How to Craft Visual Storytelling: Infusing Narratives into Brand Designs

Human beings have used visual storytelling techniques for millennia. From cave paintings and hieroglyphics to ancient manuscripts and statues depicting stories through imagery – visual stories have always been telling and timeless forms of telling tales through visual media.

Key points to keep in mind when weaving narratives into brand design:

• Understanding Your Brand’s Story: Establish the key messages and values you hope to convey to your target market, while consistency between visual elements should help give who your company is and its personality and tone.
• Leave Room for Interpretation: Maximize audience engagement by inviting them to uniquely interpret and connect with the story.

Evoke Powerful Responses through Visual Branding

Emotion is an invaluable ally in decision-making, and visual branding can draw out strong emotional responses in consumers. 

Brands that elicit positive feelings such as joy, empathy, or nostalgia create stronger emotional ties between themselves and their audiences.

Critical elements for creating emotional engagement through visual branding:

• Understand Your Target Audience: Conduct research and empathize with your target audience to gain an in-depth knowledge of their emotions and desires. 
• Make Smart Color Choices: Different hues can evoke different emotional responses; select ones that match the brand message and any desired responses for maximum effect.
• Utilize a Name Suggesting Tool like Atom: It employs creative expertise and data-driven insights. Such tools help you brainstorm and refine name options that align perfectly with your target audience’s emotions and desires.

Brand Character Design: Let Your Imagination Speak Out Through Design

One effective way to engage audiences with brands is to develop brand characters representing their personality and values.

Mascots, spokespersons, or fictional characters can serve as the face of your brand to foster solid emotional ties between consumers and your product/service.

Critical steps for developing impactful brand characters:

• Align with Brand Identity: Create characters whose traits and attributes align with your brand values and identity while remaining consistent across platforms. 
• Relatability: Make the character relatable and appropriate to their target audience’s pain points or aspirational goals.

Design for Impact: Utilizing Visuals to Drive Action and Convert

Visual storytelling not only engages but also motivates action and conversion.

Engaging visuals can increase engagement, click-through rates and conversion rates – leading to more excellent potential success and conversion rates.

Key considerations when creating visuals that drive action:

• Clear Call-to-Action: Use persuasive visuals that direct audiences toward taking desired actions. 
• Visual Hierarchy: Arrange design elements strategically to focus on the most significant components.

Storytelling in Design: Craft a Cohesive and Engaging Brand Narrative

Consistency is of utmost importance when using visual storytelling within brand design. An integrated brand narrative across all touchpoints reinforces your message and identity as a brand.

Critical steps for creating and maintaining an appealing brand narrative:

• Brand Guidelines: Devise comprehensive brand guidelines outlining design elements, colors, tonal characteristics, and tone of voice for all products under this brand name. 
• A collaborative approach: Engage designers, marketers, and content creators in crafting the brand narrative.

Conclusion

Visual storytelling has emerged as an indispensable means of standing out amidst the sea of noise and distraction, enabling brands to forge meaningful connections with their audiences while differentiating themselves from competitors. In today’s highly competitive consumer landscape, mastering visual storytelling has become a necessity rather than a luxury. Brands must now focus on leaving lasting impressions in the minds and hearts of their customers, as it is essential for driving customer retention rates and engagement. To succeed in this ever-changing environment, the art of visual storytelling has transformed into a crucial skill that resonates with today’s more sophisticated audience, creating lasting memories and fostering brand loyalty.

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When two of your favorite brands collaborate to create a limited-time product, the joy you feel as a consumer is often unmatched. This relatively simple marketing tactic can help boost a brand’s revenue at up to 25x less cost than digital marketing methods.

Examples of brand collaboration

Still not too sure what we mean by ‘brand collaboration’? It can be tough to think of examples, but there are some brand collaborations that have been going on for such a long time that it doesn’t feel like a collaboration:

• McDonald’s & Marvel/Pokemon/Doraemon and many other movie franchises. The fast food giant frequently partners with these companies to produce toys to go inside their meals for children. 
• Supreme and Louis Vuitton. This is a great example of two very different brands collaborating to expand their respective audiences. Both are fashion brands, but Louis Vuitton traditionally appeals to a more mature audience, whereas Supreme is favored by younger people. When they worked together to produce bags, both customer groups were excited to try them.
• Balenciaga and Crocs famously collaborated back in 2021, when they released ‘Balenciaga Stiletto Crocs’. Of course, these shoes weren’t designed with sales in mind, but rather increasing publicity for both brands. Since becoming an internet meme, both Balenciaga and Crocs will have benefitted from the extra coverage.

So, why do brands collaborate?

