What Is Corporate Video? Complete Guide for 2026
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A corporate video is basically a video your company uses to communicate something about the business itself to employees, new hires, investors, partners, or other stakeholders.
That could be onboarding a new team, explaining a company-wide change, training employees, sharing your culture and values, or keeping stakeholders up to date.
And sure, you could put all of that into another PDF, presentation, or very long email. But some things are just easier to understand when you can see and hear them.
That’s where corporate video comes in.
But there’s quite a lot that falls under that umbrella. So in this guide, we’ll break down what counts as a corporate video, the different types you can make, what they cost, and how to actually create one.
Corporate video vs commercial video
This might be the section that helps you work out whether you actually need a corporate video or a commercial video.
We’ve had plenty of clients come to us with a clear idea of what they want their video to look like. But once we start asking “Who is this actually for?” and “What do you need them to understand or do after watching it?”, things can get a little blurry.
We hear things like:
“We want to use it with customers, but also internally to train our employees.”
Or:
“It’s about our company, but we also want to use it to help sell what we do.”
And sometimes:
“We need it for onboarding, but it would be great if the sales team could use it too.”
Technically, you can try to make one video do all of those things. But this is where we’d draw a pretty clear line between corporate video and commercial video.
If the main purpose is to promote or sell your product or service, it’s commercial. If the main purpose is to communicate something about the company itself to employees, new hires, investors, partners, or other stakeholders, it’s corporate.
That distinction matters because the person watching changes what the video needs to say.
A prospect might need to understand why they should buy your product. A new employee might need to understand how your company works. An existing employee might need to learn a new process or policy. An investor or partner might need to understand what’s changing in the business.
Those are completely different reasons for watching, so trying to squeeze them into the same video can leave you with something that doesn’t quite work for any of them.
A simple way to separate the two is to ask: Who is the primary audience, and what is the primary job of this video?
That’s the line we use:
selling the product = commercial video;
A customer might need to understand why they should buy your product. An employee might need to understand how something works or what they need to do. Trying to make one video do both can leave you with something that doesn't quite work for either audience.
That’s why it helps to understand the difference before you start production:
Why use corporate video?
Companies deal with a lot of information, detail, and data, and not all of it is easy to communicate. New employees, stakeholders, or investors might need to understand something quickly, but another long PDF, presentation, or email isn’t always the easiest way to get them there.
That’s where corporate video helps. It lets you communicate important information faster and more clearly, using visuals, sound, motion, and storytelling to make complicated topics easier to understand.
There’s research behind this too. A study published by Athabasca University in Canada found that professionals using video-driven online training achieved a 76.6% knowledge score, supporting the role video can play in workplace learning.
And once you’ve made the video, you can use it across your onboarding programme, training platform, internal meetings, company events, or website, depending on who needs to see it.
Of course, not everything needs a video. But when there’s a lot to explain and you need people to understand it quickly, video can often do the job better than another 20-page document.
What are corporate videos used for?
We do believe that every corporate video should have its own goal and purpose. An onboarding video is trying to do something very different from a leadership update, and a sustainability video has a completely different audience from an employee training video.
But generally, the way we see it is pretty simple: companies use corporate video whenever they need to communicate something important about the business to employees, new hires, investors, partners, or other stakeholders.
If the video isn’t selling a product or service, it probably falls under corporate video.
You might be welcoming someone into the company, helping employees understand a new process, explaining an organisational change, sharing what the company stands for, or keeping stakeholders informed about what’s happening in the business.
Some of the most common uses include:
So there isn’t really one job that a corporate video needs to do. What matters is who you’re speaking to, what you need them to understand, and why you’re communicating it in the first place.
Types of corporate video & examples
Quick heads-up before we get into the list: these are the names we use at Motion The Agency, so you might call them something slightly different internally.
And this definitely isn’t every type of corporate video you can make. These are simply the ones we see companies looking for most often.
- Training & internal communication videos — Probably the broadest one on the list. This covers the videos you use to keep people across the company informed or help them do their jobs, from employee training and onboarding to internal updates, organisational changes, policies and procedures.
- Employer branding videos — These are more about showing potential hires what it’s actually like to work at your company. Think employee stories, recruitment videos, office or team content, and day-in-the-life videos.
- Company culture & values videos — This is where you can talk about the bigger picture behind the company: why you exist, what you believe in, where you’re heading, and the people behind it. That could be your mission and values, a message from leadership, your company story, or a big milestone worth celebrating.
- CSR, sustainability & compliance videos — Not always the easiest subjects to make interesting, but often some of the most important to communicate clearly. These can cover sustainability progress, CSR initiatives, compliance training, company policies, or standards your employees and stakeholders need to understand.
Do you need more than one corporate video?
As you can probably see from the examples above, there isn’t one corporate video that can communicate everything. And in our opinion, there shouldn’t be.
Every company has different messages to communicate, different goals to achieve, and different people they need to speak to. Even videos made for the same general purpose can have completely different audiences. An onboarding video for new hires, for example, will need to communicate very differently from a training video made for an experienced team.
That’s why we don’t really believe in a one-size-fits-all corporate video. The format should always come back to three things: who you’re speaking to, what you need to communicate, and what you want the video to achieve.
And realistically, that usually means you’ll need more than one video. Companies change all the time. Teams grow, processes change, policies get updated, and there’s always something new people need to know. So corporate video isn’t really something you make once and forget about. It’s something you’ll probably need to create and update fairly regularly as the company changes.
Animation vs live action for corporate video
One thing we know for sure about corporate video is that the style you choose changes both the production process and what you get at the end of it.
As a motion design-forward agency, we’re naturally much more experienced on the animation side. That’s what we do every day. We do work with live-action footage and hybrid production too, but we’re not going to pretend we’re a traditional live-action production house.
