Strong branding is essential if you want your company to grow. Without it, you’ll get lost in the background with a number of competitors vying for your audience’s attention. But you’ve probably already heard that old spiel: it’s the dominant rule in today’s digital marketing landscape. The hardest part is creating a strong brand identity. Sure, you can post on social media, attend events, run promotions, and so on, but that’s not cutting it anymore.
Video does many things better than these traditional marketing channels, especially when building your brand. It separates your company from your competition, cultivates stronger relationships, and helps you expand faster—not only with your targeted audience, but also with recruiting efforts as well.
Your brand can be built effectively through multiple types of video content across varying channels, and there are several types of videos that best help grow your company’s identity. Let’s dive into these tried-and-true content types that help your organization create and showcase its brand.
Hero’s Journey Video
Run-of-the-mill testimonial videos with general positive sentiments aren’t what potential customers want to watch. If you have someone on camera, they’re probably going to say something nice about your company. Brand identity digs deeper than the usual surface-level testimonial: much deeper. What sets this video apart is incorporating more of who that customer is, their “pain” that prompted them to seek your product or service, and how it eased their pain and changed their life.
Emotional storytelling is critical in this respect. Humanizing your subject and making them relatable to your targeted audience shows them that, “Hey, this can be your experience with us too!” This shift from focusing on the company to highlighting your customer’s journey creates an enticing video to watch that’s easier for your audience to connect with. Showing how your company can serve and delight your customers goes a long way in re-engineering this kind of video.
Our work with Mark Bell’s Sling Shot shows a way to create a hero’s journey video that focuses on the consumer rather than the company. When they approached us to create original content for their brand, we knew we wanted to focus on the first responders who use their products. We pieced together the video below to not only showcase Sling Shot products, but to also have a larger story about community, staying healthy, and preventing injury to have a long career in the fire department.
Brand Story
Brand story videos are powerful differentiators and are one of the single most important videos to utilize in building and conveying your company’s identity. The storytelling way of communicating what your company stands for resonates with consumers because humans are hardwired for stories. Instead of simply saying you believe in helping the planet, tell your story of why your company believes in that and what you’re doing to achieve that goal. It makes a more memorable assertion than a general statement.
The key to remember with this video is to be authentic. Your audience isn’t dumb and they’ll eventually discover if you’ve been falsifying what your company believes in and stands for. If your company isn’t focused on helping the environment, don’t say it because it’s in-vogue to be green. Stay true to who you are, and use your authentic voice to focus on the pain points you can solve in your customer’s life.
In addition to getting creative in the storytelling development, you can also break from the norm in the length of videos you produce. Episodic long-form content is getting more and more popular. And while this style of video might not get as many views as shorter ones, the audience who watches will be highly engaged and interested in what you have to say. It’s worth experimenting with this long-form content to see how it works for your business. Brand story videos can also be reworked into the other types of videos discussed in this article.
A great example of a brand story is our collaboration with Richmond Vona. When they started strategizing the launch of their new personal injury team, they knew they wanted an introduction video that focused on their dedication to their clients. With their tagline “For us, it’s personal”, they differentiate their brand through a simple yet modern piece.
Landing Page Video
One of the biggest challenges to increasing conversion rates is actively engaging your prospects. This is an area in which video can excel. Instead of having paragraphs of text on a landing page and running the risk of boring and losing your potential lead, you’ll have an engaging video to help visitors stay longer and convert more of them into prospects. In fact, one study suggests that having a video on a landing page can increase conversions by 86%!
Nevertheless, landing page videos are effective at gaining enough of your potential customer’s trust to convert. Think about it: they’re about to hand over their information. They want to trust that you won’t abuse their data and will follow through with what you promise them; whether that’s sending a whitepaper or giving them a free quote. A landing page video is an effective way to be transparent with your potential customer and build their trust.
A few common and effective landing page videos are…
Explainer Video
Tell your visitors what they need to know in a short and concise video. An elevator pitch wrapped up in video packaging is ideal and saves your viewers the trouble of having to read paragraphs of text. Presenting fairly run-of-the-mill content in a creative video shows who your company is and gives customers a better feel for what you have to offer. Simply having text on the page is severely limiting in this respect.
Take our work with Minitab for example. Instead of trying to cover all this information with text on a page, they knew a video would be more effective to explain their software. With a mix of software screenshots along with animations and voice-overs, we were able to create a video that highlights the benefits of their product while creating an engaging and dynamic piece of content.
FAQ Video
If your product or service has some frequently asked questions at the top of the funnel, covering those on the landing page could accelerate visitor conversions. Answering all of their initial questions before they even give their information makes your company credible and is a building block of trust right out of the gate.
Next Steps Video
If your company offers a service that has a lengthy process after your customer signs up, like a roofing or solar company, a “next steps” video can help inform your visitors what the process will look like before they hand over their information. This kind of content also works well on a redirect confirmation page after they’ve filled out your form.
Social Media Videos
Chances are part of your audience is on social media, making these marketing avenues another great way to reach them. And you’re hopefully already actively attempting to reach them on their numerous platforms, but simple text posts don’t reach the same amount of people as they used to. Videos are consumers’ favorite type of branded content on social media, and 45% of them discover new brands and products through this form of content. Other kinds of posts get deprioritized out of some social media algorithms in favor of high-quality video; only furthering why this kind of media is essential to any fully-developed social media strategy.
