And How You Can Use it in Every Industry
Let’s talk numbers. Numbers can tell you a lot about a company. They can tell you if the business is turning a profit, its current market share, and its projected valuation. But, there’s one thing numbers can’t tell you: the story of the humans behind the numbers.
The importance of human connection to a company should not be underestimated. It is important to know a company and its team as a whole, not just as a balance sheet or income statement. Numbers may seem like the best way to represent a company to potential investors, but there is another option.
Company overview videos can do what a boardroom meeting and numbers cannot. They help potential investors connect with a company and better understand its value proposition. By introducing the management team and showing the employees’ enthusiasm for their brand, viewers take a step into the company’s everyday life. They learn about the company’s values and mission, all while getting important information such as its growth, history of successes, and the customer base.
3 Key Elements to a Company
Overview Video
You’re probably wondering what exactly a company overview video is and how it can accomplish all this. A company overview video is meant to introduce what a company does, the need it solves in the market, and the people, community, or businesses it impacts. In a matter of 3-5 minutes, viewers will walk away with a strong understanding of the business and what makes it stand out from industry competitors. Additionally, a good company overview video should exemplify the brand’s voice and values to the viewer, making the company more approachable. After watching, your audience members will feel excited, optimistic, and have an overall stronger connection with the company.
Video marketing, especially company overview videos, has become critically important for companies to stand out to consumers and investors. With more access to information than ever and the average adult attention span being under 10 seconds, videos are an incredibly effective way to hook viewers in a short amount of time. In fact, despite short attention spans, video has shown to hold one’s attention for 2.7 minutes.
So what makes a company overview video stand out?
Real Interviews
First, through real, genuine interviews. Putting a face to the numbers can be extremely powerful, especially for potential investors who will most likely never meet some of the employees and end-users. It can also help them see a more authentic side of the C-Suite executives.
Take, for example, the company overview video for The Retina Group of Washington, the largest retina surgery practice in the country.
The first person you meet in this video is not the CEO or the Director of Operations but Dr. Johnson, one of the ophthalmologists at RGW. He is the first person you connect with as he talks about “physician burnout” from running a practice. He transitions into the company’s value of having their doctors focus on their patients, not the business.
The typical analyst or potential investor would likely never meet Dr. Johnson. Because of this, they would not truly understand the value of a practice like RGW to its employees, especially to the doctors who now focus their entire day on their patients.
These faces behind the numbers are important for potential investors to connect with so that they can witness firsthand the testimony of people the business impacts on a day-to-day basis.
Strong Visuals
Another important feature of a company overview video is the visuals. Not only do compelling visuals hold the viewer’s attention, but they also serve to give a look behind-the-scenes of the company. Oftentimes these visuals are able to show perspectives that people are not able to see on their own, such as aerials and extreme close-up shots.
In the B&W Growers company overview video, drone footage captures the team’s unique system for harvesting and packaging watercress and arugula. Investors might not fully grasp the immensity of this process if they did not see the vast fields of greens, the production line, and interface. Additionally, the video dynamically shows watercress from the beginning of its growth cycle, as baby seeds in a lab, to fully grown leaves being bagged for distribution and consumption. This type of footage could be of interest to consumers as well.
Powerful Stories
Finally, a company overview video can present the viewer with a strong story. Storytelling can forge a deep connection between two people, even if they have not met each other. Storytelling is such an influential tool that 87% of video marketers say that video gives them a good return on investment.
Sometimes a pitch deck can’t communicate the story of a company in an engaging way that makes it stand out.
Quirch’s company overview video goes in-depth about the company’s history, which started in Cuba, highlighting their “American Dream” story. A pitch deck slide might quickly run through this, but the impact of it hits harder when told by the owners, Ignacio and Mauricio Quirch, whose grandfather and father were exiled from Cuba under the rule of Fidel Castro.
How Can Private Equity and Growing Businesses Use Video?
Since 2016, the number of businesses using video as a marketing tool has increased by 41%. Financial firms have been able to rely on industry-standard marketing tactics with clients in the past. Now, however, they risk falling behind if they do not take advantage of video marketing.
Annual General Meetings
At investor conferences, whether it be held virtually or in-person, the goal is to engage and inform Limited Partners (LPs). Throwing statistic after statistic can feel more like a college lecture than a business opportunity. LPs want to invest in a company not only because they expect a return on investment, but because they feel connected to a company or mission.
A company overview video is a great way to accomplish both. It gives LPs the chance to resonate with a company’s sense of purpose and see the company’s growth. Instead of having another monotonous meeting, try breaking up the back-to-back PowerPoint presentations with compelling interviews and visuals.
Investor Relations and Fundraising
Maintaining investor relations and fundraising can seem like a daunting task for a private equity fund. Trying to effectively communicate your firm’s investment strategy, its proven track record, and the fund’s financial growth potential requires a lot of time, effort, and paperwork.
LPs want to know that they can trust your firm with their money. Being able to show how you have helped companies grow is crucial to give clientele confidence in your investment strategy.