As can be seen in the few examples given above, there are two main reasons a brand would consider teaming up with another brand to produce a product, content, or other marketing materials:

1. The brands want to create new content for their own audience, so partner up with other brands to spice up their offering.
2. The brands occupy relatively similar domains, so they work together to produce something which will capture the imagination of each other’s audience, therefore growing their own.

These reasons can be broken down further into smaller reasons, which could also be key drivers for brands to collaborate:

• Brands might want to dramatically boost their following on social media, which could be achieved through increased exposure to collaboration.
• Create new opportunities for customer feedback. A collaboration is sure to get a brand hearing from its customer base!
• Similarly, an inspiring collaboration could promote more user-generated content like forum posts, reviews, or even memes.

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Jack Vale is a writer in partnership with Tablebases.com, leading supplier of table bases for business and homes.

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In short, video is an excellent modality for effective branding.

But it isn’t just about providing a video — it’s about providing video content that is clearly and identifiably branded. And the best way to brand something? By using your logo.

Let’s get into the specifics of the most effective ways to include your logo in a branded video.

Add Your Logo In Your Intro

Video credit: Dribble

There are plenty of suggestions, tutorials, and opinions on the most important content to include in your video intro. But for branding purposes, your logo should definitely be involved. If you haven’t gotten one yet, try and get one from a logo creator software like DesignMantic. 

However, it’s not really enough just to highlight your logo on the screen at the beginning of the video content. You want your logo to have an impact, and you can help it along by including a music sting, sound effect, animation, or brief clip to add weight to your great logo design.

Research suggests that the first ten seconds of a video is all-important when it comes to capturing interest and inducing engagement. After that, the likelihood of sustained engagement falls off sharply.

So make sure that your intro, with your logo, is included within that first ten seconds. 

Branding your video with your logo isn’t just about reminding them of the name of your company — it’s about giving them a taste of your brand personality. If you can include your logo in an intro that involves a thought-provoking question or something funny, it will connect the two in the mind of the viewer, giving them a reaction of, “Oh, I recognize that logo — I like this brand, because it’s interesting.”

And Don’t Forget About The Outro

Intros and outros are often used as a group for video marketing purposes, because they are both integral to video branding. But your bumpers don’t have to match up completely.

It’s a good idea to avoid simply repeating your intro as an outro. That’s a good way to make sure your audience clicks out of the video before they get to the end.

You do, however, want your outro to match your branding stylistically. So you can certainly use your logo once more in your outro content. Just mix up the accompanying content around it.

Product (And Brand) Placement

Paid product placement is a big deal in movies and TV, with companies spending millions of dollars to have their products represented in the media. 

Since you’re creating your own content, it’s the perfect spot to include your own products — and you don’t even have to create an extra placement budget. Along with the products themselves, you can insert the brand logo.

How you do this will vary depending on the type of content you’re creating, but here are a few examples:

• In creating a tutorial, make sure to use products that your brand makes, and show the products themselves, complete with logo. Take a look at the example of the tutorial below. This makeup tutorial by L’Oréal  prominently features their products such as the micellar water and mascara. Viewers can get a clear view of the company’s brand identity design on their screens. 

• In creating an informational video, cite expert advice backed by your own brand. You can include a link to your website and make it a clickable version of your logo.
• In creating a testimonial, make sure that the product or brand is mentioned by name and include the logo on-screen when the name is spoken. In this video, HP created a testimonial video for their Indigo Digital Presses and it showcases their logo in the bottom corner throughout the duration. So while the product is mentioned by real customers using it for their businesses, the company also incorporates its icon which can be seen until the very end.

• In facilitating customer-created content, ask them to pose next to or display the branded product.

Add In A Watermark

Watermarks are excellent identifiers, and you can add one into your video to make sure that everyone knows where the content originally came from. 

If you think about it, there’s really not that much of a difference between a logo and a watermark and the two can work interchangeably as well. With a watermark, you are basically using a simpler or monochrome version of your brand symbol to mark ownership of digital content such as videos or images. Most of the time these are included with opacity to the max so that they don’t interfere with the video content or cover part of the screen. A logo on the other hand, like the above examples you’ve seen, are pretty much visible and have a dominant role in video branding, like this tutorial. 

Sometimes, you could use a watermark or a logo to help people become familiar with it and increase brand awareness. Consider the example given above to get a better idea. 

The image above is actually from a tutorial by Tronix which I captured to show the difference. You can see it being used as a watermark in the side of the video below which tells the viewer that it is unique content created by the brand. As it shouldn’t be distracting or overpowering, the symbol is lighter in color. 

