A business’s success is usually described with facts and figures—profits, year-to-year growth, funding.
These details are critical, but the success of an organization also depends on a more abstract factor: emotional investment.
People need to understand why they should invest in your products or services. When they feel disconnected from your brand, there’s no force driving your company’s progress. Emotional investment matters internally as well. Employees should feel motivated to build the business and make improvements.
Video bios connect people to your brand. Seeing the emotions and expressions of your team members, viewers feel a sense of familiarity and trust in your organization. With that emotional investment, you have more people, both internally and externally, supporting your organization and helping it grow.
What’s an Employee Bio Video?
It’s this, from Asia on our marketing team:
A video bio is a way for employees to introduce themselves in a professional context, such as an all-hands meeting, conference, on your website, on social media, or via email. It summarizes their key qualities so viewers can get a better sense of their interests, strengths, and more.
A typical employee bio video should include professional details to show how the person fits within their organization. Examples of this professional info include:
- Job title
- Years of experience in their field
- Area(s) of expertise
At the same time, an employee video bio should include personal details to provide a full picture of their interests. Hearing employees talk about their lives outside of work makes them a bit more relatable. Employees might describe:
- Where they’re originally from
- Their family and friends
- Their favorite activities outside of work
Here at Vyond, we ask every new employee to create an “intro video” their first week so our entire team can get to know them a bit better.
Besides connecting internal team members in onboarding, these intro videos can also be used by anyone to engage with people outside of your organization and build your brand image.
How to Engage with Video Bios
Video bios are a powerful way to humanize your brand. Whether viewers are internal employees or potential leads, watching and listing to a team member—their mannerisms, voice, and more—can help your company feel more relatable, familiar, and authentic.
Here are a few areas where you can expect to find video bios in a business context:
- Client communication: Sharing employee video bios with customers builds their confidence in your team and your business’ work.
- Conferences: If you’re speaking at a conference, share your video bio with attendees beforehand to build hype around your talk and establish familiarity with the audience.
- Team communication: Sharing video bios within your team quickly builds rapport, so everyone feels welcome and excited to work together.
With each of these areas, video bios make your business feel more approachable and friendly, so more people—both internally and externally—want to support it, and you.
Connect with Customers
In a world of online activity, businesses today mostly engage with customers virtually rather than in-person. But the typical types of online messaging—an email, a social media post—often aren’t as personal as meeting face to face.
Video bios are a powerful way to build rapport with customers online. Unlike other mediums, a video captures the emotions and expressions of your team members. With these personal details, video bios build customers’ trust and confidence in your company as they get to know more about your employees.
Here are a few key ways your sales team, support team, and other team members can distribute video bios to connect with clients as they move down the funnel:
- Social media campaigns: Use social media ads with employee bio videos to attract targeted leads. Watching and hearing your team member will build viewers’ confidence in your company and push them to click through for more information. The online video hosting platform Brightcove used this tactic by featuring an Account Director video bio in their Facebook ad.
- About us pages: Include your team’s video bios on your site’s About Us page to introduce new visitors and leads to your company. The real estate firm AQUILA features their team members’ video bios on their “About AQUILA” page.
- Email signatures: Employees, especially sales reps, constantly have to email people who aren’t familiar with their business. Including a video bio in your email signature ensures that you leave a positive first impression on everyone you contact. As an example, an account manager at the screen recording company TechSmith includes a video bio in his email signature. Here’s how they made the video email signature below.
- Follow-up emails: When one of your team members needs to introduce themselves to a customer, it can be a valuable opportunity to share a video bio. Sending the video leaves a positive first impression on clients before meeting you. The behavioral marketing company SaleCycle, for example, has sales reps email their video bio to clients once they schedule a product demo.
- Email campaigns: Send out an email flow with video bios to introduce key members of your team to existing customers. Brightcove launched a “Meet Your Account Manager” campaign to introduce account reps through video to existing clients.
Using these distribution methods, you can share your employees’ video bios with customers to build their confidence in your brand and drive them to engage with your business.
Connect with Conference Attendees
Beyond online communication, you can also connect with potential clients face to face by speaking at a conference. Sharing your expertise with conference attendees motivates them to learn more about your company and engage with your business.
To prep your audience before your talk, share your video bio with them. Hearing you talk about your background and specialties will build hype around your talk. The more viewers understand your expertise and why you were invited to speak, the more excited they’ll be to attend your speaking session.
Moreover, sharing a video bio before your talk builds an emotional connection with your conference audience. After learning about your personal details—your behavior, voice, story—through the video bio, conference attendees will feel a sense of familiarity with you that helps them stay engaged during your talk.
This video bio of aerospace engineer Natalie Panek was released by TEDxToronto to build hype around her talk.
There are a few ways to share your video bio with conference attendees before your talk:
- Talk to the conference about distributing it. You can suggest that they share your video on the conference website or on their social media accounts.
- Ask your company to share it. If you think that your business’ target audience will be attending, ask your company to share your video bio on social media as a promo for your talk.
- Play the video right before you go on stage. Ask the conference to cue your video bio before you enter on stage. Playing it right before your talk allows you to succinctly convey your background information and introduce yourself to the audience.
Whether you share your video bio weeks before or right before your talk, presenting this to your audience leaves a strong, positive first impression. Feeling like they already know you, conference attendees will be ready to listen and excited to hear more about your company after watching your video bio.
Connect with Your Team
Along with gaining clients’ support, your company needs employees to feel emotionally connected to the business in order to thrive. Without that sense of attachment, team members won’t be motivated in the long-term to work hard and help the company grow.
Sharing video bios within your team helps employees feel a stronger bond with the company, particularly during onboarding. If you introduce new employees to the rest of the company through video bios, you can establish a sense of familiarity quickly.
Here at Vyond, each new team member spends time during their first few days learning how to use Vyond and creating a short biographical video to be sent out to the entire company. This introduction video helps us get to know the new person — and these virtual connections help us build relationships with our international team, and in turn, improve our product development.
Here’s an example from Monique on the Vyond customer success team:
Along with new hires introducing themselves, video bios can be used by top executives to introduce themselves to new employees. With the video created, new hires can get to know the leaders of the company during their onboarding period. Here’s an example of a CEO video bio from the human resources software company BambooHR.
Sharing video bios within your team strengthens employee relationships. With closer bonds and a friendly atmosphere established, employees are happy to be a part of your business and work towards making it a better company.
Connect People with Your Business Through Video Bios
Emotional and dynamic, video bios strengthen your company’s foundational relationships. Whether it’s a client or an employee, viewers who watch your employees talk about their lives, jobs, and more will find your business more relatable. With that feeling of attachment, they’re more emotionally invested in your business and ready to contribute towards the company’s long-term success.
About Vyond
Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results.
With Vyond, it’s easy to create video for your training. Get started making your own videos today. Start a free 14-day trial and sign up for our bi-weekly webinar.
