How to Make an Awareness Video

Which fast food restaurant comes to mind when you hear “I’m loving it?” How about, “Have it your way?” If you recall either of them, then you understand the results of an effective awareness campaign. You may not have the budget of the largest global consumer brands, but the right awareness video can increase familiarity with the right audience.

What Is An Awareness Video?

An awareness video is a type of brand campaign video designed to create awareness for the company by helping audiences recognize or recall your name, creative, and messaging. However, marketers often don’t understand how to make one, or they try to force too many competing objectives into it. So before exploring how to create awareness videos, let’s start by understanding what they’re not.

• Promo videos. They aren’t focused on promotions, discounts, or even sales.
• Product videos. They’re not designed to showcase your products. In fact, with few exceptions, your product shouldn’t even be featured in the video.
• Explainer videos. Their goal isn’t to educate viewers on the intricate details of a complex topic or product. Rather, they convey an overall sense of the brand and establish an emotional connection.
• Testimonial videos. Typically, they don’t feature customer or client quotes.
• Demand gen videos. They won’t have a call to action because brand recognition and recall are the primary goals.

Unfortunately, the lack of direct results and attribution can be frustrating for many marketers, salespeople, and executives. But the indirect contributions of video awareness are undeniable. In many cases, it’s these top-of-funnel assets that prime the target audience for other marketing tactics.

How To Create an Awareness Campaign

Awareness campaign videos aren’t created for their own sake; they’re typically the marquee assets of broader brand awareness campaigns. That means the campaign’s success depends on the strength of the video, as every supporting asset and channel tactic will follow its lead. Given this level of importance and their relative uniqueness among marketing assets, the following tips can help you produce the best video for your brand.

Set Your Objective

Awareness videos usually have one or two primary objectives: brand recognition or brand recall.

Brand recognition is how well your audience recognizes your brand with prompting. This is measured by aided awareness, for instance, asking respondents, “Of these logos, which can you recognize and name?”

Brand recognition videos are very short and rely on cohesive visuals or sounds rather than explicit messaging through titles, on-camera narration (OCN), or voiceovers (VO). Campaigns promote these videos at a high frequency, targeting broad and often new audiences. The goal is to grab attention, and the outcome is simply that your audience knows you exist.

Brand recall is how well your audience recalls your brand without prompting. This is measured by unaided awareness, for instance, asking respondents to, “Name as many brands as you can within a given industry or sector.”

Brand recall videos are also short, though usually not as short as brand recognition videos. They emphasize expanded messaging and highlight brand attributes, values, and promises. Campaigns promote them at a moderate frequency and target audiences already familiar with your brand, either through retargeting or as a follow-up to recognition campaigns. The goal is to be memorable, and the outcome is that your audience knows you make or do something they’re interested in.

Sometimes a single campaign and video can achieve both brand recognition and recall objectives. However, if you’re unsure of your concept, it’s best to focus on one objective to ensure clarity and effectiveness.

Research Your Audience

More than any other kind of video, awareness videos depend heavily on understanding your audience’s preferences, interests, and habits. The concept needs to deeply resonate with them by tapping into the emotions and experiences that matter most to them.

Consider what makes your audience happy, sad, angry, or afraid. How can you evoke a strong emotional response that makes them feel something profound when they watch it? Whether it’s joy, nostalgia, concern, or excitement, the emotional connection is key to capturing attention and making your video memorable.

In addition to emotions, think about your audience’s lifestyle and activities. What do they enjoy doing? Where do they like to spend their time, and with whom? To earn a place in their minds, your video should help them visualize themselves engaging in those activities. Reflecting their interests, experiences, and daily lives creates a sense of familiarity and relevance that subconsciously forms a deeper connection.

Select Your Main Idea

The main idea of an awareness video serves as a bridge between your objective and your audience to connect your brand with viewer desires and emotions. To help develop it, ask yourself, “What about my brand would be captivating or memorable to my target audience?”

If your goal is to grab attention, your main idea should focus on what your audience wants to feel when they engage with your product. Carefully consider the emotions you want the audience to directly associate with your brand and/or the use of your product and embed these emotions and their triggers throughout the video.

If your goal is to be memorable, your main idea should center on what your audience wants to do with your product. How does your product integrate into their lives? How can it enhance their experiences? How will it help them achieve their goals?

As with other parts of your brand awareness video, simplicity is key. Unlike product demos and how-to videos, they don’t break a main idea into multiple supporting parts. Instead, they take a single main idea and reinforce it multiple times in multiple ways.

Craft a Cohesive Concept

The concept is the scenario you use to communicate your awareness video’s main idea. It’s important that your concept is not just cohesive with your brand, but also internally coherent, as this will reinforce your brand identity.

For example, slapping your logo on top of a series of unrelated stock footage scenes won’t be very effective. Rather, the elements of your video—colors, shapes, motion, and music—all need to feel like they naturally belong together and accurately represent your brand. Essentially, a cohesive concept is responsible for making every aspect of your video align to create a unified message.

