Before you even sit down to think about what you want to create, you need to know your goal. That way, you can weigh the different options that might be available to you and choose the one that’s most likely to achieve your goal. If you don’t know what you want, you’re going to end up with a whole lot of nothing. To start, you should decide why you’re creating the video in the first place. Was it to update current employees about the company’s goals and future? Perhaps you want to draw in a new audience that might be interested in your products or services. Whatever your reason, make sure that you 100% know why you’re creating the video.

You may have noticed that many employee video examples online have way too much dialogue in them. While that may work in a short video with a goal of showcasing the company culture and values, you need to think about the length of the video if it’s going to be shown to your employees. Long videos of 15 to 20 minutes are exhausting to watch and don’t give your employees nearly enough time to ask questions and get to know you as a company. Instead, you want to cut down on the dialogue as much as possible and keep your video around 3-5 minutes or less. Long explanatory videos can be great for a few reasons. If you’re selling a product or service and you want to clearly explain how it works, or if you want to show employees how their jobs contribute to a larger whole, you can get away with a bit of long-windedness. However, if your video is only 5 minutes or less, you need to cut down on the dialogue.

Employee video examples that don’t have a company mission in them are always a red flag. It’s the first thing that people will look for in the video and might decide to never even watch it because it doesn’t have one. When creating your video, make sure that your mission is clear and concise. You want to make sure that it’s not so long and detailed that it becomes hard to memorize and understand. You also want it to represent your entire company and how it fits into the world around them. If you don’t know your company mission, then you have no idea what you’re trying to achieve with the video. You need to have a clear idea of why you’re creating the video, and why it needs to be. If you don’t know your company’s mission, then you might as well not be creating the video at all.

Another huge mistake that people make is not using scripts for their interviews. By using scripts, you can ensure that the questions are asked by you in the exact order that they need to be asked. There’s no need to worry about which tone you’re going to use when you don’t have a script to follow. You can just read your script, memorize it your prompts and stick to it completely. If you don’t use scripts for your interviews, you’re going to have a ton of problems down the road. There’s no way that you can memorize the entire script of a long-winded interview, and do it perfectly. The most important thing is that you just need to memorize the questions that need to be asked. You don’t need to bother memorizing the entire interview.

Keeping these 4 points in mind will help guide you as you start to think about your company video and how to keep it engaging.