Today I’d like to discuss some basics of video branding for businesses and nonprofits, why it’s important, and the essential elements of branding your corporate videos for visual consistency.
Let’s say your business or nonprofit is committed to consistently post video online this year, aiming for once a week, and sometimes the videos will be a larger, professional production, but sometimes they’ll just be interviews that someone has grabbed on a smartphone. Now, all of this information is valuable to your viewers…but we also know there can be an inherent jump in look and quality from video to video using this approach. While you can’t always control this visual inconsistenc, using common branding elements can help to give all of your videos a shared, familiar feel.
The place I always like to start is with your marketing department’s branding guidelines, if you have them. They give us so much information, like how to properly use your logos, icons, colors, and fonts. From there, we want to create these four essential video branding elements:
1. The intro
2. Lower thirds
3. The bug
4. The outro
The intro opens the video and can be as simple as your logo on a plain background, or it can involve motion, or maybe it’s a unique title every time. The goal here is to create an immediate familiarity for the viewer.
Once we’re into the content, the lower thirds helps to identify the person appearing in the video, their title, or a place. It gives the viewer additional, unspoken information.
Down in the lower right corner is what I call a small “bug” which can be your complete logo or just your icon, and it can be placed down here to quietly reinforce the brand.
And, lastly, the outro, which is the closing panel. Like the intro, it can simply be your logo on a plain background. The outro serves as a reminder of who you are, how you can be contacted, and it’s the perfect place to leave the viewer with a specific call to action.
There can be other elements to branding, like incorporating campaign specific graphics, music, even the tone and the pacing of the storytelling. But especially for smaller marketing departments, if you can form the habit of incorporating these four standardized elements across your videos, it’s a great start. And it’s perfectly fine for them to evolve as your video marketing evolves or matures. It really is a journey.
Hey, thanks so much for reading this and watching the video, I do hope it’s a help. It you’d like any further help with video production or video branding for your company or nonprofit, please let me know, I’m always happy to talk with potential new clients to see if there’s a good fit.
Sincerely,
JIm T.