We all understand the point of brand guidelines – a set of design (and sometimes language) rules that ensure you’re consistently sending out the right messages about your brand.
Now video has become such a big part of the marketing mix, we’ve seen the need for video brand guidelines emerge. After all, it makes perfect sense to make sure the style and content of your videos is in keeping with the brand you’ve worked so hard to establish.
Without setting down any rules, there’s a risk you could compromise your brand as well as confuse customers. Or a third-party agency who isn’t familiar with your brand could create something that’s completely out of step with the rest of your marketing material.
With solid guidelines in place, you can make sure video is another seamless part of your communications arsenal. And with the creative boundaries already established, production costs are lowered and you’re free to concentrate on engaging content. There’s no longer the worry that outside agencies could misrepresent the look and feel of your brand. And you can make budgets go further, as even simple videos filmed internally can be professionally branded.
Create a consistent look and feel for branded video.
Video is powerful way to stand out from your competition and engage with your audience. But, like any other part of your marketing, it needs to be on brand.
Video branding elements
Here, we’ll think about the different components that make up your brand, and how we can expand existing guidelines to accommodate video. We’ll look at things like:
- The tone of the videos: For example, should they always be quite serious, or will you use humour?
- Use of language: What tone of voice reflects you best? How will you refer to people, products and services consistently?
- Use of colours: These will probably be guided by your existing palette, but a new colour can work well for a new initiative or service.
- Use of graphics: Cartoon-style animation or something more corporate?
- Use of your logo: When should it appear, and how prominent should it be?
- Use of typefaces: Again, this can come for existing guidelines, or you may need to adapt for the screen.
- Use of music and sound: Which sort of sounds will fit with the way your brand already looks and feels?
Taking these a step further, we can put together a series of ‘brand elements’ that can be used in all your corporate videos going forward. Things like intro and outro screens, the name or job-title straps that would appear when a colleague or customer appears on screen, text captions that pop up to highlight key points in the narrative… whatever works best for your brand and the type of video you’re producing.
Video templates
If you’re producing a large number of videos in a similar format, or you’re enlisting the help of a few different agencies to produce your content, a template approach can guarantee consistency as well as save valuable time and money.
We’ll go more in depth to produce guides on shooting, scripting and editing, plus film and edit a sample video to show how everything’s put together.
