How to Establish Your Brand Identity on Social Media

There’re many ways to attract your audience’s attention and raise awareness for your brand – from collaborations with celebrities and giving away freebies to organizing live or digital awareness campaigns. Yet, most of these methods have a short-term effect. If your goal is to build brand recognition, increase appeal, and position your solution as top of mind, one of the most effective ways is to provide your audience with helpful, easy-to-understand, and engaging content. Here’s how you can raise brand awareness by educating your viewers with animation.

The key to building long-lasting brand awareness is to create value beyond your product. What does that mean? 

Users today get sold more than ever before. Both traditional and digital media bombards us with ads that create an overwhelming amount of noise. Brands we’ve never heard of before constantly invade our space with information we don’t want, don’t need, and don’t trust. 

The best way to cut through the clutter is to teach people something that is useful for them. Sharing your knowledge without wanting anything in return puts you on the fast track to gaining your prospects’ trust and fostering a relationship with your audience. It also demonstrates your expertise and positions you as an authority in your field.

This is what we did for our clients at Oasis. Oasis is a mental health app geared toward college students, that uses technology to provide holistic mental support. In order for the product to be successful, the people behind the brand need to gain the trust of users and show they’re qualified to speak on the problems they’re addressing.

The solution was to craft a series of animated explainer videos that delve into different mental health topics from the perspective of students. Each video is centered around a different character that represents a specific problem and their struggle to find a solution. This makes each story relatable to viewers that might be going through a similar experience, providing them with a valuable resource on self-care and treatment, and showing them they’re not alone. Each video serves to destigmatize mental illness and encourage seeking appropriate treatment. 

The video series provides value beyond the product that Oasis offers and by doing this builds a strong bond between the brand and the target viewer, positioning it as a logical solution to the pain points that affect the potential users.

Audiences retain over 50% more information through the use of both verbal and visual cues, which makes video the most effective medium for educating people. Information received through a combination of voiceover and moving images is easier to understand and remember than any other method of teaching. 

Videos are perfect if you want to tell a story as they combine language, visuals, music, and sound effects to create an emotional experience. And when we delve into abstract concepts, animation is the perfect tool to cut out complexity and create a compelling narrative.

Let’s get back to our example. Each of the stories in our Oasis series deals with an abstract idea related to mental health. Presenting these ideas in a live-action video would have been a challenge. But animation offers unlimited possibilities to introduce abstract concepts in a clear and impactful way. 

Another reason for choosing animation is the opportunity to create a character that can be relatable yet not as specific as a real person. Although each of the animated characters we created has unique and distinctive features, the fact that they are animated, instead of real-life actors, makes them universally sympathetic. 

Finally, in terms of cost, producing these animated series was way more affordable than it would’ve been to hire dozens of actors, a crew, and a post-production team. Animation makes it easy to make quick changes in case you rebrand or change your user interface.

Educating your audience with videos will make them trust and remember you. But in order for your animated videos to be truly effective, you need a carefully crafted strategy that takes into account your goals, target viewers, and unique voice. And if you don’t know where to start, all you have to do is book a free 15-minute call!