Corporate videos have traditionally got a bad rap from many parts of our industry, seen by many as fusty, formulaic and uninspiring.

However, over the past few years, video has become a key tool in the armouries of marketers. We’ve seen more and more brands coming to us looking to license music to take their video campaigns to the next level.

The value of this approach speaks for itself. According to HubSpot, four times as many people would prefer to watch a video about a product than read about it. In addition, recent survey results from Wyzowl found that 88 per cent of businesses consider video an important part of their marketing strategies and 78 per cent believe it shows a positive ROI.

Whether you’re using video to drive customer acquisition through paid social, or as a conversion tool to reassure and build credibility, high quality video with a great soundtrack is proving difficult to beat. Music allows you to engage with an audience on an emotional level and add that extra dimension to the message you are trying to get across with your video content.

So, how can marketers take their corporate videos to the next level?

Define your purpose and achieve stakeholder buy-in

Before you even get to the stage of commissioning a piece with a production or videography company, it is essential you go through a thorough briefing process with stakeholders and ask yourself these key questions. What is the overall purpose of the video? Who is the target audience and what do we want them to think/feel/do as a result of watching the video?

Is everyone on board?

Aligning stakeholder expectations is critical for success here. One useful approach is to create a template or briefing document that all key investors feed into and sign-off on. By tying down desired objectives, content and outcomes, these templates can enable stakeholders to communicate their achievement goals efficiently while also acting as a benchmark to judge the final video once created.

This is an essential process. Without this kind of template in place, there could well be endless quibbling over the direction of visuals, content or music.

Experiment with your music choice

Once you’ve firmed up the brief for the video, you will need to consider what you want the audience to think, feel or do after seeing the video. Your choice of music plays in key role in this. As Alfred Hitchcock puts it: “If music and pictures are doing the same thing then one of them is being wasted” – in other words, be creative and experiment with tracks to inspire your audience in the right way.

Let’s say you want to portray your company as a future-facing technology innovator. Alongside evidence of your position you have on film, your choice of music can help stimulating this image for audience.

An atmospheric electronic soundtrack for example, staying instrumental to prevent drawing attention from your key messages, can go a long way in subliminally suggesting this positioning.

An easy trap for B2B marketers to fall into is to think of their target audience in purely business terms. Keep in mind that everyone is a consumer on some level. Even top-level business executives want to be entertained, excited or inspired when they consume media of any kind.

Learn from B2C brands

Great music requires great talent to create and produce it. As such, these creatives need to be supported to continue creating tracks to benefit your marketing campaigns. Free music outlets exist, but the lack of variety or quality of the songs on offer usually lead to lacklustre or formulaic marketing videos.

It pays to be selective with your music

This is where B2B marketers can learn a lot from their B2C counterparts. Brands like John Lewis, Sainsbury’s and TK Maxx have all employed a more innovative use of music in their recent Christmas adverts to support their campaigns.

Their choice of music and artist directly supported the brand’s proposition and key message from their campaign; from Sainsbury’s charming sentimentality to TK Maxx’s ‘surprising’ price promises.

In each case however, these B2C brands recognised the importance music can play in a video’s overall effect on its audience and worked with the best artists and music to support their campaigns. Why shouldn’t B2B marketers follow the same path to success?

This route can be achieved either directly with the musician themselves, or through a reputable music licensing company that holds the rights to the music from a variety of content creators. Either way, you are assuring that the musicians your music comes from are receiving fair payment for their work while ensuring your legal right to use their tracks in your video.

B2B marketers are becoming more much confident in the use of video in their work. Don’t push music to the background with your corporate films – treat it as an integral part of your messaging to create engaging, mature campaigns to truly grab your audience’s attention.

Simon Marett is director of marketing at Audio Network.