For recognition videos, the focus should be on emotive scenarios that evoke strong feelings. These could include touching moments, beautiful visuals, or eye-catching colors and graphics. The goal is to create an emotional connection with your audience through the feelings it evokes. In the case of recall videos, action scenarios drive the most impact. However, you should limit the number of scenes per video to three or less to maintain that internal coherence.

Invest in Appropriate Production

One of the best things about awareness videos is that they don’t have to be elaborate—indeed, the best ones often aren’t. Nor do they always need to be polished. Some brand identities are intentionally more raw and less refined. What they do need is impeccable production according to the given concept. So once you finalize your concept, commit to doing it right and don’t skimp on costs. Cinematic concepts require cinematic production and, accordingly, cinematic budgets.

If the concept puts you over budget, then it’s the wrong concept for your current resources. And especially for brand awareness videos, it’s much better to change the concept than compromise on production quality. Just remember, a simpler, well-executed concept will always outperform an ambitious but poorly produced one.

Where to Promote Your Awareness Video

Even if the awareness video is the centerpiece of a brand campaign, it’s still one part of many and should be used in coordination with other channels. Where and when it’s promoted will depend on the campaign strategy and align with the other components of the campaign.

Paid Media

Video awareness campaigns rely heavily on paid media to reach a broad audience. By strategically investing in various paid channels, you can ensure your video gets the visibility it needs to make an impact.

• Broadcast/CTV. These are key channels for B2C campaigns and can be particularly effective because of their broad, extensive reach. While less common for B2B, CTV’s more precise targeting makes it a more viable option for B2B campaigns as well.
• Display ads. For B2C, display ads will target more broadly by appearing on high-traffic sites as well as select interest sites to capture a wider audience. In contrast, B2B campaigns will use them more narrowly by focusing on business-related sites—a deliberate approach for capturing audience attention while they’re in a work mindset.
• Paid social. Both B2C and B2B can effectively leverage social ads, though the platforms will differ. B2B campaigns will primarily target LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, while B2C campaigns tend to focus on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter).
• Search engine marketing (SEM). Paid search is an important support channel for both B2C and B2B brand campaigns. It’s not uncommon for users who can’t remember your brand name to search for elements they recall from your video. From an SEO perspective, this means you should include keywords for those elements in your metadata. But for SEM, you should also be bidding on those terms throughout the duration of the campaign.

Owned and Earned Media

Though paid media will be the priority, owned and earned media also play an important role in supporting brand campaigns. Just keep in mind that awareness videos aren’t the best fit for every channel (e.g., PR and email). But your website and social accounts are non-negotiable.

• Homepage. Your video must be above the fold on your homepage. This is particularly important if you're running traditional advertising campaigns via broadcast, print, or billboards. Some will remember vanity URLs, but more and more, users search the web for the ads or brands they see. With your video prominently displayed on your homepage, you can ensure they know they’re in the right place.
• Social media. Like updating your cover photos to align with your campaign, pin posts of your video to the top of your social profiles. This prominent visibility increases the likelihood of viewers engaging with and sharing the video.

What to Measure

Like other assets in a brand campaign, awareness videos shouldn’t be evaluated by conversion metrics, but rather top-of-funnel ones.

Impressions

Impressions measure how many times your video is displayed, regardless of whether it’s watched in full. For most paid media campaigns, viewers won’t have the option to “press play.” Your videos will either be embedded in TV programming or autoplayed on various digital platforms, so there’s no way to track the intent as you could from a click. That’s okay, because your primary KPI is simply to gain as many views as possible. In fact, frequency is more important than duration. Having someone see the video multiple times is a better performance indicator than simply how long a single person viewed it.

Views

For owned and earned media, you’ll be able to control whether your videos autoplay. Depending on how your site is built and performs or your social fans' engagement preferences, you may choose to autoplay on these properties too. Otherwise, your KPI will be views, not impressions. With autoplay disabled, an impression will trigger whether or not the user watches the video. Thus, even though viewers demonstrate higher intent by clicking, you have to track views to know they’ve watched the video.

Paid Metrics

Of course, video metrics depend on your paid media KPIs and budget. For example, if your video campaign is overshooting your target CPM (cost per thousand impressions), you may not be targeting the right audience or you may not have the right creative. To determine if it’s the latter, benchmark the play rates for your homepage and pinned social post videos and compare that to your current campaign. If it isn’t meeting benchmarks, then your creative is probably not engaging your paid audiences either. But if it’s exceeding your benchmarks, then you may need to revisit your targeting strategy for your paid channels.

While marketers have more ways to target and distribute their campaigns than ever before, many struggle to understand what it takes to generate awareness with video. You need a deep understanding of your audience, a clear and compelling main idea, a cohesive concept, and a commitment to proper production and strategic promotion. In today’s digital landscape where it’s getting harder and harder to earn viewers’ attention, a well-constructed awareness video could easily become one of your best assets.