by Usman SheikhVideos On Homepage That Work & Video Storytelling Framework (With 5 Examples)
The homepage video has one job, and it is not the job most companies give it.
It is not there to explain what you do. Text does that faster and the viewer can skim it. It is there to prove that a real company with competent people stands behind the page, which is something text cannot do at all.
That distinction decides everything about how the video should be made. If the job is explanation, you write a script and hire a voice artist. If the job is proof, you put your own people on camera and let them talk.
Why proof is the job
A visitor landing on your homepage is running one test before any other: is this real. Real company, real people, real capability, or a well-designed shell.
This is more acute the more serious the purchase. If someone is about to hand you a regulated marketing account, a capital equipment order or a multi-year contract, the first question is not what you do. It is whether you will still be answering the phone in eighteen months and whether the people doing the work know what they are doing.
An animated explainer with a stock voiceover answers none of that. Forty seconds of your actual head of operations explaining, imperfectly, how they approach a problem answers all of it.
What to put in it
- Faces and names of people who actually do the work. Not just the founder. The person the client will deal with in month two.
- The workplace. The floor, the lab, the studio, the office. Wherever the thing happens.
- Something specific being done. One real process, shown, not described in the abstract.
- One sentence of positioning. Who you are for and what you refuse to do. Said by a person, not a title card.
What to leave out: stock footage of cities at dusk, animated logos, a voiceover that nobody in the company recognises, and any sentence that a competitor could say word for word.
A storytelling framework that holds up
Four beats, ninety seconds total.
- The situation. Name the problem the viewer is in right now, in their words. Ten seconds.
- The complication. Why the obvious solution does not work for them. This is the beat everyone skips and it is the one that earns the rest. Fifteen seconds.
- The proof. Your people, your workplace, one real thing being done well. Forty-five seconds.
- The next step. One action, spoken plainly. Twenty seconds.
Notice that three of the four beats are about the viewer or the evidence. Only the third is about you, and even then it is shown rather than claimed.
The technical part that gets ignored
Do not autoplay with sound. Do not let the video block the page from rendering. Host it so the page still loads fast on a phone on a plant floor with bad reception, because that is where a meaningful share of your industrial audience actually is.
And caption it. A large proportion of viewing happens with sound off, and captions are also the only part of a video that a search engine or an AI assistant can read. An uncaptioned video is invisible to everything except a human who chose to press play.
Measuring it
Play rate and completion tell you whether the video is good. They do not tell you whether it worked. The measure that matters is what happens on the page around it: whether visitors who watch go on to the pages that indicate real intent, and whether enquiries mention something they saw.
If you want the companion piece on customer video, including the regulatory constraints that apply in financial services, read how to make a testimonial video that is actually believed.
Last reviewed 19 September 2026.
Oil and gas. Manufacturing. Retail. Private equity.
Qualified as a CPA in Canada and the United States. Twenty years across financial planning and analysis, agency ownership and marketing leadership. Previously Senior Director of Performance and Growth at Equiton, a private equity real estate manager with nearly $2 billion under management, running both the retail and the wholesale channel. Earlier, oil and gas, and campaigns across pharmaceutical, insurance and industrial manufacturing.