Brand Videos
Building a brand is never an easy task, but bespoke video content could help you to stand out from the crowd and resonate with your target audience.
Why use video?
Video is attracting a steadily growing share of online consumer traffic, which means all businesses have a lot to gain from making it a key part of their promotional strategies.
Video creation can help you achieve many of your marketing goals, including one objective that most companies consider absolutely crucial: building and maintaining a strong brand.
The ability to plan, produce and promote effective branded videos will help you grow your audience and strengthen your relationships with existing customers.
Typical uses of brand videos
There are many ways you can use video content to develop your brand and articulate the message of what your company stands for and what you can offer your customers. It’s important to understand these various potential uses and to consider what approach makes the most sense for your organisation.
Showcase company culture
Fundamental factors like price and the quality of your product or service are key considerations for all customers. However, many prospective buyers will want to go further than these basic factors and get an idea of things like your company culture before deciding to do business with you. This is particularly true of B2B clients, who tend to go through a longer sales cycle than B2C customers.
Branded videos are an ideal format if you want to give your audience a glimpse ‘behind the scenes’ of your business. You can use them to present a picture of your organisational culture by introducing viewers to your employees or showing some of the activities that take place at your company every day. This is a great way to show the human side of your firm and make emotional connections with existing and prospective customers.
Tell your brand story
Telling a compelling story is an important step on your journey to building a strong brand, and it’s also one of the many activities to which video is ideally suited.
A well-crafted piece of branded video content is one of the best ways to give your customers an insight into key subjects like:
- The origins and history of your business
- The values and principles you stand for
- How you want to grow and evolve in the coming years
- What differentiates you from your competitors
Consolidate the look of your brand
Visual components have an essential role to play in the brand-building process. Elements like the colours and font you use in your web and social media content and various marketing materials need to be carefully planned and consistent if you want members of your target audience to remember you.
Once you have settled on the look of your brand, video content can help you strengthen it and convey it to your ideal customers in a medium that is impactful, memorable and easy for them to digest.
Show off your products and services
You need effective marketing to build a strong brand, but you also need good products and services that deliver value and get your customers not just coming back for more, but recommending you to their friends and contacts.
Video is the perfect medium to show your target audience what they can expect if they buy from you. Slick and professional videos can maximise the appeal of physical products and put services in context by showing how they’re used and the benefits they provide.
Key features of brand videos
Branded video content offers enormous potential for you to get your business noticed and to expand your audience. To really make the most of it, you need to ensure you’re including the right features in your videos.
A strong message
One of the key ideas you need to set in stone before embarking on a brand video project is the message you want to convey in the content. It should be clear, powerful and easy to understand.
A good way to test if your intended message meets these standards is by seeing if you can encapsulate it in just one or two sentences. If you’re able to do this, you can feel confident that your message is cogent and concise, and therefore more likely to have a strong and lasting impact on your target audience.
Impactful and consistent imagery
It goes without saying that compelling and well-produced imagery should be at the heart of all of your video marketing activities. Where branded video is concerned, every piece of content you create should be visually and aesthetically consistent with your other brand-building materials, from your website landing pages to your Facebook advertising. This will help you gain brand recognition and form stronger bonds with your customers.
If you’re struggling to give your videos the ‘wow’ factor or to make them look professional, there are various tactics you can try to achieve a boost in quality, such as investing in better equipment or more powerful editing software.
Working with an established and experienced video production agency is one of the most reliable ways to achieve the results you want.
A clear call to action
What do you want the viewer to do after watching the video? The answer to this question will help you create your call to action (CTA), which needs to be clear and unequivocal if you want to get good results from your branded video content.
Your CTA could encourage viewers to do anything from signing up for a demonstration of the featured product to sharing the video with their friends and contacts on social media.
Social media optimisation
Harnessing the power of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like will be crucial if you want to raise the performance of your brand videos to the highest possible level.
It’s important, therefore, to optimise your video marketing for social media, taking into account the unique needs and expectations of these users. This process will involve steps such as:
- Ensuring your brand videos work even without sound (since people could be watching in various environments, such as on public transport or at work)
- Using high-quality thumbnail images that stand out in users’ social feeds
- Uploading native videos to Facebook and Instagram, rather than simply sharing a link to YouTube
Why your business needs brand videos
If you’re still wondering whether branded video content represents a good investment for your business, it’s worth considering some of the benefits it can provide when it’s done well.
Keeping up with the competition
Video content is becoming more and more common online, and an increasing number of brands are embracing video marketing to achieve their goals. The best way to stay relevant and maintain visibility in this environment is by producing videos of your own that represent your brand and the value you provide to your audience.
Connecting with your customers
There are countless ways for people to spend their time online these days, so you need to make it as quick and easy as possible for your target audience to discover and engage with your marketing content. Video is ideal for connecting with customers and leaving them with a positive impression as it doesn’t ask them to do anything except sit back and watch.
Improving SEO
Videos often feature highly in search engine results pages (SERPs), particularly for ‘how to’ queries and questions that can be more effectively answered with a visual explanation. High-quality branded video content can support your SEO strategy by boosting your ranking in SERPs and also by earning you backlinks that increase your domain authority.
Things to consider with brand videos
Remembering these key considerations will raise the efficiency of your brand video marketing and help you achieve a better return on your investment in this space.
Planning
Like most forms of marketing, branded video content is most likely to succeed and generate the results you want when it has been thoroughly and carefully planned.
A crucial part of the planning phase is coming up with answers to questions such as:
- What buyer personas are we targeting with this video?
- What is our goal?
- How will we measure progress towards this objective?
- Where will the video be hosted?
- What is the budget?
Understanding and using equipment
Good equipment can be the difference between a mediocre brand video and an outstanding one, but to get maximum value from your gear, you must have the confidence and the expertise to use it properly.
Some modern-day smartphones are powerful enough to create great marketing videos, but without sufficient care and craft you could end up with something that looks cheap and amateurish.
High-end, professional equipment like DSLR cameras can deliver spectacular results, as long as you’re prepared to make the financial investment and you have the technical skills to get the best out of them.
Shooting and editing
The process of shooting and editing a brand video can be daunting if you haven’t done it before or you’re not familiar with the various tools and technical elements involved.
Depending on the scale, ambitions and complexity of your video project, you might have to consider factors such as:
- Hiring actors or presenters to appear in your video, or finding people within your business who are confident enough to get in front of the camera
- Arranging a lighting setup that ensures the key elements of the video are properly lit and the end product looks professional
- Scripting and recording a voiceover
- Organising and storing your footage (which can be particularly challenging with large video files)
- Editing your video
With the right strategy and a good understanding of the fundamentals of the medium, branded video content can help you achieve your key marketing goals.
If you’re keen to start using video marketing but you’re not sure where to start, a specialist agency can provide the answers and guidance you need.
