that they are often considered to be a low priority within a company, especially compared with customer-facing marketing campaigns.
As a result, your client might not give you the ideal budget you need to make something great. They may also not be willing to invest the same amount of energy to move the project along on their end.
You can’t control your client’s perspective, but you can certainly control your own. A strong marketing or advertising agency knows that every project – including corporate videos – is an opportunity to create something great that will really impress the client.
When you make a corporate video assignment a priority, you’ll start to see obstacles as opportunities. A small budget just means that you need to get creative. If your client isn’t as involved, that may be a ticket for greater freedom on your end to test new ideas or push the envelope. Put on your scrappy artist hat and really wow your client.
Tell a Great Story
Every video should tell a story. While a customer-facing video typically tells the story of why the viewer should buy the client’s product or service, corporate videos can tell a variety of tales. In this way, corporate videos give you the opportunity to be extra creative.
For example, a branding video will explain what makes a company unique and how they express their mission through the way they operate. Even something that sounds boring – a video about how a small town in England is a growing hub for the financial services industry – can be interesting if framed with the right type of story.
When you receive an assignment to create a corporate video, your first job is to figure out what story you want to tell.
Think about the themes that engage and excite people and tell a story that stakeholders will want to watch. Spectrecom Films did an excellent job in selling the city of Birmingham in this video when their client, Lombard Risk, wanted to showcase their newly launched Technology Centre to the community.
(Note the power and exuberance of the music, which helps set the positive vibe for the video.)
Create a Video that Resonates
One of the most common complaints about corporate videos is that they are boring. Who says that has to be the case?
A company’s stakeholders are their customers, too, which means your client can’t afford to take them for granted. Will a boring recruitment video help your client nab the best and brightest candidates who will help them succeed in a highly competitive market?
No way, Jose!
As you plan your client’s video, craft a story that engages your viewers. Utilize emotions or even humor. Get edgy if your client is up for it.
Twitter is in constant competition with Amazon, Google, and an endless list of hungry startups to recruit the best workers in the world. When they want to reach prospective employees, they can’t rely on a boring, poorly made recruitment video.
Instead, they made this hilarious gem, which does a great job of parodying a stereotypical recruitment video.
Use Great Music for Your Videos
It is just us, or does the upbeat and carefully bland music in most corporate videos sound the same? In these types of videos, music and other production values seem to be an afterthought.
That’s not going to fly for your awesome corporate video.
Take the time to get your music selection right. That starts with appreciating the role of music for your video. Music sets the mood of your video and can help you forge the right emotional connection with viewers. Don’t be afraid to test lots of different genres outside of the “corporate music” category and try to find a new sound that will grab the attention of viewers.
Do you want everyone in the world to know that your law firm is hot stuff? Then banish the bland acoustics and go big, like Spectrecom did when they designed this bold brand video for CMLS Law.
Compel the Viewer to Act
Last, but not least, your corporate video needs to inspire viewers to actually do something.
That might be turning new recruits into motivated and well-trained employees or convincing a company’s sales staff that they really do want to go after the new market. It may even mean moving all the way to Seattle to work for Microsoft.
By telling a compelling story that engages readers and is supported by strong production values and great music, you can move viewers to action and provide your client with an excellent ROI. Your video can also become a long-term asset that will make your agency a superstar in the eyes of your client.
In this recruitment video, Microsoft plays up all the awesomeness of Seattle in an attempt to convince top prospects to move to the “Emerald City” and work for their company. Note the fast-paced, positive music that makes Seattle sound like a really cool place to live, work, and play.
Where to Find the Best Music for Your Videos
Are you ready to up your corporate video game for your clients? Excellent! As a successful advertising or marketing agency, you already have all the creative tools you need to storyboard an amazing corporate video. There’s just one thing missing.
Where can you find truly epic royalty free music for your corporate videos? Try Soundstripe. We offer a growing music library that includes a corporate music genre. Don’t step there. Think outside the box and search our other genres. You can also filter our music selections for mood, pace, and instrumentation. Build your own playlist, so that you can edit quickly and easily.
At Soundstripe, all of our music is royalty free, so you never have to worry about copyright issues. Our monthly and yearly subscriptions are particularly valuable for marketing and advertising agencies who need a highly volume of royalty free music at an affordable rate.
With our subscription, you can use as much music, video and SFX as you need for as many projects as you like. In fact, you may want to use our music library for all of your client work or even for your own company’s corporate videos!
With the help of Soundstripe, you can prove once and for all that corporate videos can be amazing. You’ll also totally impress your clients who might just start taking corporate videos more seriously themselves!
Check out our online music library today.
Further reading
Interested in reading more top resources and getting our best filmmaking tips and tricks? Here are a couple of our most popular articles from across the Soundstripe blog: