Brands often fail to leverage the power of video marketing because their approach hasn’t been designed to realise the medium’s full potential. Video content can present information in ways that other mediums simply cannot. In addition to being immediately consumable and ultra-engaging, when executed correctly video content is both emotionally compelling and memorable.
Here’s what you need to know to produce a powerful brand film for your business.
Maintaining a Strong Brand Identity
In creating any form of content, you need to ensure that your brand narrative is clear and easy to understand. Consistency is key here to avoid confusing your audience or creating the impression that you aren’t dependable or trustworthy. Shaping a strong brand identity isn’t always easy, which is why you must consider:
Brand Archetypes
Based on the Jungian concept of universal archetypes, brand archetype embody a set of behavioural, ethical and personality-driven motivations which can effectively represent the core ethos of your brand. These are narrative tropes like the hero, sage, magician and explorer. Businesses with a keen understanding of their brand archetype will find it far easier to anchor their personality and make consistent decisions surrounding the type of content they create and the tone of voice they use to convey their messaging.
Visual Language
As your identity should capture the essence of your brand, developing and utilising a distinctive and cohesive visual language will help you to communicate the nuances of your personality through every piece of video content you create.
In creating a cohesive visual language, everything from your chosen colour palette to your typography matters. Additionally, your use of iconography and imagery will be informed by your visual language and everything from motion graphics to cinematography should be used appropriately to convey who you are, what you do and why you are the right brand for your audience.
Creating Engaging Content
The video content landscape is already extremely competitive and to effectively stand out from your competition, you need to know how to create a brand video that will genuinely resonate with your audience.
Defining your Objective
Taking the time to define your goals and objectives before doing anything else will help you to determine exactly what you want your video content to help you to achieve. This information will inform the format and the subject of your video. From animation to live action, with the right team, anything is possible. However, you need to know exactly what you want to gain from this process to secure a solid return on your investment (ROI).
Understanding your Audience
Constructing a series of customer personas and taking the time to think about the behaviours and motivations of your ideal audience will help you to create a brand film that will resonate with them.
Forming Emotional Connections
It’s one thing to grab the attention of your audience, but it’s another thing entirely to engage them for long enough to effectively convey your message in a way that will stay with them long after they have finished watching.
Understanding the emotional triggers of your audience will help you to stimulate their curiosity and form meaningful connections with them through storytelling.
Effective Video Activation
It is important to design and implement a strong video activation strategy to ensure that your brand film gets seen by the right people at the right times. Crucially, your activation strategy should be considered before jumping into the production process because you need to know that the material you put together has the potential to reach your target audience.
Optimisation
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an essential component of every digital marketing campaign. Although algorithms are constantly improving, search engines are still by no means as adept at indexing video content as they are at indexing images and text. To ensure your video content reaches the right audiences, you should:
- Add video captions, which will also ensure that your content is accessible to an audience who do not speak the same language as you
- Use relevant keywords in your video title and descriptions
- Optimise your video’s metadata
Distribution
It is important to distribute your brand content through the relevant channels to reach the maximum number of engaged people to create the biggest possible online impact. It should be noted here that different promotional strategies will be required to make the right impression on each platform.
Reframing your video can also give it a new lease of life and drive additional engagement opportunities after its initial launch. Following a successful social media launch, for example, you could embed your video content in a blog post paired with complimentary copy and other visual content that will deliver additional value to your audience.
You might also choose to work with relevant influencers within your niche to tap into their audiences and further extend your reach.
Businesses which fail to take the time to shape and communicate a strong brand identity through their brand films will struggle to adequately differentiate themselves from their competition and secure the kind of success they want to see.