Creating a Brand Video That Connects with Your Audience
Creating a Brand Video That Connects with Your Audience
Need some inspiration for your next brand video? Presenting your brand to the world with top-notch video content can feel a little overwhelming, especially if you’re not familiar with brand video best practices.
But don’t worry – we’re here to help talk you through what you need to know about the best brand videos out there, giving you some inspiration to bring your latest vision to life. Let’s get stuck in!
What is a brand video?
Our team is all too familiar with brand videos. They’re a type of marketing content that showcases a story about your brand, conveying your company values and goals in an engaging way. By doing so, a brand video aims to build an emotional connection with viewers rather than trying to sell them something.
A successful brand video will hit the objectives of improving brand awareness, trust, and recall. How? Well, it may do this by projecting clear messaging, emotional appeal, and strong storytelling elements. Don’t forget – the content should also feature high production quality and a call-to-action, ensuring the target audience always knows what to do next.
What types of brand videos exist?
There are many different brand video types out there, including:
- Company overview videos
- Company culture videos
- Mission statement videos
- Employee/customer testimonial videos
- Training videos
- Explainer videos
- Behind-the-scenes videos
- Event videos
Why is brand video important?
Why are brand video ideas so vital for your business? Well, the truth is that they can offer your company a great variety of benefits, such as:
Brand humanisation
If you want your brand to seem more relatable and approachable to your target audience, consider giving it a personality through brand video. This type of content can differentiate your business from others and help develop a stronger connection with customers.
Brand awareness
Want to shout about your business from the rooftops? Create an epic brand video, and you’ll be on your way! Brand videos effectively introduce your business to a wider audience, celebrating what makes you unique and special, which your audience may start to recall.
Emotional connections
Brand video has the power to take emotions to the next level, making it easier to connect with your target audience on a deeper level. In turn, this may even be able to help your company generate trust and loyalty in the long run. Win-win!
Customer engagement
There’s just no doubt about it – video content can be much more engaging than text alone, with the capability of capturing attention promptly. Presenting information in an exciting and digestible format may spark engagement and even lead to higher conversion rates.
Versatility
Who said one size has to fit all? Brand videos can be distributed across a variety of channels, from websites to email campaigns to social media platforms. This means that you can seek your audience out, no matter where they prefer to lurk!
Brand video best practices
So, what are the best practices when creating brand videos? Take a look at our top tips below and bring your vision to life in the best way possible!
1. Make your video distinct
A brand exists in a person’s mind as a mental network – a memory structure of images, feelings, experiences, stories, sounds, colours, and symbols. For example, the word ‘Nike’ will conjure a completely different response in your mind from those invoked by the words ‘Compare The Market’.
Brands that consistently develop and reinforce these memory structures have less work to do in the long term to achieve cut-through and sustain brand awareness. When you develop your video content, having an almost unhealthy regard for your distinctive brand assets is important.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that your video should start with a logo right at the beginning and mention your brand name every three seconds. There are different views on logo placement best practices – and, in truth, it depends on what you are trying to achieve.
2. Try emotional storytelling
Capturing the mood and telling an emotional truth are important creative elements in ensuring the effectiveness of your video advertising. However, research has shown that it isn’t necessarily the most entertaining video that generates the best results.
Creating an emotional reaction doesn’t work in isolation – it needs to be balanced with persuasion. Your video needs to tap into human emotion, needs to provide an element of rational thought and ultimately needs to elicit action.
In practice, this means finding the right balance between creating entertaining content (no matter what emotion you are tapping into) and saying enough about how your product or service fits into the story.
Electrical Industries Charity Video
3. Grab attention early
We can make decisions within fractions of a second – so fast, in fact, that our rational (system two) brain may take up to seven to ten seconds to catch up! And we are bombarded with hundreds, even thousands of messages daily – so we naturally employ unconscious, low-effort processes to filter out the unwanted and unengaging.
For your content to connect, it must grab attention within the first few seconds; many experts will say you have up to six seconds to do so. If your logo takes five seconds to resolve, forget it – you’ve probably lost your chance to connect.
Posing a question, eliciting intrigue, making a promise, and beginning a story are just some ways your video can capture your audience's attention.
But, just as the beginning is important, the best creativity starts with understanding exactly where you want to go. We can’t underemphasise the importance of a well-written brief which sets out with the end goal in mind from which the perfect beginning can be crafted.
4. Appeal to the senses
Whilst it’s true that, as filmmakers, much of our attention is focused on the images we create, failing to get the right soundtrack to your video can be the difference between ‘meh’ and great! If you’ve spent any time at all articulating your brand proposition, you will probably have thought about its personality and tone of voice.
