The power of the brand is rising now more than ever. If you are looking to grow your customer base, create a loyal following and generate sales that beat your targets, you will need to pay more attention to brand perception. There are different ways to go about this but let’s focus on one of the premier tools you can use to build your brand story and win over your target audience – Video Marketing.

If you need a little convincing to keep reading, let us oblige. Video marketing has been among the most trending Digital Marketing tactics in the past decade. We gathered a few insights for you, just in case you were in doubt.

Useful Video Marketing Statistics

Based on Wyzowl’s Video Marketing Statistics Report 2022:

• 86% of businesses have utilized video marketing in their marketing strategy
• 92% of marketers say video is critical to their strategy
• 87% of marketers say video has helped them generate good ROI for their brands
• 96% of people have watched an explainer video for more information on a product or service.
• 88% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service just by watching a brand’s video.
• 88% of people would like to see more videos from brands in 2022. (An increase of 3% from last year)

If you haven’t utilized Video Marketing in your brand strategy yet, don’t worry, you aren’t late to the party just yet. Video Marketing is still one of the main priorities of business worldwide. This is because videos are currently top on the list of the most highly consumed content in the past few years. Facebook garners about 8 billion video views a day and YouTube boasts of a whopping 1 billion users.

TikTok, a product of the Chinese company ByteDance has grown from 0 to over 1 billion users in 150 countries amassing billions of views monthly. Multiple brands have fed into the TikTok craze, and benefited highly from it!

For example, Guess, a well-known American clothing brand, launched the #InMyDenim hashtag challenge on TikTok to promote their Fall’18 Denim Fit Collection. The brand posted several official videos accompanied by Bebe Rexha’s “I’m a Mess,” a song that aptly befitted the theme perfectly while catering to the TikTok style. This video campaign resulted in 5,550 user-generated videos, 10.5 million video views, 14.3% engagement rate, and over 12,000 additional followers for Guess’s Business Account on TikTok. The promotion resonated with their target consumers and considerably boosted brand affinity.

In this article, we’ll give you some key insights on Video Marketing, including the types of videos you can produce to catch the attention of your target audience, plus some real-world examples you can use to guide your own Video Marketing Strategy, to skyrocket your Brand Affinity.

Types of Videos in Marketing

1. Livestream Videos

Since the pandemic hit, live streaming has become a core part of many brands’ marketing strategies, and who can fault them? Considering that live stream videos are watched 3 times more than pre-recorded and motion graphic videos, that is one of the best decisions to make currently in Marketing. What is even more amazing is that live video generates 6 times more interactions than regular video content.

As a business tactic, you can use live streams to provide free information, create conversations and highlight new products or promotions to establish your brand at the top of your audience’s minds, build a personal relationship with them, and qualify leads for conversion (when your audience reaches out) Live streams that focus on education present a neutral ground to introduce your products to customers without sounding “sales-y” or “pushy”.

For example, Molbak’s Garden + Home centre, a garden centre in Washington, hosts monthly livestreams on their Facebook page that features their associates talking about key gardening DIY tips, advice, and product information. This creates a more personable feel and allows them to interact directly with their consumers, giving them key information for free and boosting their brand affinity organically in the process.

2. How-to Videos

Even with the availability of printed manuals, most people are likely to gravitate towards more visual content in the form of how-to videos. These types of videos are truly a miracle for any business that sells a product or service that customers do not understand out of the box. Even with brands that sell simple products, this offers a way for them to show multiple uses of said products.

Take a look at EvenFlo Baby’s Youtube Channel for example. Most of their strollers and car seats come with printed manuals to guide parents, but they’ve gone a step further to record a series of how-to videos for their many products. The channel has about 6.2k subscribers with each video receiving an average of 50k views. This how-to video on installing the Evenflo Position & Lock Gate for example, has amassed a whopping 312K views. That’s bound to be a big bunch of satisfied parents!

3. Explainer Videos

Explainer videos are similar to how-to videos – but they have a special twist to them. They are often used to explain how the service or product works, or how it benefits the consumer, without a step-by-step tutorial, as is done with how-to videos.

