How to build your brand with video

Studies reveal that 54% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand that they support, while 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. This simply means that if you want to know how to build your brand it's ustilising more video in this day and age as it's become a necessity.

Building your brand with video is video marketing at its purest.

This is because it involves creating video content that’s relevant to your audience for their consumption. The good news is the investment is worth it.

You stand to reap more from it than you can imagine.

The importance of building your brand with video

Building your brand with video opens up a floodgate of benefits, whether you operate as an organisation or as an individual. Let’s examine some advantages of incorporating video marketing into your brand-building strategy.

1. Brand awareness, recognition and differentiation

Video marketing boosts brand awareness and ensures that your customers and target audience don’t mistake your brand for your competitors’. Once they see your logo, colour palettes or even your brand statement, they’d go “Yup! That’s ‘em.”

2. Customer loyalty

If you regularly pump out informative, educational and entertaining video content for your audience, you give them the impression that you’re committed to seeing them win. Showing that you’re not just after their cash is a fail-proof way to build trust, win their hearts and … ahem … their cash.

Since you have answers to their questions, your product or service should be the solution to their pain points. They really won’t want to go anywhere else.

3. Referrals

When I see a good video about a particular subject, whether on social media or any other platform, I’m compelled to share it with friends and family who share similar interests. I’m sure it’s the same with most people. Similarly, your valuable video content will be shared among your target audience, thus assisting your marketing aspirations.

4. Enhanced advertising effectiveness

Videos can be super-engaging and entertaining. An advertising campaign that leverages video marketing well enough stands a great chance to leave a lasting impression on the audience. If your video ads really impact your target audience, it’s only a matter of time before conversions start beating down your door.

5. Brand image and reputation

Your video marketing strategy frames how people perceive your brand. Besides regarding your brand as one that churns out relevant content, they’d associate your brand with the feeling they get when watching your brand videos.

If your brand videos trigger excitement, they can’t help seeing your brand as bubbly, full of life, and fun-loving.

6. Improved employee engagement and employee retention

Strangely, building your brand with video positively affects your employee engagement. Naturally, videos that showcase your company culture and explain your product or service will feature your employees. Also, your internal media crew could help shoot the brand videos.

As your brand waxes stronger, your employees will be glad to be a part of its success. They’ll want to keep working with you, thus boosting your employee 

Steps on how to build your brand using using video

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how to build your brand with video.

1. Define your goals

The journey towards building your brand with video begins with identifying your goals. Pinpointing the aims you hope to achieve ensures that your actions and processes are calculated and tailored to meet such needs.

The aims of building a brand with video typically include the following:

• To boost brand awareness and build trust
• Making an impression on your target audience
• Increasing conversions
• Boosting traffic to your site or increasing product inquiries
• Sharing knowledge

Having clear-cut goals is crucial because they provide a background for performance assessment. Therefore, you can tell whether or not your efforts have paid off.

2. Niche down, then study your audience and competition

Your niche determines the content of your videos.

If you operate as an organisation, you might have your niche carved out for you automatically. This is because as a company, new or old, there’s an industry you fit in already. However, if you hope to build your personal brand with video, you might be torn among multiple interests. Thus, you have to figure out what niche you want to be involved in.

Noteworthy, however, is the fact that industries have multiple sub-niches. Therefore, you might have to niche down further whether you’re building a personal brand or a corporate brand with video.

After identifying an area of specialisation, the next port of call is to figure out your audience. Getting to know them will give better insight into their preferences as well as how best to reach them. To figure out your audience, consider their:

• Needs and pain points
• Favourite virtual hangouts
• Content consumption habits
• Buying and spending tendencies

Keep an eye on your competitors too. They’re vying for your audience’s attention as well, so you need to look better. Study them; not obsessively but close enough to spot their strengths and weaknesses. Harness the realisations to improve your brand-building aspirations.

To effectively build your brand with video, you need all the bits of intelligence you can get.

3. Prioritise substance and variety

Your efforts to build your brand with videos will come to waste if your videos lack substance. So, you must make sure that your videos are chock-full of good material. Your viewers should be able to learn something from each video you publish, whether it’s how to use your product or some phenomenon in your industry.

