Why Every Author, Speaker and Expert Needs a Brand Bumper

How do you distinguish your brand and its products and services in a competitive market? One way is to develop a “video brand bumper” that accompanies your every presentation, video, or workshop. Here in this guest post, Dr. Marina Kostina, co-founder of Bookphoria, shares with you more about what a video brand bumper is, why every author, speaker and expert needs one, and a 3-step process to develop an effective bumper for your brand. If you would like to be a guest blogger for BrandTwist contact Jamie@BrandTwist.com for more information.

While attending a live workshop with branding expert Julie Cottineau, I heard Julie mention a quote from Jay –Z, an American rapper and entrepreneur, who has captured the whole idea of entrepreneural marketing in one sentence: “I’M NOT A BUSINESSMAN – I’M A BUSINESS, MAN!”

Julie also conveyed these additional, evergreen marketing and branding concepts:

• People connect with people, not with companies.
• Find out what makes you and your product or services stand out from the crowd.
• What are your unique features that can be translated into your business to create a personal signature for your products and services?
• You ARE your business, and every point of interaction with your client needs to breathe YOU.

But in this ever-expanding and competitive marketplace, how do you distinguish yourself, your brand and your products and services?

One way to create a personal digital signature is to develop a “video brand bumper” that accompanies your every presentation, video, or workshop. My business partner and I have been using brand bumpers for our own products for some time and were so enthusiastic about their impact that we developed our own unique bumper production company, Bookphoria. Here in this guest post, we share with you more about what a video brand bumper is, why every author, speaker and expert needs one, and a 3-step process to develop an effective bumper for your brand!

WHAT IS A VIDEO BUMPER?

A video bumper is a brief video announcement of your brand. It is usually only between 2 to 15 seconds long. It can contain a voice-over, an image, or a dynamic logo with background music illustrating your brand. You can put this branded piece of video at the top of your presentation as an introduction and you can also include it at the tail of your video marketing as well, to give you a professional edge.

Bumpers have a recurring signature or theme music segment and can vary in style from simple text to short films. The most well-known video bumpers are of those from the movie studios such as Dreamworks, Miramax or Columbia, as seen in this preview.

Now, as an author, speaker or expert you need to consider developing a video bumper for yourself too.

WHY DO YOU NEED A VIDEO BRAND BUMPER?

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• Bumpers are a great way to build brand awareness and attract audience to your book or your product. They allow your audience to recognize you even BEFORE your presentation or show begins! In short, they tell a stronger personal brand story.
• Bumpers help you stand out from competition and give your more authority and prestige. The use of bumpers for personal branding is still something different and therefore super fun, just like e-mail was in its early days.
• With bumpers you can have more impact as they capture the essence of your book/ content or brand and create a filter through which your audience views your materials.

THE HOW’S:

Here is a 3-step process that will help you to develop an effective video brand bumper:

1.       Tell your core message.

What makes you stand out from the crowd? You must be very clear and clever to find laser-focused concepts that can be turned into a visual summary of the core principle of your book, content or brand in a quick, 15-20 second bumper.

For example, in our own Bookphoria bumper we illustrate how a book comes alive through images of vines growing from the book, the logo color changes and the dramatic music. We want our audience to see that they become not only writers of their content and their books but also producers, actors and high tech designers.

In the bumper for her own company, Brain Alchemist, Anastasia Pryanikova demonstrates the power of brain and technology. Her core message is to rewire your brain to speak your mind and be heard… you literally see and feel how the brain is rewired in this beautiful bumper.

2. Use every detail to support your core message.

We live in the time when quick-paced technology-based markets need what BrandTwist founder and CEO Julie Cottineau calls ‘Word of Eye’ – where people share not only words, but pictures, images and photos. These digital bites are created, sent and shared through social networks with incredible speed. This is the new currency of news and information. Nowadays, not only must you have a visual representation of your brand but you also need to select all the images you share very carefully to truly stand out from the crowd. Everything in your bumper: color, music, even the animation and type, must support the image and feeling you want to project.

Let’s look at the bumper that I created for my company, Wired@Heart. My main goal is to help small business owners build connections and engagement online. Therefore, my choice of colors are warm and the sparkles and animation – as well as the music – in this video all create a deeper sense of warmth, connection and interaction.

3.       Create a movie-like quality.

Your digital bumper is the FIRST thing the audience will notice about you. Your bumper MUST be of high quality. A professionally done bumper will increase your prestige, the value of your products and thus help build your clients’ trust in you and your services. Unfortunately, the cost of creating a professionally produced bumper is usually very high; it entails finding a personal branding consultant who can advise you on what type of message to portray in your bumper, a designer who can develop all images, and animator and/or a developer. Paying for these services could be very costly.

An alternative is to try to develop a bumper yourself by using pre-made samples that usually run for $300-400 each. The beauty is that you don’t need to know anything about development or animation. You just plug in your title into a template and voila! However, they do not allow for true customization, and you will probably end up with an unoriginal bumper shared by many other authors and experts.

Introducing the good news…

Our company, Bookphoria. Because we frequently used video bumpers for our own products, we became frustrated with the limited resources available to us to easily and cost-efficiently produce our bumpers, so we created our own production company. Since Bookphoria is a full service company that is dedicated SPECIFICALLY to authors and experts who want to market their content, we cut your costs of having to hire a brand consultant, a designer and a developer – we handle and create everything for you. We meet for a brief FREE one-on-one consultation to determine your needs, your core message and your unique angle. We then develop all elements for your bumper and design it to truly be yours. In fact, we make as many samples of the bumper as you need until you find THE PERFECT ONE, along with a 100% guarantee on all products we develop.

Whatever method you choose to produce your video brand bumper, remember that your video needs to represent YOU as well as your business, products and services and also needs to quickly communicate your core brand message to stand out, connect and be remembered. Video is now more accessible than ever. Make it work for your brand and business.

EVEN BETTER NEWS FOR FRIENDS OF BRANDTWIST:

Marina and Anastasia of Bookphoria want to help you make your books and expert content come alive and change lives!  For a limited time, they are making available to friends of BrandTwist a special offer: You can still enjoy their New Year’s promotion and get your video brand bumper for only $200 until February 15, 2014. This includes a free 1-on-1 consultation, design, music, animation, development, and free samples until you are satisfied with the end result!  They cannot wait to put their creative hats on and develop a killer bumper for your book and your brand.

As you can imagine, they have a high volume of orders for this amazing product. To secure your spot, please sign up for your Free 1-1 consultation today. Put “book bumper” into the topic of the form – Sign up HERE.

 About the authors:

Dr. Marina Kostina is a founder of Wired@Heart, a distance learning consulting company, an Amazon Bestselling author, winner of STARTALK, the Oppenheimer Family Foundation grant, and a nominee for the Golden Apple Award. She has presented her research at various national and international conferences that provided insights to thousands professionals on how to build online connection, presence, engagement and enjoyment.

 

Both Marina and Anastasia are co-founders of Bookphoria – an innovative online and mobile learning platform that enables authors, speakers and experts to turn their books and content into dynamic, interactive online courses and multimedia products and grow their information business and communities of practice. Discover more about Bookphoria and connect with Marina and Anastasia through the Bookphoria Facebook page, on Twitter at @bookphoria or via email: info@bookphoria.com.