No digital strategy is really complete without a considered approach to online video. Video marketing is an extremely powerful tool and too many brands simply aren’t leveraging the full potential of this highly engaging medium.
Brand films will never be effective if they come across as disingenuous or thinly veiled promos. Everything from the overall narrative to the setting and the characters need to be strong enough to stand alone, but they should also work in harmony to effectively convey the values and ethos of your brand.
The best brand films don’t seek to sell or distract. Instead, they are formed from the desire to tell a specific story and to connect with an audience on an emotional level. This form of engagement plants the seed from which, with some nurturing, a valuable lasting relationship can grow.
So, if you are thinking about producing a brand film for your business, here are some things to keep in mind.
Understand your Brand
All brands need a strong identity to secure meaningful success within today’s ultra-competitive marketplaces. As your brand identity will inform every important decision and form the heart of every piece of content you produce, taking the time to understand how you want to convey the nuances of who you are is imperative.
Remember, consistency is key. Without it, you will struggle to present yourself as a dependable brand that your audience can trust. Let’s take a look at some of the things you can do to ensure your brand identity is fully represented by your brand film.
Don’t Dismiss Brand Archetypes
Each brand archetype represents a series of ethical and behavioural motivations that can help you to more accurately communicate the ethos and personality of your brand. Whether you want to project yourself as a sage or explorer, hero or revolutionary, archetypes are extremely powerful in anchoring your brand personality and everything that flows from it, into something tangible and relatable. As your ethos will help you to form meaningful connections with your audience, taking time to understand your brand archetype will help you to determine the types of content that will resonate with your audience and the tone you should adopt to nurture those relationships.
Develop a Strong Visual Language
It’s not all about what you say, how you say it matters too. Shaping a strong visual language that your audience will find easy to connect with your brand will facilitate the communication of your brand narrative and help you to convey your unique personality throughout every piece of content you create.
From your choice of typography to your style of cinematography, your visual language should inform every aspect of your storytelling process to create a consistent body of work that looks and feels as though it could only belong to your brand. Standing out from your competition is important and without a distinctive visual language you will struggle to make your mark.
A Strategic Approach to Content Creation
Video is the best medium for presenting information in ways that are compelling and easy to consume. That is easy to say, but the creation process is often far from simple. As the production process is both time-consuming and needs a significant level of investment in terms of resources, adopting a strategic approach is essential.
Goals
If you don’t know what you want to achieve, you will find it difficult to produce a brand film that will resonate with your audience. Your goals will inform everything from the narrative you choose to tell, to the video format you utilise to tell it. So, for example, if you want to showcase your company culture, live action video might help you to convey this message more effectively than animation.
Different video formats have their own strengths and benefits, but you will struggle to make the right choices here if you don’t have a set of very clearly defined objectives.
Audience
Similarly, you need to understand the needs, wants and desires of the people you want to connect with in order shape a film that will capture their attention and convey your narrative in ways they are receptive to. In addition to building a set of detailed customer personas, taking the time to think about how you can appeal to your ideal audience on an emotional level will help you to shape a narrative that will push you further towards achieving your goals and objectives.
Develop a Strong Video Activation Strategy
After investing so much time and effort into the creation of a first-class brand film, you will clearly want as many people as possible to engage with it. As so much video content is published by thousands of brands every single day, you need a strong activation strategy to ensure that all eyes are on you and not your competition.
Adopting a comprehensive approach to video SEO is crucial, as is taking the time to develop a detailed distribution plan that will ensure your brand film makes a big impact but also has the longevity to deliver a strong ROI.
