Corporate videos today have no excuse for being stiff, dry, or boring. After all, we’re living in a golden age of video and content creation where creators like Grace Wells launched their career off of creating fake product videos. Thankfully, many brands have taken the cue and shifted from traditional to creative storytelling with their external and internal videos.
Today, corporate videos help businesses build their brands, inspire their teams, and connect more authentically with their audience. We’ll guide you through different types of branded video with real-world examples, practical planning tips, and show you professional stock footage that can simplify your entire production process.
Strategic formats that work
Whether the audience is your customers or your co-workers, there’s tons of great formats you can leverage for corporate videos.
External-facing brand builders
With 89% of businesses using video as a marketing tool, you don’t have to look far to find good examples of successful brand content.
Product launch
If you want to get people excited, creating a product launch video is the way to go. You can use video to tease the release or drop it unexpectedly to spark interest and drive demand. When BARK released this launch video for their new offering, BARK Air, the video immediately went viral on social media.
Customer testimonial
Another great way to build your brand through video is by telling your customer’s stories through testimonials. These videos help establish trust with your audience and let them identify with your customer’s pain points. By telling Hannah Perry’s story of starting a business from scratch, Shopify creates an engaging, emotionally powerful story of an underdog finding success despite the odds.
Explainer videos
Elevator pitches explain your product and what value it brings quickly and clearly. Explainer videos are the visual form of that, with the goal of helping your target audience understand what your brand does, how it helps them reach their goals, and why they should care. Slack’s explainer video is a classic that tells you everything you need to know in less than a minute.
Internal culture & ops videos
Corporate videos aren’t just for promotion. People like to see the human side of brands, too.
Employee interviews
By putting faces and people to a business, audiences can get a better sense of the values a company represents. It’s also an important reminder that there are humans who help bring their favorite brands and products to life. This example from the Google Search team does a great job of showing how dedicated their employees are and how much thought goes into something people use every single day.
FAQ videos
Another great opportunity to put your employees front and center are FAQ videos. These are especially helpful for explaining things that are easier to understand visually, like how to assemble a product or change a setting. The example from Notion below is part of a whole series that shows how to use different parts of Notion, doing deep dives into each part of the product.
Behind-the-scenes
Taking your viewers behind the scenes is a great way to bring your audience into an experience and make them feel like they’ve gotten exclusive access to your company. They also help build transparency by showing everything that goes into bringing a product, feature, or other part of your business to life. Glossier showcases this expertly with a behind the scenes look at a shoot they did with the global girl group KATSEYE.
Strategic communication
These types of videos elevate the delivery of important messages and the visibility of your brand beyond emails or press releases.
Thought leadership videos
When you want to take a strong stance and position your brand as an authority or leader in your industry, thought leadership videos are invaluable. When these are well done, they can make a big impact on your audience and make you stand out from your competitors. This video from Patagonia on their journey to removing PFAS from their clothing is an excellent example that does all this and more.
Personalized videos
Even the videos you create internally for things like training or onboarding can make a big impact in your employee’s experiences. This training video on biases and blind spots at work from PwC tackles a challenging topic effectively.
Planning a corporate video that doesn’t suck
The best way to create an effective and impactful corporate video is to make sure you take full advantage of pre-production planning. This is where your strategy is built that will carry you through filming, distribution, and beyond. You can find a ton of free templates and tools to help you with pre-production in our Ultimate Video Marketing Toolkit.
Build your strategy first
The biggest mistake you can make is to just start shooting without a clear plan. The best way to avoid wasting time, budget, and resources is to have a solid strategy that everyone is aligned on. This includes knowing what you want to say, how you’re going to say it, and what the goal of your video is.
You also need to know who you’re speaking to. The BARK Air product launch video is an excellent example of this. Pet owners are devoted to their furbabies, which is why BARK knew to show their pets being absolutely pampered and catered to in their launch video. They absolutely get their audience, which is why the message and product resonated so well.
Creating a visual plan
Once you have your strategy mapped out, then you can start shaping what your video will look like. This includes creating a video script, storyboarding, and coming up with a shot list. The last part is important because production costs can add up quickly. So you need to map out what shots you can source from stock footage libraries like Storyblocks and what you definitely need to film yourself.
In the Spotify customer testimonial video, they do an excellent job of layering in stock footage with their own clips. B–roll is an effective tool for video storytelling, helping add context and engaging visuals.
When to use stock footage vs shoot your own
| Use stock footage | Shoot your own footage | |
| Budget | Lower cost, ideal for small budgets. | Higher cost – includes gear, crew, locations, talent, etc. |
| Production timeline | Immediate – ready to download and use. | Longer – requires pre-production, shooting, editing. |
| B-roll | Wide variety of footage to choose from. | Best for when you need specific shots you can’t find with stock. |
| Specialized visuals | Great for hard-to-access content (e.g. aerials, time lapses, etc.) | Can be costly to rent equipment, require travel, get permits. |
| Talent and rights | Come with pre-cleared releases for models and property. | Your responsibility to book talent, handle rights, legal documentation. |
Curated corporate stock footage
Even pros with million-dollar budgets don’t shoot everything themselves. Smart producers and filmmakers know when a shot is worth doing themselves and when they can easily source the perfect clip from stock.
When you’re looking for b-roll or stock footage that feels authentic and genuine, Storyblocks has all of the content you need. We work with our global team of filmmakers and artists to create diverse footage that helps brands tell their stories, their way.
Brand & product launch content
The footage you use to show your brand should line up with how your want your audience to perceive your company.
For example, if you want your brand to come off as polished and professional, you can use more formal work settings like this office panoramic shot.
On the other hand, if you choose a shot of a meeting with a more open setting and newer technology, that shows innovation and productivity.
For product launch videos, stock footage can be used in all sorts of creative ways. If you’re launching an all-natural skincare, you can show high-quality shots of the different ingredients. Or if you’ve created a fitness app, you can show clips of people running, weightlifting, and working out. The options are endless.
Human & culture focused
On the other hand, if you want to focus on the culture of your brand and the people behind it, stock footage can help you find the perfect representation. The effectiveness of faces is one of the biggest learnings our own video team has learned through the years.
Multi-shot clips are great for presenting your employees as a unified front and showcasing the diversity of your team.
If you run a small business or work with small businesses, showing clips of orders getting packed up can help show your audience to the hard work that goes into the fulfillment process.
Explainers & animated templates
Creating explainer videos doesn’t mean you have to hire an animator to make you a video completely from scratch. Along with stock footage, you can find thousands of pre-made, fully customizable video templates that you can use as the base for an engaging video.
This animated After Effects typography template is perfect for promo videos or a quick explainer. Just bring it into After Effects, add your text, customize the colors, and you’re done!
And if you do work with animator or decide to use stock for the majority of your video, you can use templates from Storyblocks to fill in any gaps or add any stylistic touches, like this animation of a girl working on a computer.
Start creating smarter with Storyblocks
With smart planning and the right resources, teams of any size (and any production budget) can create professional corporate videos. Making creative, impactful stories doesn’t mean you need to film everything yourself. Instead, pre-production work helps you map out what shots require your team’s focus and skills to bring to life, and where you can save time relying on high-quality stock footage.
Explore Storyblocks’ full library of authentic, royalty free footage today and find everything you need to bring your brand’s videos to life.
