Branded stories have emerged as a powerful tool for marketing professionals and business owners to create brand awareness. Branded stories are general stories intended to educate your audience about your brand’s values. For small and medium-sized businesses these are generally more personal stories or occasionally include some event capture but for larger brands these can be scripted or documentary-style short videos. Branded stories are probably the widest genre of marketing video. Branded stories are often more useful in B2C organizations where sales are made on a one-to-many basis, but still make an appearance in B2B businesses from time to time.

These videos are best used at the top of the funnel, where you want to educate your intended audience about your brand. As an added benefit, we like to chop these up and create video ads to maximize brand awareness.   

Length 1-2 minutes. Dimensions: 16:9. Location: Social Media,  Website, Email Newsletters, YouTube.

Benefits of a Branded Story:

The main benefit of these videos is that they’re effective in building brand awareness. These videos can help customers understand what your business does and what you stand for. By using brand videos instead of static or written content, you can position your brand in the minds of your customers without having to explicitly state your values (which can often come off as forced or inauthentic).

Branded stories tend to have high engagement rates. At a base level, video is much more engaging than static content and is more likely to drive engagement. In comparison to other types of videos, branded stories still tend to have higher engagement rates and this is because, when done well, branded stories elicit emotional responses from viewers and when people connect with a story they’re more likely to engage with it.

Branded stories also have a much stronger ROI than other forms of advertising. Branded stories can easily be cut into video campaigns that drive awareness over a couple of months. Although brand awareness and brand positioning are difficult to measure, viewership is easily tracked and can serve as a proxy. Campaigns that use branded stories are easily repurposed and tracked, and therefore far more likely to show a higher return on investment than other marketing campaigns.

How To Make an Effective Branded Story Video:

As with any video project, you want to start by identifying your ideal audience for the video. Think about what types of values you share with them, and what they think is important in brands they support. Identify the values and emotions that you want to portray so that you can build a strong connection with them.

Decide where the best place is to reach this audience. It could be on Instagram or YouTube, or maybe you want to run ads and drive traffic to a landing page where they can watch the video. Whatever you decide on, it’s important to make sure that you have tracking implemented at each step of the viewer’s journey.

Next, we start looking at the story we want to tell. There are so many types of stories that can be used here. For larger corporations, personal stories work best and we recommend looking at the stories of individuals within your organization, stakeholders or community initiatives that you run. For B2C businesses, scripted stories, events, or interviews with customers all work well.

We actually recommend that you don’t talk about the features of your product/service at all! Focus on creating a compelling story that portrays the values we identified earlier. For example, if you want to position your brand as an adventure product, then tell a story that creates a feeling of adventure. By showing your brand in a video, you align your brand with the feeling of adventure.

For production, it’s becoming more common to use some user-generated content but for higher end brands we still recommend sticking to high-production quality when possible.

Sample Branded Story Video:

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