Company overview videos are a great way to supplement those conversations. By giving LPs a short and engaging rundown of all the information, these videos make for powerful testimonies and case studies. Meeting management team members and every day individuals through video also serves as a great reminder to LPs that their investment impacts more than the overall growth of businesses, it also positively impacts the lives of employees and communities around them.
Mergers & Acquisitions and Capital Raising
In their sale to Unilever, Graze’s company overview video explained not only their team’s mission and unique subscription service but also its expansion to other countries and how they streamlined operations. Telling the story of a company’s growth in an overview video can greatly support your financial modeling during the M&A or capital raising process.
Growth stories such as Graze’s can be a persuasive tool because investors can experience, as close to firsthand as possible, a brand’s growth. This allows them to envision the opportunity for more expansion and to feel excited about being a part of that journey. Through footage of glowing social media reviews and their new distribution centers in the United States, Graze’s video showcased exactly what the buyer was looking for.
In-House Marketing
Outside of AGMs and the M&A process, these overview videos are also a great marketing tool for the portfolio company or client. Using it as part of a media library on a company’s website can provide viewers with professional information about a company. It can also showcase the work a company’s done in a more dynamic way on an “About Us” webpage. The footage shot can also be repurposed for additional marketing materials, such as GIFs, still images, and short video clips.
Promoting a company overview video or snippets from the footage on social media is another way to attract potential consumers. On top of that, there are countless ways these digital assets can be used in a marketing campaign to boost brand awareness, from including it in an email campaign to having an influencer retweet it in order to get more views.
Video is Beneficial in Many Different Industries
Every company in each industry can benefit from a company overview video. Through real interviews, strong visuals, and powerful stories, a company overview video can become an influential tool for any private equity fund, investment bank, or company.
Consumer Goods
For the consumer goods sector, a company overview video can benefit you by showing why your product is the best and how you achieved this status as an ideal commodity.
In Vital Farms’s company overview video, they make the claim that by treating their chickens humanely, their eggs are better than that of a typical egg farm where chickens are kept in cages and not allowed outside. They substantiate this claim by showing the extraordinary free-range their chickens are given, how they sanitize their eggs before packaging, and through customer testimonials. To a consumer who values humane treatment of animals and organic products, this video could be what makes them switch from a top egg producer to Vital Farms.
Investors are able to see how this company is changing the game and how they have acquired such a raving fanbase.
Healthcare
An investor looking into healthcare companies wants to see that the company is both profitable and providing its services in the most efficient, caring way to their patients.
Caregiver’s company overview video shows how the company is able to balance this successfully. In terms of profitability and growth, the video highlights how it has modernized the intellectual and developmental disabilities business. For example, they can remotely monitor their patients’ vitals, weight, blood sugar, etc. Their CEO, Mark Lashley, even speculates that in the next three to five years that they will be a half-a-billion-dollar company, which is further emphasized by the footage of him sticking pins on a map of the US.
They prove they also care for their patients through a testimonial of a patient named Richard, who was shy and easily frustrated when he first arrived at one of Caregiver’s houses. Through the mentorship and patience of their employees, Richard is now thriving. “This is my home,” he says. Any investor can see the kindhearted folks at this growing and caring company.
Technology
It might seem as though it would be hard to make a compelling company overview video for a technology company, but through it’s quite the contrary. Visuals, interviews, and even animations can be a highly influential tool.
Although traffic management infrastructure might feel like something that could be hard to connect with, Trafficware’s company overview video proves that you can form a bond with even the most technical company. Throughout the video, you learn about how Trafficware is unique among its competitors through having the broadest offering. Additionally, the video underscores how it owns all the intellectual property of their interconnected infrastructure, which is definitely of interest to potential investors. It also calls attention to its ongoing expansion, which is an important focus for any portfolio company. Strong visuals are a sticking point in this video, as animation draws in the viewer when they see how interlinked Trafficware’s system is. On top of that, footage of how their system is making self-driving cars seem like a possibility gets you excited about traffic management infrastructure over the course of the five-minute video.
These are just three examples of how different industries are able to make the most of their company overview videos. Every industry can benefit from a dynamic, captivating video that goes beyond the numbers in an effort to make a real connection between investors and a company.
The Value of Video as Part of Your Investment Strategy
According to a recent survey, 86% of businesses are using video as a marketing tool in 2021, up 1% from 2020. Additionally, 86% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website and 94% say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service. Clearly, video marketing has a significant return on investment for any company that decides to use it in their investment strategy.
Although private equity funds and other financial institutions usually stick to traditional marketing materials, the rise of technology has a new age of firms turning to video marketing tools. It’s easy to see why, when viewers say that they retain 95% of a message when shown a company video. If viewers are retaining nearly the entire message of a video, it’s a major missed opportunity to leave this out of your investment strategy.
Interested in telling a company growth story? Click this link to download our FREE video strategy questionnaire to get started!