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The Three Pillars of Successful Brand Video

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The Three Pillars of Successful Brand Video

Regardless of how fantastic and jaw amazing your latest piece of video content turns out, it’s unlikely to get the attention it deserves without a proper marketing strategy in place. We’ve come to refer to content like this as ‘orphan content’ and the internet is full of it. If your video is only seen by a limited audience or the wrong type of audience then you’re seriously restricted your chances of it gaining traction.

In this article for Fresh Business Thinking, I want to explore the three tiered approach we take to video marketing and production. Let’s look at each stage in turn.

Planning

In the modern digital environment, consumers have an increasing number of ways in which they can avoid traditional ‘interruptive’ marketing content, whether through ad blockers, increasing use of ad-free on-demand TV or simply switching off. It’s no longer enough for consumers to merely tolerate advertising; brands now need to focus on creating video content that consumers want to seek out and are willing to share with one another.

Creating a video content programme will mean doing proper market research, as well as examining your existing content, brand image and business objectives.  Activities could include:

  • Content audit
  • Brand immersion
  • Audience profiling
  • Buzz monitoring
  • Business objectives
  • Competitor analysis
  • Video research

Having the right strategy in place will help you create audience personas and a solid creative framework with which you can use to start brainstorming ideas.

Good video planning also needs to take into account a number of factors though. These will be your KPIs and include:

  • Quality: To the standard expected of the brand
  • Frequency: Regular enough to stat
  • Cost: At a budget you can afford
  • Distribution: Activated to ensure it gets seen
  • Engagement: Interesting enough for people to care

A well developed video marketing plan should take a holistic approach and will inform the second and third phases in your overall strategy.

Creation

In the creation stage, one of the most important steps is ensuring that your video’s focus and objectives are clear and identifiable and can be tracked in some way to measure success. We like to use the help, hub, hero model of content marketing to properly segment content and plan for its creation.

  • A help video is “always on” evergreen content such as how-to videos, product demonstrations, and case studies. It’s designed for your core audience, with the purpose of showing them how to engage with your brand or with the product in question.
  • A hub video is more values-driven. It should speak to your audience’s passions in a way that encourages brand engagement and loyalty. For instance, sponsorship films, documentary-style films, and behind-the-scenes footage are examples of this type.
  • Hero video is about those big moments that raise brand awareness. TV ads, social campaigns, product launches, and viral marketing campaigns. This is the content with the biggest potential reach and is typically content that’s designed for a more general audience, rather than for your core audience base.

Activation

Your branded video might be a masterpiece, but if it’s not getting out to the people who need to see it, then it’s not achieving its full potential. Whether your video is an emotionally powerful piece of brand content or a more technical tutorial or how-to video, the value your audience puts in it will be what defines how successful it is. Your audience therefore needs to be able to find it, engage with it and share it with their networks as easily as possible. What’s more that audience needs to be the right audience.

Activation needs to take into account the visibility of your content in search, who it is reaching and what platforms it is going out on. Good activation plans will look at different ways to post the same video, whether that be through tailoring it for different platforms or offering it to audiences in bitesize chunks or as part of a wider brand campaign. Making each post unique allows viewers to engage with your video in a different way, which helps boost long-term interest to ensure repeat viewings. This will also help you maximise your investment in individual videos.

Video marketing activation can be divided into three areas, each with its own set of considerations:

Find and Optimise

  • What keywords should your content be optimised for?
  • What channels and platforms will you distribute your content on (paid, earned or owned media)?
  • How will you integrate offline content into your digital channels?

Campaign Assets

  • Video production shoot stills
  • Social images
  • Viral assets
  • Facebook version with subtitles
  • Short Instagram version

Pushing to Audience

  • Promotion via social channels
  • Paid media (targeting regions, audience demographics, etc)
  • ECRM to target markets
  • PR, bloggers, vloggers and other published media (online and offline)

These three pillars of brand video development are all essential aspects of creating a successful video. With a well-developed plan that encompasses both video creation and activation, you’re ensuring that you will create content that engages your desired audience and that your content actually reaches that audience too.

Evelyn Timson is the Managing Director of UK based video production company Aspect Film and Video. She has years of experience working with some of the world’s most recognisable companies and organisations like UNICEF, Samsung, North Face, Microsoft, the British Library and National Trust. You can connect with Aspect on Facebook or Twitter or see a selection of their award winning work on their YouTube Channel.

I am the founder of Startup Today. I am the main writer and have put in many hours of work into creating this blog. If you want to find out more about me then lets get in contact.

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