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Why Do You Need Video Brand Guidelines?

Every marketer understands the importance of having brand guidelines for your communications, but what about for video?


Despite video being an integral part of any marketing strategy, with 92% of marketers using video, something that is often put on the back burner is the need for video brand guidelines. After all, if you’ve worked hard to establish a brand, you’ll naturally want to make sure the style and content of your videos is in keeping with this.


Your brand image takes time to build, but only moments to shatter if content, such as video, isn’t well considered. Fortunately, there is an easy fix: creating video brand guidelines.


What are video brand guidelines?

Let’s start with brand guidelines. Brand guidelines are essentially an instruction manual on how to represent your brand correctly. From your brand colours to tone of voice, your brand guidelines serve as a reference for people to consult before developing collateral or communicating on behalf of the business. Typically they outline the visual and written rules, but they should also establish a brand identity and show what makes your organization unique. Video brand guidelines follow the same principle as the central brand guidelines. Your video brand guidelines are a road map for video, outlining how they should look, sound and feel. Anyone who reads your video brand guidelines should come away with a firm understanding of how video fits into your overall branding. Whilst video requires individual consideration, they should form a part of your main brand guidelines to ensure a cohesive guide.

Why do you need video brand guidelines?

Your brand is your business’s identity and is likely apparent in a few places: your website, your product or service, your social media and your adverts. However, branding in video is often overlooked. It is vital to include video in your brand guidelines or even create separate video brand guidelines to:

Ensure completely consistency across all your content

Without creating and applying brand rules for your video content, chances are your videos will not represent your brand in a way that is consistent or seamless with your other content. Video brand guidelines ensure you are consistently sending out the right message across every platform and medium. A lack of consistent branding can present your brand in an unprofessional light.

Create a strong brand experience and identity

Video is a powerful and popular form of content for marketing, sales and even internal communications. It is an immersive medium that can represent your brand in a whole new way. However, if your video content is not consistent or representative of your brand it can weaken your identity and even impact the brand experience for your audience.



Make your video content recognisable to your audience

Strong branding in your videos improves brand recognition, ensuring your videos are recognised as a product of your company. For example, colour alone can increase brand recognition by 80%. Content that isn’t matching up to your established brand may confuse your audience and pollute your message. Furthermore, ensuring your videos are in-line with your branding will build trust with your customers and instil a sense of brand identity that can grow into brand loyalty.


Make sure external agencies don’t misrepresent your brand

You probably know your brand like the back of your hand, or were even involved in developing it! When you outsource to an expert video agency, however, they only know what you tell them. Brand guidelines are a starting point, but video brand guidelines establish those rules and ensure your brand is not misrepresented.

Lower production costs

Whether you create your video content inhouse or hire an external specialist, establishing creative boundaries before producing your video content means there is less upfront work to be done. This saves both time and money, leaving you or your video agency free to concentrate on creating engaging content without having to worry about making sure everything is on brand.


What should video brand guidelines include?

Video is arguably one of the most complicated mediums, but it can still be effectively branded. To ensure your videos reflect your brand, your guidelines will need to cover the following elements:

Video brand elements

Tone

This is your opportunity to explain how you want your videos to feel and the general “vibe”. For example, do you want them to be serious and professional, or should they use humour? This is an important baseline to work from and will help guide the rest of the brand elements.

Language

This will range from more granular elements such as, how your company should be referred to or how products/services should be described, to more broad aspects like the tone of voice that should be used in your videos.

Colours

Your company should have a brand colour palette that it uses in its marketing materials. You should include guidelines on how and where these colours should be used in your videos. Or you may want to introduce a new colour for a new initiative.

Graphics

If you are planning on using animation in your videos, you will need to decide on a style that best represents your brand. Will it be a more cartoon-style or something more corporate? It is also important to include guidelines for the use of specific graphical elements.




Logo

It is good to include your company logo somewhere in your videos to help with brand recognition. This section of your brand guidelines should indicate how and where your logo should be used. Will it be used in the intro or outro of videos? Or should it consistently be watermarked in the corner?

Typography

Again, this may be influenced by your existing guidelines, or you may need to adapt it for video. Typography guidelines should include information such as, sizes for headings, sub-headings and body text, and even when and where text should be used.

Music and sound

Video introduces a new element to consider for your brand - sound. It is important to consider what sort of sounds and music will fit with the way your brand already looks and feels. What mood do you want to create?


