Corporate Christmas videos can go unnoticed or they can become profitable video marketing content. During this time of the year, millions of consumers receive greeting card videos from businesses around the world.
The reality is that most organizations spend thousands of dollars making corporate videos for the sweetest holiday season of the year.
To make a successful corporate Christmas video, you need to take into account your target audience, what’s the easiest way for this audience to watch the video, and what type of greeting card video content connects better with them. However, there is so much to think about so that your audience shares your video and that your video pays back.
If the money is there, there is no problem with this if the videos prove to have a return on the investment.
But most companies make Christmas videos without ever thinking about their ROI. About how these greeting videos can be loved by their audience so that they react.
If you are wondering what are the things you should take into consideration when creating a corporate Christmas video, you’re starting off on the right foot.
The Christmas season is a time when new shopping practices surface. 2021’s Christmas and New Year celebrations will be a bit different.
This is why you should stop and rethink your corporate greeting card video.
Making a Christmas video for your brand (startup or big corporation) shouldn’t be just an item on your to-do list.
It shouldn’t be just a way to use what’s left of your marketing budget.
This is where your Christmas video marketing shines.
It’s time to look at your videos from a strategic approach.
So, how can your organization create a profitable video greeting about Christmas?
It doesn’t matter if you sell a product, a service, or just a concept. What matters is that the holiday video has an impact on your audience.
John Lewis’s Christmas TV ad campaign is the department store’s most profitable return on investment, validating its continued investment in creativity.
With this in mind, here are a few questions that will help you create a corporate Christmas video that pays back.
Today, I won’t cover specifics about corporate video production for your video greeting.
Instead, you’ll learn how to use this holiday season to create video content that is appealing and that doesn’t let leads, customers, and prospects unresponsive.
Corporate Christmas video: What to ask yourself when making holiday season videos in 2023
Corporate Christmas videos are a great way to connect with customers through emotions, especially if you personalize them.
However, for these videos to be effective, there are several things you should consider.
1) What are the business goals of your greeting card video?
To create corporate Christmas videos that your customers love and care about enough to share and react to, define your business goals first. Think about what you want and need to achieve with the Christmas video.
When the business goal is not the focus, then the video appears as another item on your digital marketing to-do list.
A clear business goal for your holiday marketing campaign with video helps create inspiring, engaging, and entertaining corporate Christmas videos even for different types of marketing segments. [Side note: Adding children to your Christmas videos helps increase viewer engagement].
Figure out what you want to achieve with your business goal. When possible, be specific. Decide what you want to measure.
Here are three examples:
- Is it sales through a promotional video to increase sales by 5%?
- Is it a product launch through an explainer video to help 20% of your sales lead re-engage?
- How about a warm video where SDRs celebrate the season through a warm video to help them increase sales productivity by 3%?
Video producers will do a better job if you define what you need based on your specific business goals.
Goals are what drive the business to true success.
Brands and companies should not create corporate Christmas videos without identifying their business goals.
2) Who is your target audience for your corporate Christmas video?
In order to make sure your leads and customers watch your video, segment your audience. This involves separating your contacts into different groups and making sure that the video they’ll watch is relevant to what they’re looking for.
Wait a minute? Are we still talking about a Christmas video?
Yes! And about business goals.
Make sure to apply marketing segmentation techniques.
Here are 4 ways in which you can segment your audience to increase video conversions this holiday season:
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- Segment your audience based on their preferences.
- Segment your customers based on the frequency of their purchases.
- Apply segmentation of customers based on the types of items that they buy.
- Create customer segments based on their country or language.
Here you have more marketing segmentation strategies you can apply to your videos this Christmas:
3) How long should your corporate Christmas video be?
Ok, lots of people ask, “what is the best length for a corporate Christmas video?” Well, that depends. This question is not as easy to answer as one might think. Different companies and positions rely on different lengths to best represent their brand.
Among other things, to keep it simple, take into consideration your business goals, audience, distribution channel, budget, and type of video.
I typically recommend that corporate Christmas videos be under 1-minute max if the audience will play them mostly on computers, and about 30 to 45 seconds if they’ll play them on mobile devices.
That’s not because longer videos are bad (they can be very effective).
Simply put, shorter videos are easier to watch by wider audiences, cheaper to produce, more effective for social media distribution, focused, and memorable.
But the reality is that some video types require the videos to be longer and they are still really effective.
This type of video usually will take more from your budget if you are working with a corporate video production company.
With this in mind, most brands will be more than fine with shorter videos. Shorter videos generate more social shares, are more cost-effective, and are faster to produce.
So, short it up! That’s probably the optimal video length.
4) What is the holiday season video about and how does your greeting card video reflect it?
Define what is the holiday season video about taking into consideration your creative resources, audience, and business goals.
Christmas is a time for giving, receiving, and spending time with family.
Because of this, you need to find the right balance between “Merry Christmas” and “buy now” (or whatever needs to happen to achieve your organization’s goal).
An “easy” way to know about the storytelling of your brand Christmas video? Ask your customers to share what they would like to see in the video.
If you have a large audience, you can run a segmented survey to know about their expectations and desires for the brand video about Christmas.
If you have a small audience or not that many people in your CRM, you can also run a survey, a contest, or even make a few calls to find patterns among your customers.
This will also increase expectations. You can make this part of the marketing campaign so that customers are expectant.
5) What format works best for your audience?
There are many video formats that you can choose from to create a memorable corporate video for Christmas.
Let’s keep it simple.
