We are well aware of the importance of brand guidelines—they define the identity of your business or company. These guidelines help streamline and ensure consistency in how and what you communicate to your customers in various forms on different platforms. One such form is video. However, the question arises—what about video brand guidelines? Undoubtedly, you would want your videos to align with the rest of your communication and make them memorable. That is why you need to create your video brand guidelines!

In this article, we will discuss essential elements of your video brand guidelines to enhance the impact of your video marketing strategy. 

Why Do You Need Video Brand Guidelines? 

A brand style guide can be considered as a set of rules on how to communicate with your customers. This includes but is not limited to tone, voice, colour palette, logos, typography, and imagery. Your website, social media presence, advertisements, product packaging, etc. reflect your brand identity. 

In fact, video brand guidelines follow the same principle. The style guide gives you the direction to define your video’s look, feel, sound, and even distribution or promotion. You don’t have to create a separate rule book for videos but you can include it in your existing style guide.

Here’s why you need to create video brand guidelines. 

• Consistency: Whether you are a new or an established brand, your customers expect some consistency, which is actually a door to brand loyalty. If your communication across different channels or mediums including videos lacks consistency, then it may affect your reputation, reflect poorly on your brand, and even impact customer experience. 

• Brand awareness: Impactful or strong branding makes your customers notice you. The colours, jingle, or logo you use helps customers recognise your product or brand on different channels instantly, increasing brand awareness. 

• Avoid misrepresentation: If you outsource branding or marketing activities including video production to agencies, then video brand guidelines ensure that third parties are aware of what you stand for. It will help them follow the right tone, colour palette, voice, sound etc. without diluting your brand identity. 

• Avoid rework: When you have clear video brand guidelines, then whether you employ an in-house team or agency for video production, they will stick to it to focus their effort and time on the creative process. This will help save both time and money. 

11 Essential Elements of Video Brand Guidelines

Video marketing is one of the most powerful tools when reaching out to your customers. Having well-defined video brand guidelines can make this tool more effective and impactful. 

Here are a few essential elements to consider when creating your video brand guidelines. 

#1 Tone 

This is one of the initial elements to define when creating a style guide. It will help you define the overall feel or vibe of your videos. You can decide whether you want your videos to be professional, humorous, fun, informative, or others.

#2 Style of Editing

Identifying your style of editing in terms of animation, transition, audio, graphics, etc. will also help define the feel of your videos for your customers. 

#3 Colours 

Your company brand guideline would have defined the colour palette used in different marketing collaterals. You can decide how and where you would like to use that colour palette. For instance, do you want to use it throughout the video or only in the intro or outro? Which colours do you want to highlight in external videos or internal videos? 

#4 Graphics 

Do you want a professional video with real-life graphics or an animation video with cartoon-like images or characters? You may also want to define other graphical elements in your video. For instance, how much space do you want to use at the bottom or top for subtitles, additional display text, etc.? 

#5 Placement of Logo

Including your logo in videos is important for brand recognition. In your video brand guidelines, you can define how and where would you like to place your logo—will it be at the intro, outro, at the bottom, at the top or as a watermark? 

#6 Typography 

Typography outlines font and size for headlines, subheadlines, subtitles, display text and also where these will be placed. 

#7 Sound 

You may also want to define the type of mood you would want to create in your videos and music is an important aspect of it. Do you want to use a standard jingle or background music at the intro or outro? It is important to determine whether the music or sound you choose also matches your brand’s feel and vibe. 

#8 Transition 

It may appear trivial but it can be utilised for brand retention. You may decide to go with a simple or classic transition with a piece of music or also do a logo reveal in between transitions. 

#9 Target Audience

Now, you may wonder why to include this in your video brand guidelines. Defining your target audiences even for your video marketing strategy will help you make more impact. For instance, if you have two or more groups or categories, then you may need to make different versions or take different approaches to create videos. 

#10 Accessibility 

It is important to be considerate of differently-abled audiences in your video branding guidelines. You may want to define how and where you would include captions, transcription, audio, or colour contrasts to make your videos accessible to all. 

#11 Promotion or Distribution 

This is quite an important aspect of your style guide. You can define on which channels your video will appear or go live and how it would look. Do you want to use your videos as a part of the learning management system, YouTube, or website? What would be the style of your thumbnails—standardise it across all social media channels? How would you keep the tone of the description and what would be the guidelines for tagging? 

Final Words 

Video brand guidelines not only make your videos consistent but also improve the overall brand awareness and retention. Creating it first may appear a little troublesome but once defined, it will come into practice easily. It will also help your video production agency to navigate through the process of video creation to create what represents your brand the best. 

If you would want to know how we at BOXmedia are utilising video marketing to drive results for businesses, reach out to us today!