The Guide to Building a Brand Through Video Marketing.

For the past ten years or so, there has been a heavy shift in the content that people are seeking out on the internet. In the 2000s and through the early 2010s, brands relied on written content through blogs, social media, and newsletters to capture an audience’s attention. Over time, this reliance on text-based content has slowly fallen due to a variety of reasons.

Today, more people than ever before are seeking out and watching video-based content across the web. Whether it’s through social media, a video hosting platform, or on a website, consumers want to watch instead of read. In 2020, the number of people watching videos online surged past 240 million, which far surpassed previous predictions.

As video continues to become the leading form of content online, your company should be looking for ways to leverage video content internally. One major benefit of using video across your business is it’s proven excellence in conveying brand messaging.

Building brand awareness can be difficult, especially over text. By using video, your team controls the message, narrative, and emotion you want your audience to feel when thinking about your company.

So whether you are a new business that hasn’t established a strong brand presence yet, or an established business looking to strengthen or pivot your brand message, video is here to help you.

Here is a quick guide that will help you implement video marketing to build your brand:

1. Establish Goals

Before we dive into the fun stuff, we need to effectively set out a plan for your video marketing content. Entering into any new area of marketing is going to require extensive planning and goal-setting in order to be effective.

An effective video marketing strategy should complement your other efforts across each area of the marketing funnel.

In this case, since you are attempting to build a brand, you’ll want to focus on the areas higher in the funnel. Building awareness and getting consumers to consider your brand over others should be the main goal of your video marketing plans.

To lay the groundwork, you should set goals for each area of the marketing funnel that creating your own video content will help achieve. Some specific goals could be:

Awareness:

Receive X amount of followers across all social media platforms through branded video content
Increase monthly branded search volume by X%

Consideration:

Increase traffic to a product page by X%
Increase product inquiries or demo requests by X%

Conversion:

Increase sales by X%
Decrease bounce rate by X%

Each of these goals can be attained through a balanced marketing strategy that includes video content in some way. We will highlight how each of these goals can be achieved by using video later in the guide, but for now, think of a few goals your business wants to work towards. Again, for companies looking to build brand awareness, most of your goals should address the top of the funnel.

2. Find an Agency and Set a Budget

After setting the goals you want to achieve through your video marketing efforts, you will need to think about how you are going to reach these goals. While the cost of creating video content has dropped significantly over the years, this will still be a new arm within your marketing department and should be budgeted for accordingly.

As a newer business owner, it may be more strategic for you to “dip your toes” into video marketing without fully committing first. The last thing you need is to have $10,000 wasted on fancy camera equipment and videographers if it isn’t going to help your bottom line.

Here at Explainify, we have a dedicated team that prides itself on creating effective animated video content that fits in any industry. By using animation, we can efficiently deliver a brand story, product overview, or anything else you may want to showcase to customers, but at a fraction of the cost of live production.

When leaning on outside help for your business, you should still be setting a budget to keep your business in good financial standing. It can be easy to overspend when you are not making in-house purchases, so make sure that you meet with your accounting team or financial advisor to establish a set budget for outsourced projects.

As you set your budget, make sure to keep your business goals in mind. Agencies will often offer multiple packages to fit any company’s needs. For instance, if you were to use Explainify for your animated content needs, there are four packages available depending on the size of your business and the goals you want to achieve. Our packages are as follows:

Explain Package:

Great for smaller businesses with a tight budget
Includes simple icons, animation, and on-screen text only
Each video will take 5-7 weeks to complete

Explain Plus Package:

Essential offering that is a great option for scaling businesses or more established brands
Includes human characters that interact with products using basic animations
Still simplistic, but more in-depth than the standard package
Each video will take 6-8 weeks to complete

Impress Package:

The “high-performance” package includes even more in-depth animation
Receive access to multiple characters, better graphics, and an animated overview of your product or service
More background details, color palettes, and transitions
Takes 7-9 weeks to complete

Inspire Package:

The biggest and best package for brands with a high budget and larger goals
Includes an entire suite of characters and icons
Characters will be more interactive with the product and background environment
Use of Faux 3D as well as other complex dimensional and isometric animation techniques
Takes 8-10 weeks to complete

Learn more about Explainify packages

Each package will range in price and should be selected based on budget, company needs, and goals. Even though outsourcing will be less expensive than producing this content in-house, you still may need to tap into external funds to help alleviate the additional costs.

If you need extra capital to maximize your efforts, you can either move funds from another initiative, attempt to raise the capital yourself through bootstrapping, or use a loan. Choosing the most cost-effective package may not help your business based on the goals you set out. Having a set budget will help you plan accordingly so you can select the best agency, and package for your team.

After selecting an agency, it is important to start thinking about how you want your brand to be represented by an outside source.

3. Brainstorm Video Ideas

Now that your goals and budget have been set for your video marketing efforts, it’s time to start brainstorming some content ideas that’ll help you achieve your goals. Thinking back to the marketing funnel should help you think of some content ideas. Since you have goals set for each stage of the funnel, you should have a few video ideas that correspond to said goals.

Let’s start with the awareness stage of the funnel since that’ll be the biggest push for brands who are just starting their video marketing efforts.

Awareness:

Company Explainer Video
When attempting to build awareness you need to assume that whoever comes across your video knows absolutely nothing about your brand. This means before you can jump into the grittier specificities of your product or service, you must first educate them about who you are and what you stand for.

These videos will still touch on your product of course, but the video will be more focused on your company’s brand. This means you should showcase the culture you aim to invoke with your brand.

In this example for Betterworks, you see how short and sweet an explainer video can be. The brand explainer gives the consumer the base knowledge they need to understand what your brand is about without hitting them over the head with unnecessary information.

Consideration:

Product Explainer
After a consumer already knows a bit about your brand, the next step is to continue educating them in a more serious and product-driven way. If a consumer knows a bit about your culture, they’re ready to learn more about exactly what you do and how your product works.

When creating a product explainer, remember you still need to walk the fine line of being too “salesy” in the video. Consumers at this stage of the funnel are seeking more information, but may not be ready to make a decision just yet. Let’s take a look at another example.

In this video, we get exactly everything we need, and nothing more, to understand what Spotify is and what the product does. Notice the video doesn’t get into membership details, costs, or anything of that nature. Simply put, they explain what the product does and why a consumer should want it.

Conversion:

Sales Video
After you have established your brand’s feeling in the space and have explained what your product is, it’s time to convince consumers they need your product. A sales video is the next step to the marketing process and will go over all the finer details about your product, including price, exact features, and more.

This video from Raspberry Pi highlights the exact features a tech-driven consumer would want to see from their product, but still without going too far down the rabbit hole. You simply learn everything you need to about the product, including specific features and the sale price.

While there are more video options for each stage of the marketing funnel, these options will set you up for success and are a low lift for your team to handle. For explainer videos, we still recommend going through an outside source to produce these, as not much camera work or voiceover is needed. If interested in learning more about our explainer videos you can contact us today for a free phone consultation.

There You Have It!

By this point, you have everything you need to get your video marketing plans rolling. While it won’t happen overnight, getting started now will only streamline the process down the road. Whether you decide to go headfirst into content creation immediately, or if you are just starting the process, we’re here to help you.

Feel free to contact us with any questions about video marketing for you and your brand. As the world begins to rely more on video content, it’ll only help build your business, and subsequently, your brand.

Remember to ask about our Frustration-Free™ Process!

The Guide to Building a Brand Through Video Marketing