How to Build Brand Awareness With Video Marketing
Learn how to implement video marketing to tell your brand’s story, express its personality, and increase awareness.
It’s been said that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. After all, if you’re trying to convince a friend why Costa Rica should be this year’s BFF vacation destination, what would be most convincing: a paragraph you send over a text, a single photo of a towering waterfall bookended by verdant rainforest vegetation, or a 30-second video covering the vast array of landscapes, wildlife, cuisine and activities you’ll both experience firsthand? (Hint: that video will have your tickets in hand faster than you can say, “hit play.”)
Today, promoting a brand without video marketing is like kayaking without a paddle: You’ll get to your destination eventually, but it’s much faster (and less strenuous) with the right tool.
How Important Is Video Marketing?
But just how important is video marketing in a content strategy, anyway? Very. In a Wyzowl survey from 2022, 95% of surveyed marketers said video marketing helped increase their brand awareness in 2022, and 92% reported that video provided them a good return on their investment — an all-time high. Plus, 91% reported using video as a marketing tool, another all-time high since they began tracking that stat in 2016. If a brand wants to stay relevant across paid, owned, and earned channels, video must be a key component of its content marketing strategy.
But how is video marketing perceived by the public? Simply put, as an essential part of their consumer journey. In February 2020, Google found that 70% of people bought from a brand because of seeing it on YouTube. Even if a consumer is aware of a brand beforehand, video can make a difference when it’s time to buy. Wyzowl found that 86% of people say watching a video has convinced them to buy a product or service, and a whopping 91% said they want to see more online videos from brands in 2023.
So give the people what they want.
95% of surveyed marketers said video marketing helped increate their brand awareness in 2022
Video Marketing Across Your Marketing Funnels
Increasing brand awareness means telling your brand’s story across the entire marketing funnel. And no, that doesn’t mean sitting the CEO in front of a camera and hitting record as they wax nostalgic. We said give the people what they want.
At the top of the funnel, you want to capture their attention and spark an immediate, strong brand connection. What problem can you help them solve? What are your values? Why are you here? The goal is to create an engaging video that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Hook them, but keep them wanting more. Consider the Farmer’s Dog Super Bowl ad or HelloFresh’s cute comparison to “The One.”
When it comes to the middle of the funnel, you’ve got their attention — now show them why they can’t live without you. This is a great place for how-to or explainer videos, or product videos. Just be careful not to oversell them or bury the lede. Keep the videos on topic and on brand. For example, Salesforce has a video on creating relevant and empathetic marketing campaigns in Marketing Cloud. It’s short, informative, and encourages interested viewers to dive deeper.
Finally, when you get to the bottom of the funnel, it’s time to influence decision-making. Video testimonials or case studies are great here. So are videos that cover discounts or incentives. One of our favorite examples is the video by River Pools we shared in our article on BOFU strategies. Videos like these nudge your prospective leads who might be holding back on requesting a free quote.
Let Videos Show Off Your Brand Personality
Across all the videos you create, it’s crucial your brand’s personality shines through and rings true to you. This can be as literal as ensuring all of the graphic elements in the video align with your brand. Lower thirds, logos, colors — make sure they all match your brand standards. It’s a cliche example, but if you’re creating a video for a powerful Fortune 500 company, Comic Sans probably won’t set the right tone.
Logos and brand fonts aren’t the only way to show customers who you are in your videos, though. To express a brand’s personality in video is to humanize it — to showcase a brand’s values, mission, and even its people. LinkedIn recommends, “Introduce your team members, customers, or partners and share their stories and testimonials. Show behind-the-scenes footage of your work process, culture, or social impact. Highlight your values, mission, or vision and how they guide your actions and decisions.” Each of these methods will go a long way to fostering connections with your customers, pulling back the curtain a little, and sharing the humanity behind the brand.
Whether you’re just dipping your toes into short-form video with a behind-the-scenes teaser of your latest product launch, or filming an in-depth, multi-episode testimonial series for YouTube, this authentic, human approach to video can help viewers resonate with your brand and begin developing loyalty.
You can even express your personality through content you didn’t make yourself. Whether sharing user-generated content (UGC) or working with influencers, there’s an opportunity to tell your brand story and express its personality through what you choose to share and who you choose to partner with. For example, if your brand is lighthearted and playful, a comedic influencer could be the right fit. If your brand is committed to sustainability, sharing ways your customers reuse, recycle, or find a second life for your product can help reinforce this brand value.
Take how Danzeisen Dairy shared a customer reusing its glass milk bottles as floral centerpieces. The message reinforces the brand’s values, the post encourages engagement across its target audience, and the brand didn’t even have to lift a finger.
Creating Shareable Video Content
It’s smart to include video on your website and in emails to customers, but the primary repository for video marketing is, of course, social media. That said, the thought of creating unique content for every single platform can feel overwhelming. While it’s important to remember that each platform has its own algorithm — and your audience likely differs slightly on each, so the content that will perform best likely does, too — it is possible to create content that you can repurpose for a few applications.
For example, short-form videos created for TikTok can be repurposed for Instagram Reels. The long-form video you posted to YouTube can be trimmed and uploaded natively to Facebook. Better still, create vertical “teaser” content for Instagram Stories and drive viewers to the full video on YouTube. Just as you may be used to starting with a 60-second television commercial and trimming it down to 30- and 15-second versions, think of ways to slice and dice a single video so it can be used across multiple platforms.
To express a brand’s personality in video is to humanize it.
Measuring Your Video Marketing Success
Once you’ve uploaded your video, the work isn’t over — you need to monitor its performance to measure its success and ultimately inform your future strategy. Here are some important KPIs to monitor:
- VIEW COUNT: How many people watched your video
Keep in mind, that this measurement differs by platform. For example, a view on YouTube is counted after someone watches a video for 30 seconds, but on Facebook and Instagram, a view is counted after three seconds.
- ENGAGEMENT: How people interacted with your video (comments, likes, etc.)
When it comes to comments, numbers aren’t everything. Be sure to monitor the sentiment of the comments. Viral videos aren’t always a good thing for a brand.
- PLAY RATE: How many people actually clicked “play” to watch your video
Autoplay can lead to overinflated numbers. This lets you know how many people actually took an action to watch your content.
- SOCIAL SHARES: How many people shared your video on social media
Social shares are critical when increasing brand awareness because it gets your content in front of a much wider audience than you can achieve on your own. Remember, top-of-funnel videos will see more shares than middle or bottom.
- CLICK-THROUGH RATE: Percentage of viewers who click on your call-to-action (CTA)
If your video has a CTA button, this metric is critical for measuring success. Think viewers clicking from your video to go to your landing page.
- CONVERSIONS: How many customers or leads your video generated
Depending on whether you’re running a video ad campaign or just tracking actions on your website, this might require UTM tags or other programs (Google Analytics) to track.
Your Video Marketing Experts
So, you’re convinced video is the way to go — but not sure where to turn for strategy, content, or execution. There’s no need to go it alone. Consider Ideas Collide your tour guide for all things video and content marketing. From our skilled strategists to our in-house video team, we can take you from step A to Z and everywhere in between. If you’re ready to start your video journey, drop us a line, and let’s go!