This means that you should not make a video just for the sake of making it. What’s more, it highlights the importance of having a plan when creating each video. Decide on the key takeaways, the call to action, and the length of the video.

Nailing these elements will make sure it delivers the message and communicates to the viewers what you want them to do next, all without losing their attention.

While the message that you pass is central, other aspects of your video content matter.

They say monotony kills interest. Those words ring true.

To effectively build your brand with video, incorporate different video types and ideas.

Who says you’re limited to only videos of real persons? 3D animations can work wonders too.

Alternate ideas as you proceed. An introductory video showcasing your company’s business and culture should be followed by an instructional and educational video. Next up should be a product demo video, and in the event of an update, roll out another clip on the product update.

Testimonial videos of satisfied customers shouldn’t be left out! After all, almost 90% of a survey’s respondents trust online testimonials as much as a close ally’s recommendation.

4. Decide on whether or not to engage professionals

Your success in building your brand with video is greatly dependent on who handles the video creation. So, you have to decide whether you’ll work with a professional video crew or rely on your in-house team. If your in-house team can get the job done, you’re good to go. Otherwise, engage a professional video crew.

There should be no compromise when it comes to creating high-quality videos.

However, you might be building your personal brand and have neither an in-house team nor the budget to engage a team of experts. Your only sustainable option might be to film the video yourself. Chances are that videos produced in this manner will be of poor quality, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

Our guide on how to film yourself like a professional has all the details you need to ace creating videos of yourself.

Thankfully, as you progress on your brand-building journey as a business or an individual, you’ll gain ideas on video content creation and find out what works better for you. Then you can decide whether or not you still need professional help.

5. Be consistent with your branding elements

Implementing video marketing as a brand-building tactic means boldly flaunting your branding elements in your video. So, does your brand have a logo, brand statement, colour combination, or even theme song or instrumental? Be sure to work these into each and every video.

The branding elements help make your brand memorable and exceptional. They also trigger the feelings associated with your brand. The familiarity, in turn, nurtures and preserves your audience’s trust.

To achieve this, you have to be consistent with the branding elements. Your videos should all have a similar pattern whether in the form of the intro, the font, logo placement, colour combination or tone. If you’ve used an upbeat tone that suggests excitement for a while, don’t suddenly switch it up for a super-sober one.

6. Create videos at a regular pace

Creating high-quality content is good. But it’s not enough. You need to do it regularly.

One thing you don’t want is to lose your audience’s interest simply because you’re inconsistent with your video production. Going months on end without publishing videos and for absolutely no good reason isn’t commendable at all.

Similarly, don’t create videos sporadically. Pick a sustainable pace and maintain it. Your audience will know when to expect stuff from you which will deepen their trust in your brand.

7. Constantly share and promote

Sharing and promoting the videos you’ve produced gives momentum to your brand-building ambitions. It’s an important step in building your brand with video because it helps you compete favourably and attract your target audience.

Additionally, it creates some familiarity between them and your brand because they have insight into your journey. The outcome is a greater trust which leads to greater sales.

You can share the videos on

• Various hosting platforms
• Social media
• Your website
• Newsletters

If you’re new to the game, sharing and promoting your videos might seem unproductive at first. But, just like everything else, consistency is key. Stay the course, the results will gradually appear.

8. Evaluate your efforts

The final step is to assess the result of your video marketing campaign. Assessment is crucial because it lays bare the outcome of all you’ve been doing from the get-go, highlighting what worked and what didn’t. Therefore, it shows what you should improve upon and what you should implement once more.

Evaluating your efforts demands reflecting on your goals at the beginning of the brand-building journey. Are you nailing those goals? That’s the question.

Some indicators of success include:

• More sales
• Greater downloads
• Increased traffic to your site
• More business opportunities such as collaboration requests
• Increased engagement with the videos
• More followers on social media

If you find that you haven’t been hitting the original targets, it’s back to the drawing board.

Finally, brand-building efforts should never end and neither should your video marketing campaign. Implement the steps discussed in this post to get the desired results and maintain them.

While videos can be used to effectively build your brand, they can also play a powerful role in recruitment. Read our post for insight into how to create fantastic recruitment videos.