5 Ways to Keep Your Videos On-Brand

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With the great resignation of 2021, employers are struggling to retain talent and engage employees in a meaningful way. And it turns out, the secret to standing out and to connecting on an emotional level both internally and externally–is branding.

Why Brand Your Videos?

In a recent Social Sprout survey that asked what made a brand stand out, 40% said it was due to memorable content, 33% said distinct personality, and 32% said compelling storytelling. Recent surveys also show that establishing a consistent internal brand has a positive impact on brand identification among employees, which improves overall staff retention rates. Additionally, research suggests that internal branding both improves job satisfaction and staff loyalty. Kind of the holy grail for brands in 2021, right?

While 95% of organizations have branding guidelines, just 25% enforce these guidelines, which means 60% of organizations create internal and external marketing materials that are inconsistent with brand best practices.

So how can you make sure your brand is aligned both internally and externally? The answer, quite simply, is video. Internally, 48% of all employees consider video the most engaging form of communication, according to a TechSmith survey.

Empowering your teams to create engaging videos that align with your branding consistently, no matter whether they’re meant for marketing, HR, or training, shouldn’t be hard. Here are 5 easy ways you can keep your videos on-brand, always:

1. Easy-to-Access Brand Book

Make sure every potential video creator on your team has access to your company’s brand book. Want to make this even more intuitive? Use a video creation tool like Powtoon that allows you to pre-define your brand logos, colors, and fonts. Create a template with a slide that has all of your brand guidelines. Include visual examples like the one below.

2. Lock Branded Elements in Place

Think about the last time you sat through an hour-long presentation only to see the logo appearing in the top left corner of some slides, on the bottom right corner of others, and then completely missing from some slides? Not the most professional look – and completely avoidable.

Create video templates your team can easily use and include branded elements like your logos. To make sure videos are always looking consistent, lock certain objects in place.

3. Introduce Branded Characters

Humanize your videos with characters. This is a great way to build an emotional connection and instant engagement while showing your playful side. In 2022 (and beyond), promoting diversity and inclusion among your team and clients is more important than ever. Characters give us, content creators, an opportunity to deliver brand consistency and inclusivity. Customizing your characters with branded clothing is easy and will make a difference.

With Powtoon’s Character Building feature, your team can quickly customize video characters to match… well, whoever you’d like them to! That means fine-tuning skin tone, face shape, hairstyle, clothes, height, accessories, and more.

4. Brand Tone and Voice

The tone and the voice of your brand are the building blocks of how people experience you. In many cases, the teams most familiar with the brand’s tone and voice guidelines are the brand marketing, PR ,communication teams. But that leaves out the rest of your most important brand ambassadors – your entire organization.

Make sure to communicate your brand’s values, style, and rhythm so every video created reflects this. For example, this fun change management video by Sage reflects the team’s humor and easy-going vibe using characters to animate a conversation.

The best way to do this is to create video templates that your employees can intuitively customize. Want to go the extra mile? Include a slide with some short and sweet recommendations about video length, language, and tone of voice, etc.

5. Consistency, consistency, consistency

In today’s day and age, it’s close to impossible to review each and every piece of content created – at least when you’re going for scale. That’s why ensuring your brand guidelines are transparent to all content creators (even those sitting in the HR and L&D departments) is nothing less than crucial. Providing them with video creation tools that include templates, characters, and recommendations can make the impossible possible and help you reap the benefits of a consistent and fabulous brand.

Empower your team to create on-brand videos

In the last 2 years, team leaders across the board have recognized the need to empower employees to become video creators. And many HR, Internal Communications, and L&D teams have met this challenge head-on and started creating amazing content.

When it comes to scaling, you want to make sure your in-house creators have the tools they need to produce effective video content that aligns with your brand guidelines. Explore Powtoon’s all-new brand controls for protecting your brand’s look and feel in every video.

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Sapir Segal

Sapir is the Enterprise Product Marketing Manager at Powtoon. Her work is driven by a consistent, unwavering belief in the power of storytelling and how good product narratives help build long-lasting brands, connect between customers, and drive sales.