Stand Out From Your Competition
Strong brands don’t lead with products or services — they share their stories. Brands that stand out from the competition are set apart because of their own research and work. They stand out because their brand has creative brand storytelling.
Creative brand storytelling only becomes an art when the storyteller creates meaningful, emotional connections. This happens by activating feelings living inside the audience receiving the message. It creates a human, emotional connection. The real challenge for a brand is not to be “better” than the competition. Instead, it’s about bettering themselves by thinking beyond their own products or services. Creative brand storytelling identifies the strongest, most meaningful bonds formed with customers.
That’s where inspiration is born. So are you inspiring anyone with your brand’s story?
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Every Story Has a Beginning
Brand stories are born the moment someone hears your company’s name. After that, the story grows when they see your logo, click on your website, and then feast their senses on the content you’ve pushed onto the world. That inception moment is when audiences start building their own picture of the brand.
Cohesive and consistent messaging creates familiar traits that people correlate directly with your brand. Consistency and cohesive messaging are why legally blind folks can pick the Coke can out of a lineup without their spectacles. It’s why driving by the golden arches makes you want to either hurl or scrape $1.07 out of your car seats to buy a cheeseburger.
There isn’t one piece of content that doesn’t impact how an audience views your brand. Eyes and ears don’t come with “delete” buttons. Profound messages — good and bad — cannot be unseen and they are hard to forget.
Social media and content marketing provide brands with a powerful opportunity to build a presence that reflects the tried and true values of your brand. Boiled down, your messaging should be honest. It should reflect your company’s personality. And when you do that consistently, over and over again, that transparency creates trust. You turn new clients into loyal allies.
Your best marketing assets then become your very own customers. They’ve been on the ride with you, and they know you’ve never wavered from the goals and the partnerships you’ve formed.
Video Content is better than gold.
Companies that operate in industries where few brands use video or motion graphics have a unique opportunity. It’s an opportunity to separate themselves from competitors who are slow to adapt. Videos activate the senses. The best ones make the viewer want to take it even further by seeking what’s on the screen in the real world — touching, tasting, and experiencing it.
Shareable, engaging content is key to becoming a trusted industry leader. Shooting videos and creating motion graphics gives brands the chance to develop characters audiences can root for. It lets brands infuse personality into messaging and take the time to thoughtfully build human connections.
If you’re reading this, then you already know that online video is quickly becoming a creative necessity for every brand, from small start-ups all the way up to Fortune 500 companies. By 2017, video will account for 69 percent of all Internet traffic. Online users stream 38.2 billion videos per year– that’s a 43-percent increase since 2014.
Mobile video streams alone have increased 48 percent year-over-year since 2014. And most interestingly, 96 percent of consumers find videos helpful when deciding to make a purchase online. Simply put, video does things other media cannot. Especially for creative brand storytelling.
The Power of Creative Brand Storytelling: GoPro
Few companies have mastered creative brand storytelling better than GoPro. Once unknown, this now-familiar company produces small action cameras that are must-haves for every adrenaline junkie on the planet. The most beautiful thing about a GoPro camera is its ability to capture the stories of its user.
Fish tales about adventure once exchanged between friends at the bar are now true stories being captured and shared online by a community of cliff jumpers, skydivers, rock climbers, snowboarders, surfers, and skateboarders. There have even been GoPros attached to dogs, allowing fur-loving humans to experience a day in the life of their own best friends. GoPro’s Youtube channel has close to four million subscribers and is home to thousands of videos of people living the parts of their lives they love the most.
Video Content: What to Create and Share
To begin, consider the goal of the content. What is it supposed to accomplish? Generating leads? Converting viewers to customers? Driving brand awareness? Or simply engaging a target audience? Every piece of content, especially video, needs a strategic plan that speaks to the type of video content your brand aims to produce: educational, entertaining, practical, etc. Ask yourself who this content is intended for (with as much demographic detail as possible) and what the content is helping the audience accomplish.
From that point, determine who will create the content and where it will live (whether on a website, YouTube, Vimeo, social media, or elsewhere). If the project exceeds the capacity of your in-house departments, it is best to seek outside creative agencies to aid with content creation. One of our producers would love the opportunity to help you craft your story with video production or motion graphic design.
Here’s an article we published a while back that explains how our process works and the things we consider when producing a video.
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