If viewers will play the video mainly on their desktops, then you don’t need to worry about formatting, because the format of your video isn’t that important.
Mobile users want to be able to watch your holiday season video without having to zoom in. This way, they can watch it on their phone.
Usually, you want to pick MP4 videos formatted at smaller dimensions. Compression is also important.
If your video needs to load quickly, MP4 is better because it works across the majority of devices.
If many people will watch the video from different locations, make sure to distribute it through a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
You can also use reliable video hosting for businesses like Wistia, Vimeo, or even YouTube if branding is not that important.
You will also need to decide if you want to create a different version per device type or if you’ll have one format for all of them.
Choose the video format according to your audience and distribution channel.
6) Where are the greeting card videos going to be played?
Video distribution is also related to the video format and to the audience that will watch your brand video about Christmas.
If you are targeting corporate leads and customers (B2B), chances are that a landscape or horizontal video works best. Most of them will watch the video while they are at work.
If you target consumers (B2C), vertical or square videos might be a better idea.
Especially during the Xmas season, most of the viewers will probably watch the video from their smartphones because they’ll be at home.
7) Are the videos going to be uploaded to a video platform like YouTube, Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook, or even TikTok?
This is also related to distribution, goals, audience, and what’s in the video. Each of these known social media platforms is focused on video content.
Each one of them specialized in different video formats because of the way viewers consume content.
If one of your goals is related to branding, awareness, or simply getting more eyeballs, then consider uploading your video to a social media platform for video content.
You can also get more people to watch your video about Christmas if you invest in advertising. Platforms like Facebook can help you target granular audiences really well.
Wherever your audience spends their time, that’s where you should publish and promote your video.
8) Are the brand Christmas videos going to be displayed on any of these platforms’ landing pages or on a corporate landing page?
Most organizations are not aware of the power of well-done landing pages for video. This also applies to a company greeting card video.
Because of this, most video marketers and even branding peers will send viewers to a generic YouTube video page without taking into consideration SEO if what they want is eyeballs, or a custom landing page for video if what they want is branding or sales engagement.
If you are going to send a personalized campaign through any one-to-one channel, then use a personalized landing page for the video.
For example, with personalization software like Pirsonal, you can create a branded landing page for each viewer. The following image shows different personalization placeholders.
This way, you’ll increase viewer engagement. Your customers and leads will have a better experience. And you’ll be able to create targeted messages with your business goal in mind.
Personalization software like Pirsonal automatically creates dynamic landing pages. This means that you can automatically create a landing page for each viewer at scale.
If you upload your brand Christmas video to platforms like YouTube, make sure you properly define the metadata for SEO. This will increase your chances of getting more traction for your video marketing campaign.
9) Should we use personalized videos for our corporate Christmas videos?
If you want to improve customer experience, you can make personalized videos with your customers’ or employees’ names.
Watch the following personalized Christmas video example:
Christmas is also the perfect time of the year to create a personalized video campaign – BTW, this audio explains how to successfully manage a personalized video project. The reason for this is that customers are expecting something different from their favorite brands.
If you want to go the extra mile, create personalized videos automatically based on the buyer persona.
Here is an example:
Personalized videos are videos with customer data. Similar to emails with personalization tags, with personalized videos you have personalization placeholders for text, images, videos, and audio.
There are many ways you can use them.
You can also invite your leads and customers to make their own videos in a totally personalized or customized way.
Pirsonal is a personalized video marketing software that helps you make personalized videos to wow your unique audience during the holiday season.
For example, you can ask them to fill out a web form, and when they fill in the web form, a personalized or custom video is created automatically.
This can be done for you by a personalized video production agency, or you can simply signup for a free trial and start your own personalized video project from scratch.
If you have a fairly large audience like e-commerce companies do and/or don’t have a large budget, you can also consider creating interactive videos with personalization instead.
In this case, videos are not rendered in the cloud as they are with personalized videos, but the personalization is printed in the interactive video player.
Interactive video software like Pirsonal Player helps you add personalized Calls to Action to your videos at scale.
If you are considering personalized videos for your next corporate greeting card video, you’ll want to see more examples, and case studies. To learn more about personalized video marketing, take a look at this guide about personalized video marketing with examples.
Closing thoughts: Make a corporate Christmas video that makes people react
Taking the time to answer these questions during the brainstorming phase will help you save a lot of time later. It will also help you save money. You’ll make a corporate Christmas video that is profitable by itself.
Creating a holiday video for your brand is easy. Creating a video marketing strategy that makes people react is something else.
When thinking about one-to-one marketing, use video personalization to create a memorable, creative wow effect.
Use interactive videos with personalized Calls to Action if your audience is too wide and your budget too little.
If your goal is related to branding, use generic but targeted videos. This is also when you don’t want to enjoy the benefits of video personalization or distribute your videos through social media platforms.
Chances are that your budget has experienced some changes.
Maybe you have a few more dollars than last year. Maybe you don’t because management is cautious.
Your video production company or in-house creative team needs to make sure that this video pays back.
Historically, Christmas commercials have been moneymakers. People are expecting them, along with the offers and promotions associated with them.
Creating a video greeting for Christmas requires the same attention as any other video ad campaign you probably already run.
It needs to be conceived as a marketing strategy with its own measurable business goals.
Having this in mind will help you use the power of video to communicate, explain and engage.
From there, with the right video marketing strategy in place, you’ll be able to make people react, even if we are still talking about the holiday season.
Want to catch your audience’s attention this holiday season? Let’s talk about your personalized greeting card video.
