How to Effectively Market Employee Benefits
When it comes to employee benefits, providing great options isn’t enough—your employees need to understand and access them. And benefits communication can be a challenge in companies with diverse job roles and varying access to technology. From factory floors to corner offices, marketing your benefits program requires a multi-channel strategy that meets employees where they are. Employee benefits videos are essential to the strategy.
Why Benefits Marketing Is So Challenging
- Plan Complexity: Understanding how an HSA differs from an HRA and how FSAs fit in requires simplification. Employees need more than one way to digest this complex information.
- Access Gaps: Office workers may have intranet access and email, while fulfillment center staff may only catch updates via information in the break room. A mechanic at Boeing and a corporate analyst at Amazon have vastly different workdays, routines, and access to communication tools.
- Information Overload: Even when benefits information is shared, it’s often buried in dense PDFs or hard-to-navigate portals, leaving employees overwhelmed or disengaged.
Enter Video: The Versatile, Scalable Solution
Benefits videos allow companies to communicate clearly, visually, and narratively across multiple platforms. They break down complex benefit structures, illustrate real-life scenarios, and drive engagement. Here some ways we’ve seen it done right:
1. Create Short, Attention-Grabbing Benefit Ads
Think of these like commercials: 15–30 second spots that tease what’s new or most important this year. These can be shared via:
- Internal social channels
- Employee emails
- Text messages
- QR codes on posters or postcards
These short videos act as the “hook,” leading employees to longer-form benefits explainer videos or portals where they can get more detailed information. Because these ads are new each year and have a short shelf life they can push creative limits to grab eyeballs. For example, use actual employees to boost internal excitement… leverage humorous themes… or maybe feature some puppets?
2. Use Storytelling to Make Benefits Relatable
Confusion and complexity often come from employees not seeing how benefits apply to their real lives. Longer ‘evergreen’ 1-2 minute explainer benefits videos on core benefit topics can explain what is available and how employees can use their benefits.
3. Distribute Across Multiple Channels
Don’t rely on just one medium. A robust benefits marketing campaign may include:
- Email newsletters with embedded or linked videos
- Microsites and intranet pages
- Text messages with video links
- Posters in break rooms and elevators with scannable QR codes
- Animated GIFs or banners on employee portals
The more touchpoints you offer, the better your chance of reaching everyone.
4. Track Engagement and Optimize
Campaign tracking let you see which platforms drive the most engagement. Did more people watch the video from the email link or the elevator QR code? Use that data to refine future campaigns.
Final Thoughts
Benefits will likely always be complex—but your communication strategy doesn’t have to be. By leaning into short-form video, cross-channel distribution, employee storytelling, and data-driven optimization, you can dramatically improve awareness, understanding, and engagement.
Whether your employees are in a truck, on the factory floor, or behind a desk, the right video at the right time can make all the difference.