This should make understanding this a bit easier. This Spotify explainer video explains why exactly music-lovers should use Spotify, by appealing to their emotion and love of good music. It also showcases the various features the platform has without over-elaborating and illustrates some use-cases for the app. This particular video played an instrumental role in the platform’s growth, increasing its paid subscribers by 66% from 30MM to 50MM globally during its run.

4. User-Generated Videos

User-generated video is perhaps one of the most powerful forms of video marketing in our world today. This video type is raw, unadulterated and authentic – created wholly by people, rather than brands. Imagine this. A customer makes a video recommending your brand or narrating their good experience with your product and posts it across all their personal social media pages – from their WhatsApp story, to their Facebook profile, right up to Instagram Reels. Anyone on their friend list is immediately intrigued. They tuck your brand into the back of their minds, and it comes back up exactly at their point of need. You immediately increase conversions due to that single video.

User-generated videos can come in the form of product reviews and organic customer testimonials. Some brands work with micro and macro influencers to create a positive brand experience with user-generated videos, while others are lucky enough to have their customers willingly rave about them, without being told to. Either way, this strategy is a useful one that you can tap into to boost your brand awareness, affinity, and even conversions.

In the past year, Crocs launched their branded hashtag #croctok on TikTok which opened the gates for a huge wave of User-Generated Content. Hundreds of TikTokers created Crocs-themed videos showing off their Crocs, how they cleaned them and how they styled or decorated them. These videos generated over 6 million views, increasing brand affinity and awareness globally, while creating a pool of content the brand could dip into for their future Marketing campaigns.

5. Brand Story Videos

People love stories. Our African history has been transferred to younger generations through folklore, stories, and narratives and these stories have made us who we are today. Tell a beautiful, emotional, and captivating story about your brand, and you can win the hearts of some loyal customers. A great brand story has simple but impactful messaging, and clear, engaging visuals with cohesive storytelling.

LEGO, for instance, makes use of this beautiful animated film to tell its origin story, not only entertaining its audience but allowing them to connect with the brand on an emotional level, by giving them a deeper understanding of why it was formed. The video ends on a powerful note, with an animated character of the current owner, the grandchild of the founder, proclaiming, “We are still convinced that only the best is good enough because children deserve the best.” We believe no parent who watches this video would be in doubt of those words – on the contrary, it would build trust and affinity in parents across the globe who share this same sentiment.

6. Behind the Scene Videos

Most business social media pages are filled with the message “Buy! Buy! Buy!” and never really seek to connect on a personal level with their audience. Customers love to interact with their favorite brands and feel a sense of familiarity with them. Give your customers a peek into the day-to-day affairs of your brand. Show them the back story of how your products are made. Reveal how your business toils hard to give them the best. Just by showing them the office environment, and the daily mundane happenings at your organization, you will be blown away by how much loyalty and affinity you can gain.

A perfect example of boosting brand affinity using Behind the Scene Videos is the Domino’s Pizza Turnaround campaign video. The brand had received a whole boatload of negative comments and reviews from customers, and the brand sentiment was growing gloomier by the day. Instead of defending these comments or ignoring them wholly, Domino’s faced them head-on and decided to make a change, recording the process in a documentary-style video named Domino’s Pizza Turnaround. This video has cameos from the CEO as well as many Domino’s Staff members, with various shots from their offices and restaurant, showing the journey to making an entirely new and better recipe for their pizzas. This tactic undertaken by the brand paid off. By 2017, they were the #1 Pizza Brand in the USA with $5.9 billion in annual sales. The openness and truthfulness of Dominos portrayed in this video most likely put them in a more positive light with their customers and may even have won them new customers. A classic example of turning lemons into lemonade!

Conclusion

Brand affinity is a super powerful tool to have in your arsenal. If you want to build a brand that transcends customer habits and becomes a lifestyle choice, you need to start using video marketing. It is one of the most effective ways to achieve specific, memorable, and trustworthy brand affinity.