Transitions

Even transitions between shots can increase brand recognition. Think American sports networks that typically use a fast logo reveal! You need to consider what your brand standard will be for transitions. Will it be a simple and classic transition, or will you make it an opportunity to to reinforce your brand?

Video templates

If you’re going to be producing a large number of videos in a similar format, such as multiple training videos, it might be worth creating video templates and including them in your video brand guidelines. These can then be used as a foundation for your videos going forwards, saving time and money, and guaranteeing consistency.

Shooting style

If you are taking a filmed approach, establishing a shooting style and editing technique is very important for the visual vibe of the video. What lighting will you use? What angles will you shoot at? Will you shoot indoors or outdoors? Alongside this, knowing where the video will be distributed will decide how you frame the shots. For example, if it is going to be shared on social media, you may need to consider if a 1:1 aspect ratio would work best for your brand and content.




To wrap it all up...

It is great that you are creating video content - there is no better way to market your business. But, don’t lose sight of your brand! Without creative boundaries in place you risk compromising the brand you’ve worked so hard to establish. Video brand guidelines not only makes your content consistent, but also better. They help protect your brand, create a strong message across all your content and lets your brand identity shine through. If you are ready to get your video brand guidelines produced, either request a quote or drop us an email. We'd be more than happy to help!


 
 
 

Video SEO: 12 Ways to Optimise Your Video for Search

So, you’ve spent time and money creating an awesome video, but it just isn’t ranking on search engines.

You’ve come to the right place!

Video SEO is a totally different ball game to regular SEO and is often overlooked as part of the video marketing process. This usually results in your video not getting in front of the people you want.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to optimise your videos to improve your ranking on search with 12 easy-to-implement tips.

But, first, let's start with the basics.



Video SEO is the process of optimising your videos to get them to rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) or hosting sites, like YouTube, for relevant keyword searches. This should ultimately result in your video getting more views and your website getting more organic traffic. There are many optimisation strategies and tactics to give your video the best chance of ranking. In this guide, we’ll be focusing on how to get your video to rank higher in search engines, like Google, rather than YouTube optimisation. With the explosion of video in the last 10 years, it is harder than ever to rank in the universal search results compared to getting your video indexed on the video tab (see below).


What are the universal search results?

Search engine results pages used to just be a list of 10 blue links to websites, but Google upped the game a few years ago with the addition of embedded boxes. These can contain media such as videos, images, maps, shopping results, which appear above organic search results. This expansion is commonly referred to as the universal search results. In regards to video, depending on the search request video has prime real estate and takes up a lot of space on the results page. This can come in the form of a “featured snippet”, the large video at the top of the results page, and/or multiple boxes of video results below the featured snippet (see below).



Appearing in the universal search relies on a whole host of factors, such as the authority of your website, the number of videos on your website and how it ranks for video-related search queries. We recommend starting by focusing your efforts on ranking higher in video search and YouTube (LINK), rather than in the universal search.


Below are 12 actionable steps you can take to optimise your video for search and make the most of your video marketing assets. So let’s dive in!




When choosing your video hosting site, you need to consider your objectives for the video and why you want it to rank. Do you want to increase your website traffic and conversions? Or are you more focused on increasing brand awareness?


If your goal is the latter and you are not concerned about driving more traffic to your website, then video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo might be the best options for you. This is because platforms like these drive traffic to their own sites, rather than your website, meaning your audience will get lost in a sea of content on those platforms (such as recommended videos that appear after yours on YouTube).


However, if you want to increase traffic to your website and drive conversions, then you should look at video hosting platforms that support this.




Just like website optimisation, the video title and description play a part in ranking videos. So it is important to spend time writing copy that reflects the content of the video, rather than just replicating the title of the page the video is embedded on. It’s also vital to do keyword research to ensure you are basing your title and description around what people are actually searching for. But don’t fall into the trap of stuffing the title and description with keywords you want to target. This will not only be ineffective, but will look spammy to potential viewers. Write your title and description with both Google and your audience in mind, this will not only optimise it for SEO but help draw viewers in.




Your video's thumbnail is what your audience will see as they scroll through the search results, and it can play a significant role in whether people click on your video or not. You should think of your thumbnail image as the book cover or movie poster of your video. It needs to be relevant, compelling and exciting. If you get it right, a strong thumbnail image can have a significant impact on your click-through-rate and other SEO metrics.