Some of the most popular platforms to showcase social media video content and what works best for them are below.
Instagram & IGTV
People seek Instagram for an escape from information overload and a place to enjoy creative visual content. To keep in line with this, shorter and visually-interesting videos typically draw the most views. Because of the creative nature of Instagram, your company has a lot of freedom with how you showcase your brand. You should still maintain a singular focus throughout your video, but don’t be afraid to try something new to highlight what makes your business different. Our video with National Car Rental helps differentiate their brand by showcasing the many benefits the PGA Junior League experienced by having them as a sponsor and utilizing their services.
Facebook Video
Viral videos have made it big on Facebook. But even if your company doesn’t fit into the viral video mold there are other ways to find success with video content. Keeping your visitors engaged with your content for at least one minute helps boost your video rankings, and what better way to hold their attention than with a high-quality video? Be sure to always share original content and upload videos directly to Facebook instead of using another video hosting solution. You should also cross-link with Instagram, which will help increase the number of impressions and chances for a prospect to convert.
Employee Recruiting Video
Utilizing video in your company’s recruitment efforts is another powerful way to build your brand. What better way to showcase your company’s value, culture, and mission to prospective employees you hope will come on board? Recruiting videos breathe life into the text you use on job postings. They share the positive intangibles: the look, feel, and authenticity of your company.
Besides adding another creative and dynamic layer to your brand, recruitment videos offer other positive benefits. Recruiting videos boost your ranking in search results. This produces more high quality candidates since impressions increase with video. In fact, having a video in your job posting can increase application rates by as much as 34%!
Showcasing your company culture and values also helps introduce your better cultural fit to new hires. Conversely, if they don’t like what they see on your video, they probably won’t apply. This saves you time and money in managing “empty prospects” who might be a questionable fit to begin with, or cost you training time and resources only to leave a few weeks after the hire.
Along with reaching a higher volume of people, recruitment videos also appeal to the younger workers; young, new visionaries which all firms need. Generations like Millennials are more digitally savvy and watch the most online videos of any generation. Recruitment videos that highlight all the important points to interest the people you want to work for your company will help capture the workforce your company needs to grow and prosper for years to come.
When Heasley & Partners approached us to create a variety of internal videos for Amazing Lash Studio, they knew what kind of employee they wanted to recruit. By focusing on studio managers, stylists, and brand leaders, their end goal was to attract more like-minded and motivated people to join their company. Highlighting how amazing it is to work for Amazing Lash Studio and giving a glimpse into the company culture will give their prospective employees a better feel for if it’s the right company for them before they even apply.
Company FAQs Video
We’ve already briefly touched on this topic above, but it warrants its own sections in this article because chances are your salespeople answer the same questions over and over, day-in and day-out. It’s hard to convey excitement about a product by answering the same old questions in the same old way.
Imagine all the time saved by creating a video which answers all those redundant questions they hear time and time again with prospects and customers. Videos get customers the answers they want before they even before their first call! The best FAQ videos address the top 5-10 company questions—so length can vary depending on the complexity of your answers. You can even have FAQ videos for a variety of categories: Sales, Customer Service, Product Support, the list is only limited by your needs and imagination.
If time and budget permits, the most effective approach is to have each salesperson in your company create their own FAQ video. This helps their prospect get to know their sales rep and become more familiar with the product they’re considering. Your sales team should be the driving force behind which questions are included since they’re the ones “in the trenches” talking to prospects daily. This kind of video should focus solely on the very top-of-the-funnel questions: this isn’t the time to get into the weeds and complexity of what you’re selling.
The results, when executed correctly, deliver a shorter sales cycle, a stronger bond of trust between the salesperson and prospective customer, and a more educated buyer, who will likely buy again and again.
Product / Service Video
One type of video that is too often so cut-and-dried that it puts people to sleep when they should be paying attention is product / service videos. Disrupting the status quo of the ordinary product show-and-tell delivery is a great chance for a company to differentiate themselves. Something as simple and self-explanatory as bug killer can offer a creative twist that makes it a memorable product, and presentation, in the consumer’s eyes. Take a look at this video we did for CombatMax. It highlights how their bug killer is different from the competition and stands out with the fun food-truck twist.
Product / service videos are also versatile and can be utilized throughout your online marketing presence. Obviously, you’ll want to put them on your product page, but you can also incorporate them into email marketing campaigns, social media plans, and landing pages. The adaptability of this video form reinforces the importance of developing visually-engaging and creative content that will stand out wherever you use it.
This form of video content also presents a good opportunity to discuss how much your products and services cost. You don’t need to have a separate cost video once you find a way to organically include this information in your product / service video. The suitability of including cost varies from company to company, but for those who see this as an advantage, including pricing usually fits well within product and service videos.
Videos to Build Your Brand & Enhance your Company Experience
Creating the right high-quality video doesn’t happen overnight. It requires industry knowledge and years of experience by seasoned veterans at a tried-and-true video production agency such as MarzMotion. We closely work with our customers from idea-inception through production to create a memorable final product that drives your business to new, undiscovered heights. Contact MarzMotion and let’s get your professional video project started today.