Finding the right voiceover, soundtrack, and brand sonic (think ‘We Buy Any Car Dot Com’) are important aspects of your video. It can be hard to justify the expense of commissioning a great jingle, paying the royalty fee to a good tune or commissioning the best voiceover actor to nail your brand tone, but it could make or break your video.
If you want music in your video, it will help if you’ve thought about what style of music suits your brand – are you a cinematic, grand, victorious brand or an edgy, street-wise, hip-hop brand? As we develop the brief into a creative idea, we will also consider the role that music plays in your video – from a subtle background track to maintain attention or a music soundtrack that advances the story to a dramatic piece designed to evoke emotion or an earworm that will stay in your viewer’s mind long after the video has finished.
Glorious Soups video
5. Tailor your video to your audience
Compared with big-budget TV advertising, one of the main attractions of video is that it’s much easier on the pocket. It’s true that you can still spend big money on creating video content, but often the audience isn’t expecting cinema-quality output. This means that you may well have the budget to create several pieces of content tailored specifically to your target audiences and the platforms on which they are viewing.
When planned into the production process, we can usually create different versions of your video for very little additional cost. Whether it’s a slight variation to the script, a different voiceover artist, various video lengths from the same content or alternative graphics and animations, your video will resonate with the audience the more tailored it is.
6. Keep different platforms in mind
Unfortunately, one size does not always fit all. Different platforms often have different requirements, which you must keep at the forefront of your mind when creating brand videos. For instance, Instagram typically favours vertical videos, while you can usually find horizontally formatted videos on YouTube.
Moreover, social media users sometimes watch videos without audio, meaning captions can significantly boost engagement. Knowing your audience's needs across different platforms is integral to capturing their attention.
So, tailoring your video’s format, length, and style to align with each platform’s specifications should never be underestimated. Doing this right can boost your brand video’s visibility as well as the user experience.
7. Include a CTA
Never create a brand video without also creating a CTA to go with it. The best brand videos always include clear call-to-actions so viewers know what to do next.
Whether you want them to purchase your new product, sign up for your weekly newsletter, or hop on their website, an effective CTA at a strategic point in the video can help ramp up those much-wanted conversions.
Ideally, you’ll want to whack a CTA at the beginning of the video to catch early viewers and right at the end to reinforce your message. Remember to implement action-oriented language to be extra-persuasive!
8. Encourage user-generated content
Ah, user-generated content. UGC, like customer testimonials, are becoming ever-popular amongst leading brands. Not only can incorporating user-generated content into your brand videos boost authenticity, but they can also build a sense of community and engagement.
Just ensure you get users' permission to display these videos and ensure the content aligns effectively with your brand’s message. This may help viewers build a stronger connection with your brand and make them more likely to trust you.
9. Keep your branding consistent
Consistency is key – it will be worth remembering this! Consistent branding can reinforce your brand identity, generating trust amongst your audience. Whether you have a strong, bold colour or a familiar logo, you’ll want to slip these elements into your brand video where appropriate, ensuring viewers will recognise your content and associate it with your organisation.
Mixing things up can dilute your brand’s identity and message, so it’s best to keep things simple where visuals and auditory elements are concerned. Do you know McDonald’s golden arches and catchy jingle? You bet you do. Point proven!
10. Monitor your brand video’s performance
There’s no point in publishing a brand video if you’re not going to monitor its performance. Grab your favourite analytics tools and track important metrics like engagement rates, click-through rates, and view count. Doing this can help you understand which brand video elements performed well and which could do better.
This learning experience can help you adjust the content or take a different approach when the next time rolls around. A tactic like this will help you continuously optimise your video strategy and better meet the needs of your target audience. Pretty clever, right?
Brand video ideas: shining examples
If you’re still feeling a little stuck when it comes to brand video, we welcome you to take a look at our top brand video ideas below.
The brand video we worked on for ECCO Safety Group highlights its role in the vehicle safety market. It utilises powerful imagery of emergency and utility vehicles combined with real-world use cases to generate a strong sense of reliability.
We loved the way we captured every stage of the process, their people, and their products while showing off the company's expertise in a visually pleasing way.
At Reel Film, we created a brand video for Chameleon Technology’s Ivie product, showing how the product can fit seamlessly into customers’ daily lives. We were proud of how we were able to make the technology seem approachable in this brand video, concentrating on ease of use while visually demonstrating how the product can improve everyday life.
Furthermore, the powerful voiceover coupled with the inspirational music assists in making the brand relatable.
Concluding on brand video best practices
So, there you have it! Hopefully, you’re a little more confident about approaching brand video best practices and ideas that could take your business marketing to the next level. By following the right brand video best practices, you can show off your company’s personality and start hitting your long-term goals.
If you’re interested in our video production services, please get in touch with our team today. We work our magic across a range of sectors and can’t wait to get started on your project.
Additionally, for more video insights, be sure to check out our blog.