There are some rules of thumb (pun intended) when it comes to creating your thumbnail:

  • Don’t just use a frame from the video! This will not be interesting or exciting for potential viewers and will not stand out on the results page. Be more creative to show what your video is all about.

  • The rule of thirds. Video thumbnails are no different than images. Consider your framing to ensure your image is attractive and attention grabbing.

  • Make sure it is visible, even at 116 x 65 pixels. Whatever your thumbnail content, you need to make sure it is compelling even when it is shrunk down in the search results.



A video transcript is any speech or audio from your video in written form with no time information attached. There are two types of transcription: verbatim and clean read. Verbatim transcribes the audio word-for-word, including all sound effects, which is great for scripted speech. Whereas clean read transcription captures the fundamental meaning of the words in a recording but does not type them exactly as they are spoken. This means your audio or video files have been slightly edited for easy readability, perfect for unscripted content like interviews. Transcripts live in the backend of your website as part of the code, meaning it can be scraped by search bots so they know exactly what your video is about and can rank your video more effectively. Think of it like detailed alt text for your video.


Captioning is the process of breaking the transcript up into smaller segments and synchronising them with the video's audio to create captions (aka. subtitles). Captions typically sit at the bottom of the video screen allowing viewers to watch the video without needing sound.


you will have the option to embed your video on your website in different ways.



A sitemap is a file uploaded to your website where you provide information about your website for search engines (called metadata), such as the pages, videos, images and other files on your site, and the relationship between them. Search engines like Google read this file which allows them to crawl your website more effectively. Creating a video sitemap is the best way to help search engines find and understand the video content on your site. It will give them information such as the video title, description, run time and intended audience. This can either be embedded as part of an existing sitemap or be completely separate just for video, it’s up to you!



Google typically only indexes one video per page. So if you are putting multiple videos on your webpage, ensure that you embed them in order of importance. It is unlikely that Google will recognise more than the first video, so choose the one you want to rank in SERPs.



You’ve spent time and money on creating your video, so it sounds obvious that you would want to put it pride of place on your website. But, we’ve seen it time and time again that videos are hidden or below-the-fold meaning users have to scroll to find the content.



You can’t rely on your video alone to rank on the SERPs. If your video isn’t ranking despite optimising it, it could be because the page it’s embedded on is not performing. It is vital that the page itself is optimised for SEO, otherwise search engines won’t crawl it in the first place.


You want your video to be seen by everyone and anyone, we get it! But that doesn’t mean it should be embedded on multiple pages. If you put your video on multiple pages, you are essentially competing against yourself for a spot in the SERPs. Why would you want to make your life harder?



We recommend to our clients that it forms part of a wider strategy to get eyes on your video. Investing in channels such as paid video advertising on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, or more organic routes such as email marketing, is a more strategic route.




We’re a generous lot, so here is a bonus video SEO tip! Alongside the tactics we’ve just run through, one of the most important ranking factors is the video itself and it’s quality. If someone starts watching your video and then leaves straight away, this communicates to Google that your video is either low quality or irrelevant. This will inform future search results, meaning your video could drop or not appear. But don’t splash a load of cash on expensive equipment too quickly. Instead plan your video in advance, focus on providing value to your audience, and do the research.




 
 
 

YouTube video lengths?



The world of YouTube is vast, with content varying from music videos, to movies, to tutorials, to product demos. It’s no wonder it is the second largest search engine in the world. As a result, users are used to watching long form content. But unless you’re planning on giving them a binge-worthy TV series, they’re not going to stick around for longer than a couple of minutes. Hubspot found that audiences engaged the most with content that was under two minutes, so try to keep your videos within that bracket. YouTube video length: < 2 minutes



In-stream ads (aka. Pre-roll ads) are the ads played automatically before YouTube videos. They’re not a fan favourite as they are intrusive and prevent viewers from seeing the content they’re looking for (even if it is only for a few seconds). As a result, shorter is better! The most effective YouTube pre-roll ad length is 15 to 30 seconds. However, 3 types of pre-roll ads and lengths: Bumper ads Ads that users must watch before they can access the video. Length: 6 seconds Non-skippable ads Viewers must watch the full ad to access the video. Length: 15 - 20 seconds long Skippable ads Viewers must watch the first 5 seconds before they can skip to watch the video. Length: 6 - 20 seconds long what is crucial for pre-roll ads is grabbing the viewers’ attention. You must hook the viewer in the first 5 seconds before they can skip past the ad.



 
 
 
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