Can video help increase your brand awareness?

Table of contents

Introduction – Can video increase brand awareness?

Videos are a formidable tool for enhancing a brand’s image and creating a strong connection with its customers: but do they improve brand awareness?  The short answer is: yes, definitely. 

In this post, we will dig into this statement. We will examine the reasons why, we will provide supporting numbers and statistics, and we will see how videos increase brand awareness. 

Let’s go step by step. We’ll start by with a quick definition of Brand Awareness: what it is and why it is so important. 

What is brand awareness? And why is it so important? 

Brand awareness: the term is self-explanatory. It’s about the awareness the public has of a brand. To put it even better: it’s about notoriety, which in turn translates into desirability. 

So far, so good. However, isolating the different factors that contribute to increasing brand awareness—making sure that the brand remains imprinted very clearly (and for a long time) in the minds of consumers—is much more complex.

Certainly, video can play a key role in all of this, and we will get to that in the remainder of the post. 

First, let’s answer the second question: why is brand awareness so important? 

Brand awareness is important because it forms the highest part of the marketing funnel, the starting point of the process that then results in conversions, sales, and loyalty. 

The more consumers who know about your brand, the more conversions there will be, the more revenue and sales will increase. It’s very intuitive, but that’s not all: good brand awareness drives up retention rates. That’s because consumers don’t just buy a product; in a sense, they embrace the entire value system around a brand. Often, it is also a matter of status (conscious or unconscious). 

And that’s not all: improving brand awareness also triggers a fundamental ripple effect. Such an effect can be summarized as follows: when a brand is highly desirable, its own customers who turn into spokespeople. And, mind you, these are the most effective and credible testimonials because they are authentic. 

This is the old word-of-mouth mechanism, which has exponentially increased its strength and reach with digital media (just think of what happens, for example, on social networks, when a piece of content goes viral). 

In short, brand awareness is the fundamental basis of any kind of marketing operation, even and especially when it comes to digital marketing: from social media to email marketing, from ads to SEO strategies. Before we see how video fits within this broad landscape, it’s important to provide you with some data on the importance of brand awareness: 

• 59% of customers prefer to buy new products from brands they already know
• 77% of people refer to certain products by their brand name. 
• 82% of investors want the companies they invest in to have strong brand awareness.
• 75% of companies say that building brand awareness is among their top priorities. (renderforest.com) 

Semrush’s latest report on content marketing, which surveyed more than 1,500 marketers from 40 different countries, found that increasing brand awareness is the first priority for as many as 45% of respondents

How videos increase brand awareness in 6 points 

Brand awareness is the basis for any marketing strategy and for the effectiveness of any kind of campaign—we saw it above. 

Now, it’s time to look at how videos increase brand awareness. We’ll do this by isolating the 6 ways that are most decisive. 

1) Intelligibility and memorability 

• When viewing a video, the average user retains 95% of the message it contains; when it comes to text, this drops to 10% (covideo.com). 

• Ninety-four percent of marketers say that videos have consistently helped with what customers understand about their products or services (hubspot.com). 

Without messages that are understandable or memorable, you’ll have little chance of increasing brand awareness. It’s a basic step. And, as is clear from the statistics we have just reported, video is the tool that ensures that your messages are understood and memorable. 

2) Recognizability 

Again, let’s start with a significant statistic: 

• 75% of people recognize a brand from its logo, 60% by its visual style, 45% by the characteristic combination of its colors, 25% by its unique tone of voice (huddlecreative.com). 

Now, if you think about it, video is the only medium in which all these elements recur together, and combine neatly. 

Certainly, a well-constructed video includes your logo (which can be animated). The visual style unfolds well and it’s memorable. The brand’s characteristic colors and corporate image are featured. Finally, the tone of voice has a way of expanding into effective, engaging storytelling that takes its rightful place (…but without being boring). 

If recognizability is a “mosaic,” video is undoubtedly the medium capable of holding the most “tiles” all together. 

3) Surplus value

The desirability of a brand also (especially) depends on the added value it offers its customers. 

It is first and foremost a matter of perception, which has to do with the quality of the content. In the digital world, video—when it is well constructed—is the tool perceived as having the highest quality. 

But that’s not all.

Value also translates into education and information and into the ability to convey values to be shared, and not just to promote products to be sold. Again, in this sense, there is no better tool than video. In just a few seconds (or minutes), video can condense all of this, without weighing down, without boring, and while entertaining the audience. 

The ultimate goal is to create an emotional and intimate connection between the brand and individuals. 

In this regard, pay attention to this statistic: 

• 85% of people say that they feel connected to brands in a stronger way  through video content (renderforest.com) 

4) Ease of sharing – especially on social. 

As we saw above, brand awareness is also a matter of “digital word of mouth.” That is, of the ability to turn customers into real brand testimonials. 

Any good marketer knows that the perfect places to trigger this word of mouth are social media. 

And what is the content type that performs best on social media, in terms of coverage and sharing? 

The answer is obvious, again, video. 

Of all the data that we could use to support this, consider the following:  

• In a study on nearly 800 million Facebook posts, Buffer found that videos generate an average of 59% more engagement than other types of posts (buffer.com)
• On Instagram, the content that generates the best engagement rate is, once again, video (mention.com) 
• On LinkedIn, videos show an average engagement rate that is three times higher than text-only content (businessinsider.com). 

5) How videos increase brand awareness: The role of SEO 

A recognized and well-known brand must be immediately findable on Google. This is something we absolutely take for granted.  

In fact, in our eyes, a well-ranked site on search engines appears as “better” than its competitors. Likewise, the brand to which the site belongs is also perceived as better. 

It is a mechanism that has now become almost instinctive, unconscious…and, because of this, it acts even more strongly on us. 

SEO marketing is that branch of marketing that deals precisely with improving search engine rankings. All SEO specialists know that video is a formidable ally, even in this regard. 

This other statistic can tell you why: 

• On average, videos rank 50 times higher, in terms of organic results, on search engines than links that contain only text (seoinc.com).

6) The personalization boost 

This last point is decisive, and it points straight to the future (already present in the digital world): personalization. 

What is its relevance to brand awareness? 

We have already glimpsed it above: audiences today are looking for brands with which they can recognize themselves, with which they can establish an intimate and deep connection. 

To be “recognizable” and “palatable,” it’s not necessary to shout louder than the competition. You can do it differently: you can address each one in a close, intimate dialog, in a way that is precise and personalized. 

How is this possible? 

It’s possible thanks to data analytics, which allows you to know your audience and divide the target audience into many micro-targets corresponding to each individual person. 

And what is the role of video? 

Video has a central role. We’re talking about personalized video, which is built based on the characteristics and browsing choices of each individual recipient. 

Not surprisingly, according to Forbes, personalized videos are “the marketing breakthrough that brands need” (forbes.com). 

Here is the final answer to the question of how videos increase brand awareness: through personalization! 

More on the possibilities of Babelee’s personalized videos can be found here.