If you don’t know how to make an About Us video that will come across as genuine and appealing, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we will lead you through detailed steps, myths, to-do’s and not-to-do’s of a Meet the Team video, so your clients and prospects can know who you guys are!
Company “Meet the Team” or “About Us” videos are for people who are close to buying from you, and they want to look under the hood to see what sort of culture you have.
These videos are one of those things where you can let go of some of the usual marketing habits because for once, it’s not all about your customer (it is really, but pretend it’s not for now).
Meet the Team videos are all “me, me, me” because that’s what people are looking for on those About Us website pages.
It’s time to let you in on a little secret: About Us pages are usually the second most visited page on your website.
People visit your About Us page when they’re making some critical decision about buying your product or hiring you for their work.
In short, people visit your About Us page when they’re sold to what you’re selling them.
But we’ve seen blunders in the About Us videos that can discourage any client.
So, here are a couple of things you need to avoid to make your Meet the Team videos legitimate:
Don’t sell yourself:
If there’s nothing personal, and it’s actually angled as a low-level soft sell on buying from you or your company, it’s not going to sit well with your customer.
“Most of my day is spent trying to find the best deal for our clients and that’s how we like it here at ACME brokers” isn’t sincere, and no one’s coming to the About Us page to be sold to anyway.
Don’t use corporate speak:
People are coming to know you, not to hear you do the “business talk”.
Give them some impersonal corporate-speak like everybody repeating a slightly different version of “the thing I love about ACME brokers is the people,” and you’ll blow a huge opportunity to be memorable.
Especially if your marketing has a real character everywhere else, you’ll fail here miserably.
Instead, give your prospects something that feels like the fingerprints of your team, and you’re more likely to build trust and crucially, land clients that you’ll serve better because they’ll understand you.
This is where we make your journey of “how to make an About Us video” a little easier by introducing you to an About Us video example.
Here’s our About Us page . You’ll see we’ve got individual videos of each of us where we hope you’ll learn a little bit about us, but also learn something interesting to take away as well (We told you it was really about your customer in the end).
We also use these videos in our email signature like the image below. It’s nice to personalise that space too.
We’ve found over time that our Meet Me videos have proved to be the most-watched on our site, beating all the really flipping brilliant case studies and testimonials that we’ve put so much more time and effort into.
So, how do you empower your team to make a genuine sounding Meet the Team video that feels like actually meeting the team?
In a nutshell: Take some risks in the shoot. You don’t have to use it all in the edit, but it’s too late in the editing phase if everything is a series of “hackneyed” sound bites.
But before we get to that, you need to decide if you want to make your About Us video a montage video, where you put everyone together in the cut, or you want to make individual videos for each person. It doesn’t matter too much; the approach is the same right up to the edit.
Either way, you’d want a video that helps viewers seamlessly become a part of your world.
In order to ensure that your Meet the Team video remains both professional and relevant, you need to look for things where personal overlaps with professional. That’s why hobbies or interests often come up.
So do pets that have been brought in the office, inside-jokes, and fun routines that outside world wouldn’t know about-these are the sorts of things that pull an audience in and help them relate to you.
Approaching it that way will help you quickly find the material that can reveal character and a team ethos.
To get the genuine footage we talked about, it will also require dispelling some myths. Because while looking around for advice on this, what you’ll quickly find are some really unhelpful observations. Here is some awful advice you need to steer clear of:
There’s no need to somehow shoe-horn it into their conversation on the camera. Don’t make them self-conscious in a process that already has plenty of that. It doesn’t matter what the mission statement of the company is, this is a place for their understanding of the company’s mission.
With some of the awful advice set aside, here is a step by step procedure that will tell you how to make a meet the team video that will make people love your team!
Getting people to appear on camera is hard, so it should be your first concern.
Why people say “no” most of the time:
Not everyone likes cameras but 99% of the time this is because they just have no idea how they’re going to appear on the screen, or perhaps, how it’s going to appear in your marketing overall. It’s possible they won’t even be able to tell you why they don’t want to be in it.
But it’s usually because of the lack of control they’ll be feeling over how they’ll be portrayed or what the process of filming will be like.
How to get people to be on camera:
Be prepared for those who are still going to refuse. In the end, you only want people who get it and want to be a part of it anyway.
If you have a large team and you’re making a montage video, you may get more “No’s”, but that’s okay because no one will know if the entire team is in it or not.
With this sort of portraiture, any overtly scripted bits are going to sound really unconvincing. So, we don’t want you to script exactly what people are supposed to say. Rather, script chapters that you can fill with impromptu answers from your team members.
Here are some of the sections you can make for the About Us video script:
Intro Section: The best short grabs from the interviews to help set the tone.
Mission-Based Bits: Any grabs that show the kind of business you are.
Fun Stuff: Anything that shows your lighter side.
Things We Care About: Individuality, pets, hobbies, things people love or loathe.
It really doesn’t have to be any more complex than that, but don’t let us stop you from complicating your life. Kidding aside, you might want a more stylised video, and it may need props, certain angles etc. You can layer all of that on top, but this is the basic structure you need to have.
Now that you have your script, it’s time to reverse engineer the questions that will get you there for each section.
Keep to open-ended questions. Something like “If a stranger asked you why this company even exists, what would you tell them?” And don’t worry about open-ended questions stopping people in their tracks; you’re not going to include that in the edit, you’re after the thought they lead to.
If it doesn’t work out the first time, don’t worry. Just leave your team to answer open questions in their own time.
Even if they squirm and need to think about it for a bit, let them. It means you’re more likely to get something honest and hopefully, positive.
If your company truly sucks to work, there’s not much you can do about it here. But otherwise, it’ll be fine.
Get creative with the questions from all your sections. But remember to avoid those that have “Yes” or “No” answers or those that have implied answers like “Can you tell me why our widgets are the best?”
Decide if you have the capacity for this, or if you need to have a professional team brought in. If this is the first bit of in-house production, better leave it to the professionals.
They are better knowledgeable about the subtle differences between playfulness and mawkishness, for example.
Hopefully, we’ve been successful in answering the question “how to make an About Us video” up till now and you’ve gathered some good stuff.
If you’ve opted to do this in-house because you’ve already edited a few projects, we’ve got you covered. Here are a few things that can help in making the editing phase of your meet the team video quick and effective:
Have questions written down in the timeline.
In the timeline, it’s better to give yourself some text chunks with the questions written down so you can easily catalogue all the answers. Now you can listen through and cut out all the waffle and outtakes. As you go, you can also look for that killer statement that can act as a pivot for the beginning. It’s usually obvious when you hear those statements, or you may have a few possible ones to choose from.
Put the hook in the beginning.
The first thing you want your audience to hear is something compelling or even cryptic as long as the meaning becomes clear later. Keep that in mind while editing. This will trigger the listener with the idea that this is new information, and it’s more likely that they’ll continue to watch.
Reorder until it’s perfect!
Reorder anything that will make your About Us video better. You can now abandon the structure that was made to build questions for the production, or keep it as it was filmed. It really just depends on how much energy you need to create to fit with the rest of your comms.
We hope you were able to learn how to make an About Us video that doesn’t send your client and prospects running far away.
If you liked our content, you better read the rest of our blog.
We also have a YouTube channel where we’re pursuing a sort of warts, and all “show and tell” kind of thing. There, we are showing people what we did that didn’t work and also a few things that really did. That’s our growth strategy, and it seems to be working.
Join us at this stage even if you’re hoping we’ll secretly fail so you’ll have another excuse not to grow your channel!
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