As an internal comms professional, you’re probably all-too-familiar with the complicated email, instant messaging, and newsletter song-and-dance designed to cover all your internal communications bases.
It’s stressful.
You need people to read your messages, but in your heart of hearts, you know they aren’t — at least not as thoroughly as they should.
The emails and newsletters you’ve been sending for years aren’t cutting it anymore; no matter how hard you try, you can’t make busy employees any more inclined to read long, text-based comms.
Remote and hybrid work has exacerbated this stressful situation by overloading legacy comms channels and introducing the added wrinkle of teams distributed across time zones.
Adding video to your internal communications fills in the gaps left behind by text-heavy comms. Video is quickly becoming an integral communication tool — one that’s here to stay.
And for good reason.
Your email, Slack, and newsletters need internal communications videos
What you’re doing right now isn’t working.
Your people are disengaged.
- Only 34% of employees say they feel engaged at work.
Your comms aren’t getting through.
- Only 37% of employees read internal messages.
- 65% of emails get ignored.
You need a new way to amplify your messages.
First, it’s worth pointing out that video isn’t designed or intended to completely replace your traditional comms tools. Video augments these tools, making them more effective and efficient for communicating in the modern workplace.
This is one reason why using video is easier than most people think: there’s very little learning curve, since the tools your employees use will still be the backbone of your internal communication.
It’s just a matter of using video to simplify — and amplify — your existing internal comms strategy. Here’s what video brings to the internal communication table.
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Video amplifies your comms
The struggle with internal communs channels is that they’re very noisy. Professionals get 121 emails each day, on average. This quickly gets overwhelming.
Your people are being severely over-contacted.
There’s no way to quickly sort through the noise, so they end up checking out of these comms channels altogether. This doesn’t bode well for those employee newsletters and important internal comms messages you’re sending.
Putting important messages into video form amplifies your most critical comms.
In the midst of all those noisy channels, video gives people a way to quickly identify important messages because it stands out from standard text-based comms. And videos give people a break from all the reading they’re expected to do each day.
Adding a video to an email increases open and click rates by 96%. The stats don’t lie: people don’t ignore messages when there’s a video inside.
Adding video to your communication stack ensures mission-critical information doesn’t get missed as people sift through packed inboxes or scroll endless instant message flows.
An easier way to process complex messages
Internal comms messages are rarely one-liners. They’re chock full of can’t-miss information. Even though your team is filled with smart, capable people, they still struggle to process all of this information during their busy workdays.
It isn’t their fault. It’s just human nature.
Most marketing research suggests the ideal length for an email is 50 to 125 words. Yes, that’s based on marketing emails. But people have the same attention span, regardless of whether they’re reading a marketing email or a work email.
50 to 125 words isn’t much space. For reference, the last three paragraphs were 101 words in total. Video bypasses this problem, because you can include a lot more information in a short video. This is because the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it processes text. Watching a video also causes less eye and brain strain than reading.
You can put a lot of information in a video and people will be able to maintain focus without missing details. On the other hand, people start to skim even after reading a relatively short block of text.
People can pretty easily stay engaged through an entire three-minute video. Between recorded video of yourself talking, on-screen text, and visuals, you can fit a lot more information into a three-minute video than you can fit into 125 words of text.
A shareable and trackable medium
A major frustration about mediums like email is that you send your messages out into the abyss and then pretty much have to hope for the best. One of the best things about video is how easy it is to share and track.
Video can be shared via a clickable link, which makes it compatible with just about any communication channel from email, to company intranet, to employee social platforms.
Share your internal comms videos on multiple platforms so you have the best chance of catching people in their preferred place. It’s easy on both ends of the conversation and accessible for everyone.
Once that video is shared, dig into the analytics from your link to find out how many people opened the video and how many people watched it until the end. When you’re trying to measure the success of your internal comms, that’s no small benefit.
Pro tip: With a video-making platform like Biteable Teams, it’s easy to track your video analytics. Share your video with a single link and track the stats in a user-friendly dashboard.
Internal communications videos are engaging and memorable
As we mentioned earlier, keeping employees engaged with text-based comms is tough. It’s equally tough getting them to actually process and remember the information you share. Video engages two of the senses: visual and auditory.
Appealing to more senses gives you access to more tools for communication.
Videos can leverage text, graphics, music, and conversational communication to convey information. This adds a human touch to your comms and makes them far more entertaining, engaging, and memorable than text.
- 55% of people give their full attention to videos.
- People retain 95% of a message they watch on video, compared to 10% when they read it in text.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know your most important messages are not only landing, but sticking, too?
Videos are easy to make (yes, really)
For most comms professionals, actually making videos is the biggest obstacle to using video for internal communication. But it’s a perceived obstacle, based on how difficult it was to create videos back in the day.
Modern video-making technology is incredible. In just the past few years, it’s advanced to the point where anyone can shoot and edit video footage with zero formal training in video creation.
Consider how many videos you see on social media which are completely shot and uploaded from someone’s phone. These videos often get thousands and even millions of views.
Obviously, internal communication isn’t the same as social media content. But the success of such simple videos on social media shows that you can get all the benefits of video communication without paying for professional production.
(In fact, your employees are so used to this type of informal content, they’ll prefer it to highly produced internal comms videos; it comes across as more authentic and approachable.)
Most smartphones have a perfectly good camera for shooting short video clips, especially videos of yourself speaking. And modern video editing software offers premade visuals that you can edit as easily as editing a text document.
Modern technology makes creating videos about as easy as writing emails or other text documents, especially if your focus is short videos intended to convey information.
The bottom line is that you already have what you need to make videos for internal communication. And that’s just one more reason why video is a permanent fixture in internal comms.
Pro tip: Skip the smartphone altogether. Record yourself from directly within the Biteable Teams platform and add the footage straight to your internal comms video. No uploading necessary.
Create internal comms videos the easy way with Biteable Teams
The power of video is clear. Video is here to stay, and it’s the future of internal comms.
Biteable Teams gives you the power to stay at the forefront of communication with prebuilt video templates, brandable scenes, and a video-making platform so simple it runs in your web browser.
Create professional-quality internal comms videos in minutes, share them with your team in a single click, and track the results — all in an easy-to-use platform.
Biteable Teams is hands-down the most efficient way to leverage the power of video for your internal comms.