5 Ways To Amplify Brand Awareness Using Videos

Liza Brown

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

The use of digital video is continuously on the rise. According to Cisco more than 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic will consist of online videos by 2020. In 2018, the total digital video advertising spend is projected to reach US$11 billion in Asia Pacific, almost half of which comprises of mobile video.

It seems that businesses are realizing that video is definitely the future of content marketing. In fact, more than half plan to use video as the medium of choice in their marketing strategies, according to Nielsen.

However, there are key elements marketers need to bear in mind if they want to boost brand awareness using video. Here are five surefire ways to achieve just that.

1. Perform High Quality Research

When a video plays on your screen, what makes you want to stay and watch? Good and relevant content that piques your interest.

Good content is based on good research. Therefore, it is important to dive deep during the pre-development stage with research about your audience’s problems and your brand’s capability to solve them.

Knowing your audience through thorough research helps you to build accurate customer personas. This is essential in knowing what content is relevant to them. When you know your audience well and create content that speaks to their needs, you’re ensuring that your content value adds. This in turn boosts airtime for your video.

Good research also goes a long way to knowing how long (or short) it takes to hook your audience in. In today's day and age, no one wants to watch something that wastes their time. With 72 hours of video being uploaded onto YouTube every 60 seconds, but only 24 hours in a day, you have less than 8 seconds to capture your audience’s attention before they decide your video is worth their time.

2. Repurpose Old High-Quality Content

Before creating video content, you might be feeling super thrilled and filled with fresh ideas that you cannot wait to share with your audience. But as time goes by, you may be confronted with unexpected challenges. For example, running out of fresh ideas, finding yourself on a shoestring marketing budget, or that your video content is outdated.

Don't worry, because there are several ways you can give your video library a major overhaul without busting your budget. Do you have a blog? Identify your most popular articles and repurpose them into videos, from how-to instructional videos or short explainer videos.

Repurposing content can also help drive traffic to your video. Embed your video into your blog article or share your infographic with a link to your video in forums. All these would help to drive traffic to your video, helping you boost your brand awareness and reach.

You won’t need to create new videos all the time. If you can identify your brand’s best-performing content, then you can repurpose them to create new videos.

3. Identify Best Practices in Video Format and Flow

One of the best practices to follow is learning to optimize your video for search engines. You may have a good video but if no one can find it, it’s wasted content. Google and Facebook are paying attention to the rise in video marketing and are making changes in their algorithm to prioritize them. You may have noticed that Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) feature more video results and rich snippets now unlike years ago. Furthermore, Facebook is regularly tweaking how videos are played on their platform. Thus, it's important that marketers are well aware of the basics of video optimization for search.

To do so, you should not only give a clear, concise and accurate title for it, you must be careful to use the most detailed levels of optimization for video sharing platforms. First, make sure the first two or three lines of text (above-the-fold) is loaded with relevant keywords and the most important information. Also, don't use misleading tags just to get more views because Google might penalize you for that. You should also choose a category to group your video with similar content out on YouTube.

Next, don’t limit yourself to just one channel. A third of all internet users may watch YouTube but this isn't the only place that people go to watch videos. For example, 45% of people watch over an hour of videos on either Facebook or YouTube. So if you're only concentrating on YouTube and ignoring Facebook altogether, you're losing a big chunk of potential viewers.

4. The Shorter, The Better

Video has the ability to prompt engagement, which is crucial in social strategies. These engagements will push your content higher in feeds, which in turn will bring it to more and newer audience.

Tropicana ran a video campaign that compared videos that were 6, 15 and 30 seconds long and found that the shortest videos had higher ad recall. This has sparked the idea of 6-second video ads on Facebook as the ideal video length. The shorter the video, the better the recall.

Shorter videos are also better utilized across all devices. With mobile being the rapidly growing medium of choice among consumers to watch video content, videos need to be mobile-friendly. Think of mobile-first apps like Instagram and Snapchat. Videos should be repurposed into shorter lengths to be shared on such platforms and apps, giving you more avenues to get your brand videos seen.

5. Measure Video Performance

Now, after everything is said and done, you need to measure your video's performance online. Let’s take YouTube as an example. How is your "Watch time" doing? This is important because how long people continue to watch your video speaks a lot about the quality of your content. It will also tell you how strong different parts of the video are.

You can also compare your video with all other videos similar in length in YouTube Analytics. This is a good measuring tool to check your video's performance against your competitors.

Finally, how engaged is your audience? Engagement can include sharing, re-tweeting, posting, commenting, liking and adding your video to their playlists. All of these are driven by your strategy before you even release the video.

Remember, your target audience needs to be attracted to your video the second they see it. So make sure you have great aesthetics put in place such as color schemes, object animation, focused imagery, etc. Boosting brand awareness using video can be fun and easy. So long as you have the end result in mind (sales, sales, and more sales!), you don't have to look far and wide for motivation to set in. Good luck!

-Author- Daniël Heerkens

Daniël is a Dutch entrepreneur and marketer who has been featured on the BBC. He has always been interested in Sustainable Products and Digital Innovation. With previous experience working for FMCG Multinationals (Danone & Royal FrieslandCampina) in The Netherlands, Malaysia and Singapore, he is now the Digital Marketing Strategy Expert at 2Stallions Digital Marketing Agency. He volunteers as the Chief Editor of the Association of Dutch Business Magazine. A permanent resident of Singapore, he has worked and lived in more than 6 countries. He most recently finished a 1000 km bicycle ride through Myanmar to raise funds for charity.

Liza Brown

Liza Brown is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Liza Brown