There are plenty of free (and paid, of course) software programs out there that allow you to insert a watermark into every frame of your video, or just into certain sections. Software programs like InShot and Kapwing are free and easy to use. Just upload your logo and/or other text content.

Logo Bug

A logo bug is similar to a watermark, though it is usually placed in the video in a way that won’t interfere with the actual video content, such as in the lower corner away from the main action. In the example here, Callaway Golf has incorporated their logo bug within the tutorial video about their golf clubs. 

Logo bugs also serve as a continual placement of your logo, providing a constant reminder of the brand behind the video. 

You can choose to use your full logo, if it shows up well against video backgrounds. Alternatively, this might be a good time to create another version of your logo design to adapt it into a simple, stripped-down iteration.

Be Careful About Placement

Many videos that are branded with a logo place it in the lower right hand corner. This is very typical practice, unlike websites, which typically place the logo in the upper left, interestingly enough.

However, there should be caution used here. It’s good practice to provide closed captioning for your content— not only is that more inclusive for the hard of hearing, but viewers are often watching short videos on lunch breaks, at work, at school — places where they don’t really want the video to be loud or even heard at all. Around 50% of consumers say that captions are important because they watch content with the sound off.

Image: Wave.video

But captioning tends to run along the lower third of the screen, and may extend almost to the corners. So extensive captioning could actually obscure your logo if you’ve chosen that placement.

Consider other placements, such as the upper right hand side. Or you could go the website-design route and place it in the upper left.

Using Your Logo In Video Branding

If you’re getting ready to unleash some video content, congratulations! A branded video is one of the most effective ways of advertising your company, garnering shares and likes, and attracting new customers or viewers.

Video content is always a good idea, and the scope of creativity for videos is practically endless. No matter what company you run or brand you represent, video has a place in your branding process.

Remember that it’s more than just where, when, and how you place your logo throughout your video content — it’s also a matter of the quality of the video itself.

After all, a great logo isn’t going to help your brand if the video content surrounding it is irrelevant. 

The best plan is to think about content first and usage of the logo later. Focus your skills and energies on creating a great video that provides value to the viewer, whether for educational, informational, or entertainment purposes.

Once you have the framework of a great video, then you can fit your logo in using one or more of the ideas we’ve listed above.

The post How to Use Your Video for Branding with a Logo appeared first on COLDEA Productions, LLC.

Understand Your Data

Keeping data safe first requires every organization to understand the data they have in their possession and then forecast what the damage would be to customers if this information fell into the wrong hands. Once you know the type of data that’s in your possession, the next step is to figure out who inside your organization has access and manage internal permissions appropriately. This type of internal discovery can help data security leaders craft risk assessment models and conduct data penetration testing that will help companies mitigate risks. Businesses should also be careful to only collect/store customer data that is needed.

Keep Your Employee-Customer Communication Methods Secure

Keeping customers updated on your policies and being transparent about what type of data is collected and how it’s stored will provide them with the assurance they need to allow your company to handle their data in a secure manner. Using safe communication tools such as encrypted online faxing and two-factor authentication can go a long way toward establishing consumer trust.

Create Data Breach Processes

Guarding data is not only about making sure that firewalls secure your data perimeter. An onion model made up of layers of monitoring and management is the best way to safeguard against risk. If your data is breached, it’s critical that a crisis communications plan is already in place and can be acted upon quickly. This will help to prevent customer attrition, negative press, and even future legalities if parties are notified as soon as possible. The onion model also helps in locating breaches faster because of the more widespread monitoring that is implemented system-wide.

Make Security a Priority

Training teams to successfully protect customer data is a powerful standard against information theft and helps to protect businesses from liability. It’s critical that all team members know how to respond to incidents and how data leaks can occur unintentionally. Knowledge is power when it comes to learning how to protect hardware (laptops, USB drives, files, servers, smartphones) and make sure that physical spaces that house data are secure. On the digital side, knowing how to identify phishing scams and other digital vulnerabilities will help to keep the entire company and its customers safe.

Americans Feel That Their Data is Vulnerable

The Pew Research Center has collected data regarding how Americans, in particular, are feeling that they are losing control of their personal data. About half of all Americans feel that they have no control over entities accessing their online search information, and the majority of Americans think that they have no control over their data being collected by companies. In the future, companies will have to work harder to demonstrate that they are committed to keeping customer data safe. Providing customers with information about how their data is being used and extra security options will become an essential part of the customer engagement lifecycle in the modern digital age where consumers are demanding more and more personal data transparency.

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Abigail Baker is a writer from Happy Writers, Co. in partnership with Faxage, an encrypted online faxing service.

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