3 Places in your Company to Look For Video Ideas (and 1 to Avoid)

You’ve heard it here, you’ve heard it everywhere: video is an important part of a complete, balanced marketing strategy. It’s easy to repeat statistics about the growth of web video, but harder to figure out a way for your business to take advantage of it.

Maybe you’re already ahead of the curve, with some standard company videos to handle explaining who you are and why someone should work with you (or for you). That’s a great start, but that’s only scratching the surface of the power of video marketing. In order to really harness the power of video, you’ll need to find unique video ideas to solve your customer’s issues, build up your reputation as a subject matter expert, and harmonize with your website’s SEO optimization.

While that sounds like a daunting task, I’ve got great news for you– - some of your most useful and valuable marketing video ideas are already percolating within your organization. You just haven’t tapped into them yet.

What this list is and isn’t about

It’s a bit of a misnomer to say this is a list about ‘marketing videos.’ Any video you make for your business could, in some sense, be called a ‘marketing video.’

In this context, we’re narrowing in specifically on the kinds of videos that are playing a support role on your website to back up other components of your marketing, like your website, your inbound marketing, and your SEO efforts. These kinds of videos aren’t going to be social media fodder, and probably won’t go viral or otherwise attract customers to your business on their own.

There’s nothing wrong with videos designed to attract customers on their own, obviously! But if we’re thinking holistically about your marketing efforts, there are always important pieces of information that aren’t going to draw attention by themselves, but are still vitally important to your customers’ journeys or satisfaction.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get into the first place to look for video ideas within your company.

Place #1 - Customer Support

Your first port of call on a mission to uncover hidden video ideas within your company should be your customer service representatives. While ideally every interaction with your company is a positive one for your customers, customer service has a unique vantage point on your customers at their most frustrated and confused. Because of this, their insight into where video might help to sand down rough points in the customer journey is invaluable.

For example, if you sell bicycles and accessories, and your customer service team tells you that they routinely get calls or emails about a particularly tricky part of the self-assembly process, that might be a sign to create how-to videos that go more in-depth to explain the nuances of assembly than the printed manual does. It might also be a sign that videos promoting your assembly service on your website might prod less handy customers to choose to splurge to avoid the problem altogether.

To see this in action, check out electric bicycle manufacturer RadPowerBikes and their extensive collection of assembly and troubleshooting videos.

The particular attention paid to making sure all of the steps are clearly visible in the video and are easy to follow and understand makes this a stellar example of a customer support video done right.

The list could go on and on, and most importantly, will look unique to your business and your customer’s questions. In any case, a collection of FAQ, how-to, or troubleshooting videos can help to cut down the volume of the calls and emails your team is fielding over common issues, and save their bandwidth for solving larger problems that require more time or hand-holding

Place #2 - Inbound Sales

Anyone who has spent time talking to an inbound sales representative knows that there is nobody more knowledgeable about a company’s product or service. If videos about specific products or services are needed on your website, it’s probably a no-brainer to bring some of the sales staff into the conversation.

But like your customer service reps, your inbound sales team also spends a lot of time fielding questions from potential customers. Some of those questions, they’ll admit, they’ve had to answer multiple times per day. These questions provide you with valuable raw data that can be transformed into video content for your website.

Let’s imagine you’re running an e-commerce business that sells custom t-shirts of varying materials and qualities. Questions your sales staff might be answering on a regular basis could include:

• The difference between two different materials of fabric
• The difference between different processes of screen printing
• How to prepare graphic elements for issue free printing

To see this in action, check out this video from CustomInk that explains how their Design Lab templates can be used to help someone with minimal graphic experience design a shirt.

Like with the customer service team, the questions your inbound sales team encounters will be unique to you and your business, which makes for excellent content that your customer won’t be able to find anywhere else.

One thing to keep in mind is that the video ideas you mine from your inbound sales team likely aren’t going to serve the same purpose as those from your Customer Service team. While the aim of customer service-focused videos is to cut down on the amount of calls, inbound sales-focused videos should instead be viewed as a way to position yourself as a subject matter expert. That way, when that customer does call, they’re not only able to ask more questions if they have them, but they’ll be more likely to trust your team is knowledgeable enough to answer them.

Place #3 - Web and SEO

It’s been said that your website should be your best salesperson. After all, when designed correctly, they can provide all the information your customers need, on-demand, at any time. This is thanks to the work of your web team, whether that consists of several people splitting the UX, UI, and SEO components of the work, or whether you’ve got a very hard working jack of all trades behind the screen.

Because of the groundwork laid by your web team, you’re also gaining a lot of insight into how your customers are navigating and interacting with your website. If interpreted correctly, this insight can provide you with video opportunities.

For example, your analytics data will contain the search terms people are searching for when they land on your site. Increasingly, as people make more use of digital voice assistants on their phones and in their homes, those search terms are arriving in the form of a question. Having videos ready to answer those questions immediately when someone lands on your site is a great way to ensure they stick around to learn more about your business, as opposed to immediately clicking off and seeking the answer elsewhere.

In addition, this strategy can be used to help customers searching for answers within your website. If your web team notices that users travel from a specific product page to your customer support page, it’s possible that there’s a gap in information on that page that can be quickly solved with video.

Video ideas sourced from the web team may cross over with ideas from customer support and inbound sales. The benefit here is not that the ideas are unique, but to use the data from your website to identify which ideas have the greatest potential to answer questions for your customers. 

Bottom Line

This is far from a comprehensive list, as the org chart of your company will largely determine the best sources for your ideas. This list isn’t designed to imply that a marketing team can’t or shouldn’t come up with ideas on their own, or that operations or leadership aren’t great sources for ideas as well (they certainly are!).

What this list is designed to do is inspire you to recognize that if there are blind spots or pain points in sectors of your marketing, parts of your team are noticing them just as much as your customers are. The golden opportunity provided by deploying marketing videos on your website is a means to solve problems both internally and externally at the same time. The result is a smoother journey for your customers and more opportunities for your team to do what they do best.

However, we’re not quite done, as there’s one final source of video ideas I promised to mention.

A place to Avoid - The person who spends the most time on Facebook/Instagram/TikTok

There’s always one. Someone who knows all the circulating trends, the trendy hashtags, and whatever dance that every organization on their feed is doing. Often, when the new shiny thing shows up on their feed, they get excited and exclaim the words every social media manager dreads: “We should do this with our team!”

Regardless of whether your video production focus is to generate new attention for the organization or to smooth the customer experience on your website, this is generally not a useful source for marketing video ideas. Running through the in-kind costs of spending company time coordinating a dance, the often-ignored copyright implications of lip syncing to popular music, or the potential landmine of jumping in on a trend without fully understanding the cultural conversation around it could be an article on its own.

It’s probably more succinct to say that chasing trends will mostly result in content with a shelf life. If your time and budget for content production are limited, creating disposable content is a tough value proposition, as you’ll be locked in a cycle of constantly generating new content to replace your old videos as they age out of relevance. Ideally, every piece of content you create will be able to live on your website indefinitely and continue to provide you and your customers with value.