Why Your Brand Needs Video: 5 Ways to Stand Out

When it comes to being effective at brand marketing, it’s less and less about distributing a ton of ads and more about creating valuable content for the right audience. (You can read more about that in our Brand Affinity Marketing Playbook.) Historically, the majority of brand-building content has always been based on what was successful in television — video ads. But, does that mean businesses have to rely on video in the future? After all, there are a ton of other ways to support your brand.

So, what’s the problem with focusing all of your efforts on blog posts, infographics, or other media? Is your marketing budget better spent investing in video, and is it really that important to be successful with growing your brand?

Our answer is a resounding yes! We think video is absolutely important and worth the investment even though we understand it can be a challenge to get started. We believe with the right resources, creative ideas, and a little practice, anyone can produce videos they’re proud to share. In this post, we’ll make the case for why you need video in your brand marketing strategy.

Present your brand’s complete identity

You’ve worked hard to develop your brand identity. So, why not give your audience a fuller view of who you are as a brand? Brand video is the best and most scalable way of presenting your brand’s complete identity.

“Video is the best and most scalable way of presenting your brand’s complete identity.”

When you look at other forms of communication, blog posts are a great way to share your company’s ideas and concepts, showing off your brand’s tone and voice. Photos and imagery also allow you to show off the people who make up your business. But, video is the only media that can bring both of these elements together to show off your company’s full identity to help you make more personal connections with your audience.

Express your brand’s unique style

With video, your brand design can go far beyond color palettes and logos (which are super important; don’t get us wrong). But, with video, you have the opportunity to inject your brand style into all of your sets, color grading, costumes, animations — and of course, music. Having more elements to play with means more space to cement a unique and distinct brand identity, helping you make a lasting impression on your audience.

Convey your team members’ personalities

Branding doesn’t work super well when it’s only thought of as a layer on top of your other marketing. Instead, to be effective, it has to come from the very core foundations of the business — the collective ideas, values, and actions of the people within the business.

“When you document your team on video, you capture the full range of their expressions.”

When you document your team on video, you capture the full range of their expressions (even the little mistakes that make us more human). It’s a better opportunity to showcase your character, giving a wider audience a glimpse into who you are and what you’re about.

We love using our team as talent in our videos. Even though they’re not professional actors, we’re able to get authentic takes that make our videos more personal for our audience. Take a look at this video we shot with Nick from our Customer Happiness team where he explains how to customize a Wistia audio player.

Build the strongest emotional connection

The concept of brand affinity really relies on the importance of “affinity” (i.e., empathy and bonding). Because video is the most direct human-to-human creative medium on the web, it’s the medium that can help you create the strongest bonds with your audience.

When you spend a lot of time watching videos from a specific brand, it very much feels like you’ve spent a lot of time with the company behind that brand. Ultimately, you want people to spend more time with your brand, strengthen their connections, and feel closer to your business because of it.

Stand out on social media

If you spend any time on social media at all, you know that video has shaped the way these platforms operate. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — and even LinkedIn — all have native video platforms. If you want to be able to stand out and acquire engaged audiences on social media, then you’re going to need to have a lot of video content. But that’s not all. In addition to being native video platforms, video gets much higher engagement rates on every platform than text or image posts, which means that posting video is the best way to get your content seen.

To announce Wistia’s podcast product update, we created an announcement video for social with real folks from our team. This is only one example of the types of videos you can create for social that communicate your brand’s message and the people behind it.

Put your best foot forward

See how you can level up your brand marketing efforts and tell your story with video? We encourage you to start investing more in video for your brand strategy this year — we can’t wait to see what you come up with!