Brand awareness and engagement is key when selling, your customers should know your name as well as knowing your brand values. Customers want to know who they are buying from and why they should be trusting your brand or business. Video gives you the opportunity to help create good quality and creative content that will bring your brand to life. Video has emerged as a marketing tool, it is one of the most effective ways to build trust and increase your overall engagement and awareness with customers.

Video is an extremely powerful marketing tool but 42% of businesses are still not using it (source), here are a few reason why we think you should be using video to help improve your brands awareness and engagement;

Lets you tell a story

Storytelling allows you to reach out to a whole new audience, it lets you connect with your customers by showing them who the brand is and what the brand is about. Taking your customer through a journey helps create personality behind the brand, it will help you leave a more memorable impression on your viewers.

Video is a medium that helps provide content that is more concise yet more meaningful than a picture would. Audiences don't have time to read longer pieces of text, a short upbeat video will capture their attention quicker and it will be easier for them to consume during the day when they don't have much time. Series of ongoing videos is a great idea when explaining different products or services to your audience as they can choose when to watch and they can watch them in their own time. It will also play out like a story for each produce and service you offer. This will be a lot more effective than posting one long video that will loose peoples attention and be ignored due to the length of it.

Including personal stories into your videos can help you add value and show a different side to your company. This will help you when trying to differentiate you from your competitors as every story is different and your customers might be able to relate more to your stories. Storytelling helps show your roots, it helps build a natural connection with your audience that you are then able to add a call to action to.

Your brand's personality matters just as much as what you are selling, the more passion you have in your video the higher your conversion rate can be. This is because people will see the true emotion you have for the brand and feel more of a connection with the business and they will want to use you over a competitor.

Improves search engine performance

Video always ranks higher in online searches than anything else, 62% of google searches include video (source). By adding video to your website you are increasing your exposure, this means people will see your website more and engagement and awareness of your brand will increase. Audiences would rather see a video of a product or service in use than a picture with information, this means when audiences are searching for what you offer they will be looking for video content. This is due to them wanting video content over text and images.

Google cares about video, google values the quality of the content and it’s relevance to what you are searching. As a search engine it is able to scan through all types of media to see what your website has to offer. If your website offers a mixture of content it means your website is more informative than others. This will then boost your SEO as you are giving audiences more than other websites that offer similar information to you. This will help improve brand awareness as if you are showing closer to the top of searches more people will use your website and find out about your company. 

Not only does video help increase SEO but it will help convince customers to buy, shoppers are twice as likely to make a purchase after viewing something like a product video than they are without engaging that content (source). This shows more customers are looking for engaging content as they don't want to be having to find the information out for themselves, customers want to be given that information in the easiest way possible. This will help with your brand engagement as customers are more likely going to visit and stay on your website longer if your website is offering video.

Can be used on social platforms

Video can be used anywhere, from your website's landing page to your company's social media pages. The only factor you will need to think about when creating video for socials is the timings for each different platforms. You are able to post different styles of video depending on the platforms as well as making longer or short versions of videos already created.

As a business you need to be where your audience is, different social media platforms appeal to different demographics however once you know what platforms your customer is using it will be easier to post. You are able to optimize your video content to make fit to each platform's audience and cater to the different audiences needs.

When using social media you want to be making sure you are staying consistent. By posting a series of videos will help keep that consistency, you don't want to be posting only one video as this won't keep audiences engaged. Creating teaser videos will help build the excitement around the brand, you are then able to post the full version to your website. This will encourage more customers to visit the website, increase traffic and engagement with the brand.

Posting on social media will help encourage sharing, if your customer likes your content they will more likely share it with their family and friends, 76% of users say they would share a branded video with their friend if it was entertaining (source). Social sharing will then help increase traffic to your pages as people will become more interested in what you offer. This is a good way to get free marketing for your brand as customer sharing will bring more potential customers to you helping improve the overall awareness and engagement with the brand.

Authentic

When done correctly video gives a feeling of genuine authenticity, by creating this feeling will help followers respond more to your content and become more active. Video gives you the opportunity to reach out to your audience and express your feelings to them which will help inspire them more. Mixing up your mediums is very important as it gives your company more diversity. It helps capture the audience's attention as there is more to look at and gives them more than just pieces of text and images.

Video allows you to open up and share more with your audience, audiences don't just want to invest in solutions to solve their problems anymore they want to be investing in a genuine connection as well. People want to get to know people behind the business as this helps when buying.

When creating a video you want to be making sure you're not relying on a script as this can hurt how authentic your video looks. If you rely on a script and continuously look at notes it will seem more staged and unnatural which audiences won't enjoy as much. If you just talk to the camera it gives you a more unique personality and will help show that there is more to the business while still making key points about the product or service you are selling. This is important as engagement will be better with a more natural relaxed video than it would with a scripted forced video. 

Creating brand awareness and engagement is a very difficult task for any business, by using video marketing you are able to extend your reach and help improve communications that will impact potential customers. Video is a great way of encouraging audiences to feel a more genuine connection with your brand as you are able to use storytelling to build on emotions.

If you need help with building awareness and engagement for your business, get in touch with one of our team to see how we can help build on this.

‍