Your brand is your identity — it’s your messaging, your tone, the very distillation of who you are as a company. Branding is typically a top priority in your marketing efforts. But when it comes to video, branding is sometimes put on the back burner, especially when it comes to making a video style guide.
It’s a mistake to neglect branding within your videos and training, as this results in a less cohesive view of your company. Branding can also have a huge impact on your company’s performance.
Neglecting branding in videos is equivalent to ignoring sales and the importance of your company’s image. Fortunately, this is a problem with an easy fix: creating a video brand style guide.
Why video branding matters
Your company branding is likely apparent in a few places: your website, your product, your blog articles, and your ads. Unfortunately, it’s easy to overlook branding in video, because the video creation process itself is already involved and unpredictable. But overlooking branding in your videos is a big mistake, for a few reasons:
- A lack of consistent branding across your channels and mediums can present your business in a poor, even unprofessional light. Whether people are new to your brand or experienced, they’ll expect your branding to be consistent.
- Strong branding in videos allows them to be immediately recognizable as a product of your company. For example, color alone can help drive brand recognition by up to 80%. This can help with the next two points.
- Better branding in video can help establish brand recognition for your company as a whole. This allows people, over time, to quickly recognize your brand because of increased exposure.
- Branded videos help boost overall brand awareness. Brand recognition starts with awareness, and branded videos make this task easier for you and your company.
Whether you’re using videos for training, marketing, or general awareness, video branding is important. Watch how sales intelligence company, EverString, infused their brand colors into this animated video example:
We’ve established why branding is crucial for your videos — and a style guide can help you get there. Now, what, exactly, is a video brand style guide?
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What is a video style guide?
A video brand style guide is your map for video. It tells you how videos should look, sound, and feel, and even how you should promote them. Anyone who reads through a video style guide should walk away with a firm understanding of how video plays into their company’s branding.
But you don’t have to have a stand-alone video brand style guide. Ideally, you can include videos in your current style guide. This makes for a more cohesive style guide. (Style guides are intended to create a cohesive experience, after all!) By including video instructions within an existing style guide, you’re setting up new hires for a smoother onboarding experience as well.
For example, take a look at Zendesk’s brand style guide. Their style guide covers branding through and through, including areas where video is concerned. They cover video philosophy, sound editing, b-roll style, interviewing, and the nitty-gritty of video editing.
Understanding how to create a video brand style guide is almost as important as understanding what a video brand style guide is.
How to create a video style guide
Video is arguably one of the most complex content formats one can create. But it can still be effectively branded like any other content format. To ensure that your videos are properly branded, create a style guide or a video section in an existing style guide to keep them consistent.
Cover the following areas to ensure that your style guide checks all the right boxes:
- Tone: This dictates the general feel of your video. It is your opportunity to explain the overall vibe you’re going for with your videos. For example, do you want videos to be casual and informative? Fun and friendly? Or should they be more professional in tone?
- Editing style: Similar to tone, editing style will define how our videos make your audience feel. How do you utilize transitions, graphics, timing, audio, and animation?
- Colors: Your company likely has a brand color palette it uses in its marketing materials. Be sure to include guidelines on how and where to use these colors within internal and external videos. Do you want branded colors prominently displayed? Or do you want your brand colors displayed only on the intro?
- Logo placement: It’s a good idea to include your company logo in your videos to help with brand recognition. Use this section of your style guide to indicate where and when you’d like the logo placed. Will it go prominently in the intro of the video? Should it stay watermarked in the corner? Or should it be featured at the end of the video?
- Audience: Your company targets at least one audience, and possibly more. Clearly define how you want your video to target each audience. Depending on how varied your audiences are, your video will need to take different approaches.
- Accessibility: It’s important to make your videos accessible to differently-abled audiences. Set your process for applying closed captions, transcriptions, audio, and color contrast
- Distribution: This section of your style guide can describe where your videos live and what they look like once they get there. Do your videos go into a Learning Management System or to YouTube? What’s the process for putting them there? Should thumbnails look a specific way? Do you require a specific process for descriptions or tagging?
Including the above in your video brand style guide or existing style guide ensures that you’re creating videos that feel cohesive with your company’s other content. To see these points in action, be sure to look at the Yeshiva University video style guide, which covers granular technical specs as well as brand-specific points. Keep reading for more video style guide examples.
While the video creation process may feel more cumbersome at first, due to the guidelines you set, it will eventually become quicker and easier. (And, more importantly, more consistent.)
How Vyond makes branding a cinch
When it comes to branding a video, there are a lot of elements to track. Creating a video that feels aligned with your brand can mean the difference between something as granular as using one color over another.
Fortunately, Vyond makes branding animated videos a cinch, thanks to the following features:
- Vyond features a library of characters that can be altered to fit your target audiences. For example, you can easily swap the color of a character’s shirt, change their hair, alter their clothing, or design them as silhouettes in your brand colors.
- Alter backgrounds and props on the fly. Tweak any preexisting scene template to fit your own audience or brand. For example, if you want to use an office template to mimic your office by including items from your real location, you can do so with ease. Vyond features a vast library of templates, which you can alter in any number of ways to feel like an entirely new scene.
- Add audio into any video, making it possible to include a brand jingle (if you have one). This also enables you to include voiceover narration and sound effects.
- Import your logo, brand font, photos, videos, and other brand elements to include in your animations.
Watch this video from WebCE Online Education & Training to see numerous customizations in motion and learn more about how to brand your video in Vyond.
Video makes branding the star
A brand style guide can not only make video consistent but also better. A style guide acts as a road map, providing you with direction as you navigate the video creation process. While video creation may be a bit rocky the first few times you apply a style guide, it will get easier over time.
Eventually, you’ll reach a point where following your style guide is second nature. When that moment comes, you’ll be able to make your videos truly shine, and your brand along with them.
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Video brand style guide examples
Each of these companies includes video in their brand guidelines. They all provide excellent examples of what to consider for your own video style guide.
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