Employee engagement is simple in real time and in small groups. It becomes much more difficult as your organization grows. When your organization has thousands of people, it becomes an uphill battle.
What’s the best way to engage staff across multiple departments and locations? Videos. Let’s dive into why video is so uniquely effective, and how to capitalize on it.
Appeal to Emotions through Video Storytelling
People tend to make emotionally- based decisions, and so emotional connection is the cornerstone of building trust and cultivating positive change.
This is easy to see in a marketing sense, but the same is true when it comes to recruiting new employees, as well as engaging your coworkers.
Your ideal aim with internal marketing is to Appeal to Emotions.
Oral storytelling has existed for much, much longer than written word, and as a result, our brains are wired to grab onto these types of stories. We remember more details from stories, and it holds our attention longer. In addition to that, stories can propel us to action.
The most effective way to appeal to emotions is by telling stories.
You might say: Can’t we just write up some content and send that to our staff? After all, creating videos is more involved and time consuming than just writing about it.
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. And while that’s not an exact formula, it’s true that images tend to be more impactful than written words. In fact, about 30% of our brain is dedicated to the sole task of vision. At one point or another, you have undoubtedly heard someone say that they are a “visual learner.” In reality, everyone who has vision is a visual learner.
As humans, we actually have mirror neurons and neurochemicals in our brain that convert images seen into emotions and reactions.
One last nerdy fact: video provides the same experience at scale.
If a group of people read a book and you ask them to describe how they visualize certain characters or locations, you will get unique and varying “mental images”. But if you ask a group of people who watched a movie to describe the look of characters or locations, the same images will be recalled. This makes sense of course, but my point is that when you want all of your staff to be on the same page, using video for your most important messages is far more effective than text, in large part due to human nature.
This is why we say video has “superpowers.” It super- performs in: grabbing interest, connecting emotionally, and creating a similar experience at scale.
For these reasons, every brand should be utilizing video to its fullest potential!