Branding is all about telling a cohesive and continuous story about your company to the world. When there is a consistent branding strategy, you’re carefully aligning what you want people to think about your company and what people actually think about it.
Your branding is your reputation. It’s both an art and a science that you have to carefully navigate in order to make a lasting impression in the mind of your target audience. Through consistent branding across all platforms, you’re creating a memorable projection of your brand in the mind of the customer through visual, behavioral, and tonal brand components.
With more and more platforms coming up every day to reach your customers, it can sometimes be overwhelming to keep up with consistent branding in all of them. That’s why putting together a cohesive brand style guide or brand guidelines can be really important.
According to a study by Cisco, video traffic will make up a whopping 81% of all global consumer internet traffic in 2021. That number has been growing year over year, so it’s time to give video some thought if you haven’t already. Keep reading for more on how to apply your company’s brand guidelines to your video marketing strategy.
What Are Brand Guidelines?
Brand guidelines are what define the way your brand looks and feels to your audience. Your brand guidelines outline a set of ground rules that everyone has to follow if they plan to display any material on behalf of your company. These brand guidelines should be followed across all platforms, including both online and offline channels.
Brand guidelines are often either decided by company execs or compiled by the designers, copywriters, and other marketers who will put the guidelines to use on a daily basis. They’ll typically include the company’s mission and the vision, its core values, target audience, and the overall brand personality.
Brand guidelines are most often presented as a document or presentation that brings all rules and guidelines together. The goal is for designers and marketers to reference this document regularly when creating new assets for the brand—including video
How to Apply Brand Guidelines to Your Videos
Applying brand guidelines to something like a blog article or social media post is simple, but people often wonder how brand guidelines can apply to your video content. The key to the process is thinking about your video in parts and applying your brand guidelines to each component. The result will be a final video that exudes the essence of your brand. First up: colors.
Colors
Your brand guidelines should include a color palette that will be used in all marketing materials. While it’s typically not possible to strictly adhere to the color palette in video content, consider trying to prominently use these colors in your video content. You can get creative with this, too—try featuring your brand’s main color in props, talent wardrobe, on-screen text, or even as a lighting tint over the whole production. Most people won’t consciously notice these choices, but they will notice the overall connection to your brand.
Tone
Your brand’s tone is all about the general feel that your video arouses in your viewer. You can also think of it as the “vibe” that your content gives out, often due to the language you use in your content. Common tone words are “friendly,” “professional,” “casual,” or “formal.” Keeping the same tone in all your marketing methods helps build a connection with your audience, and it creates a memorable image of your company. For video, try to match any dialogue or on-screen text with your brand’s standard tone.
Language
Language goes closely with the tone of voice that is specified in your brand. If you tend to use a rather formal language in other types of communication with your customers, trying to use excessively informal language in your video marketing can be off-putting to your customers—and vice versa. Make sure any language used in your video feels like language you’d use in other marketing channels, too.
Logo Usage
Your logo is what communicates the ownership and quality of your brand to the world. In your brand guidelines, you can specify the ways your logo appears in the video content that you create. Many types of videos offer an opportunity to feature the brand’s logo during the content, which can go a long way toward establishing your branding in the minds of your viewers. Just make sure to follow your standard logo guidelines for consistency.
Typography
Keeping your typography consistent in your video marketing is an often—but important—aspect of adhering to your brand guidelines. This is particularly important if your videos are text-heavy. You can specify the ways your headings, subheadings, and other similar text elements are displayed in your videos, consistent with your other text materials. Try to use your brand’s default typeface whenever possible—this isn’t the time to introduce new fonts and hierarchies.
Sound/Music Usage
With video, you can add another exciting element to your brand guidelines that you usually can’t include with other methods—sound. Make sure the music and other sounds you use in videos stay consistent with the tone and the personality of the brand. Determining a key central theme for your music and sound will make it easy for you to decide which music to use in your videos.
Editing Style
Your video editing style can completely change the tone and meaning of a video. There are many creative editing techniques you can use, but make sure they are not too aggressive or contrast too much with the rest of the content methods that you use. Whether you are using montages, fade-ins, cutaway shots, parallel editing, or other techniques, always keep things consistent in all your videos.
Audience
Finally, your audience is the most important factor you should consider when creating your video marketing strategy. Your company may target one or more audiences, but you need to define how you want your video to target each audience. If there are techniques that you used to specifically grab the attention of your audience in other content marketing methods, make sure you use them for your video marketing strategy as well.
Conclusion
Your videos should always feel cohesive with the other types of content and materials that you use to promote your brand. Internet users crave video content more than any other type of content available to them. Make sure you take advantage of it by creating a video marketing strategy that fully adheres to your company’s branding guidelines. That way, you can make your brand a memorable story that seamlessly unfolds across all the platforms your audience spends time on.