So for the comparison below, we’ve tried to be as accurate as possible about what goes into live-action production based on the projects we’ve worked on and what we know about the process.
And one important thing to keep in mind: this isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison. Live action and animation are made in completely different ways, the budget goes to different things, and each is better suited to showing different things.
So rather than looking at this as “which one is better?”, think of it as which approach makes more sense for what you need to communicate.
Animation
Animation can range from simple, template-based production to completely custom, high-end work. At the more affordable end, you’re usually looking at stock assets, basic motion graphics, or AI tools, which can be quick and accessible but give you less control over how the final video looks.
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Custom animation gives you much more freedom to build the visuals around what you actually need to communicate. That’s one reason it tends to work particularly well for training and onboarding videos, especially for software companies. There often isn’t a physical product or process you need to film, so instead you can animate the interface, workflows, data, or more abstract concepts people need to understand. And naturally, the more custom and detailed the animation becomes, the more time, creative work, and budget it requires.
Live-action
Live-action production can be as simple as filming a CEO interview in one location or as involved as a large-scale shoot with multiple locations, specialist crews, advanced equipment, and VFX. As the production gets bigger, you’re not just paying for better cameras—you’re adding more people, locations, equipment, filming days, and post-production, which is why the cost can climb pretty quickly.
Live action tends to work particularly well when you actually need a person or something physical on screen. That could be a company-wide announcement where employees need to hear directly from leadership, an employee story where the person is the whole point, or a training video where someone needs to physically demonstrate what to do. If seeing the real person, place, equipment, or process helps get the message across, live action usually makes a lot of sense.
How to create a corporate video
There are a lot of ways to make a corporate video, and the process will look slightly different depending on whether you’re creating something simple internally or working with a production team on a more polished piece.
And if you’d rather work with an agency, we’ve also put together a list of the top corporate video production companies to help you find the right one for your project.
But generally, it comes down to the same four areas: the tools you use, pre-production, production, and post-production.
Tools for creating a corporate video
You don’t necessarily need all of these, but these are some of the tools commonly used across different parts of corporate video production:
The tools you need really depend on what you’re making. A quick internal training video might only need Loom, while a fully animated company video could involve Figma, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and several other tools along the way.
Pre-production: Plan before you make anything
This is where most of the important decisions happen. Before you start filming or animating, you need to work out what you’re actually trying to communicate and how you’re going to do it.
The main goal of pre-production is to remove as much guesswork as possible before the actual production starts. By this point, you should know what the video needs to communicate, what the audience will see, which production format makes the most sense, and roughly what it will take to make it.
This is also where you want to catch problems early. Changing a script or storyboard during pre-production is much easier than changing direction once filming has happened or animation is already underway. The clearer these decisions are upfront, the easier it is to keep the production on schedule, within budget, and moving in the same creative direction.
Production: Bring everything to life
This is where the actual video gets made, and the process can look very different depending on the format you’ve chosen.
Production is where everything planned during pre-production actually starts coming to life. What happens here depends heavily on the format you’ve chosen. A live-action project moves into filming, while an animated project moves into designing and animating the approved visuals. With 3D, there are usually a few more technical stages before you reach the finished scenes.
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The important thing is that each format has a very different production process. Live action depends more on people, locations, equipment, and shoot days, while animation gives you more control over what appears on screen but requires time to design and animate it. 3D gives you even more control over objects, environments, and camera movement, but usually comes with additional production stages.
That’s why choosing the right format during pre-production matters so much. It doesn’t just change how the final video looks; it changes how the entire video gets made, how long it takes, and where the production effort goes.
Post-production: Bring it all together
Once everything has been filmed or animated, you still have to turn those individual pieces into the finished video.
For live action, that usually means choosing the best takes, editing the footage, colour correcting, adding graphics, cleaning up the audio, and making sure everything flows properly.
For animation, it’s about refining the timing and motion, bringing all the scenes together, adding sound design and music, and polishing the smaller details.
This is also where feedback and revisions come in. Corporate videos often need input from different people across the company, so you’ll usually go through a few rounds of review before everything is signed off and ready to use.
How much does a corporate video cost?
Corporate video costs can vary a lot depending on what you’re making. A simple internal video will naturally cost much less than a custom animation or a large live-action production.
For us, animated corporate videos start at $3,480 for 30 seconds. Live-action benchmarks range from around $4,231 for a lean production to $52,897 for a larger flagship production, with more complex projects sometimes reaching $25,000–$75,000.
That difference mostly comes down to what goes into making the video. Things like video length, animation complexity, crew, talent, locations, equipment, filming days, turnaround, and the number of deliverables can all have a pretty big impact on the final cost.
If you want to get into the numbers properly, we’ve broken down typical production costs, what affects them, and our own pricing in our corporate video cost guide.
Conclusion
So, after all of that, what is corporate video really about? For us, it’s pretty simple: using video to communicate something important about your company to the people who need to understand it. That could be employees, new hires, investors, partners, or other stakeholders.
And there isn’t one format that works for everything. You might need animation for software training, live action for a company-wide message from your CEO, or a mix of both for something bigger. It always comes back to who you’re speaking to, what you need them to understand, and what you want the video to achieve.
That’s also why we don’t really see corporate video as something you make once and forget about. Companies change, teams grow, processes get updated, and there will always be new things that need communicating.
If you’re thinking about making one, check out our corporate video service to see how we can help. Or if you already have an idea in mind, get a free sample and we’ll show you what it could look like using your own brand before you commit to anything.
FAQ
Widi Setyowati
Widi is a content marketing specialist with experience in video marketing, email marketing, and content creation. At Motion The Agency, she specializes in crafting engaging video campaigns, impactful email outreach, and insightful written content.
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