Music for Your Marketing Video: 5 Key Considerations

If you've ever found yourself laughing, crying, cheering, or shivering in response to a TV or film scene, that scene probably underlined its impact with powerful, evocative music. Music's ability to stir the heart and mind can also lend extra punch to your marketing videos' impact on your brand's target audience.

Before you can take full advantage of your marketing video's musical opportunities, you need to understand how it supports your marketing and brand message, when and how to use it, and how copyright and licensing issues might guide your music selection and usage. Start by thinking about these five key considerations.

How Music Contributes to a Video's Impact

The right music can contribute to your marketing video's success in many ways. Perhaps most obviously, music can evoke mood. If you want your audience to feel nostalgic, energized, alarmed, relieved, or amused, your post-production team can do this by combining different styles of music with the appropriate visuals and narration.

Music can also help you tell your video's story more memorably. Modern audiences have grown used to hearing music as an accompaniment to their regular TV, film, gaming, and online entertainment. A cohesive music score can help put them in a receptive state of mind, helping them pay more attention to your marketing message.

In addition to its mood-setting potential, music can also support the structure of your marketing video. For example, different music cues can punctuate the beginnings of different segments of the video, helping to guide the audience through each stage of your narrative.

How Your Video's Music Enhances Your Brand

A video enhanced by a strong, appropriate musical underpinning can establish or reinforce your brand image even as it communicates a specific marketing point to your target audience. This benefit can prove especially important if you must compete for brand awareness in a crowded industrial or professional marketplace.

You probably know several musical jingles or themes associated with specific brands. Such musical earworms can create a powerful mental or emotional link to a given brand. By re-using a memorable piece of music across multiple videos, you create a powerful memory hook that evokes your brand in your audience's thoughts.

You must think carefully about what kind of feeling you want your brand to inspire in your target market before selecting the music that they'll associate with that brand. For instance, wistful, gentle acoustic music could help you promote a retirement community, while high-energy pop music might work better on a younger demographic.

How and When to Include or Exclude Music

Certain moments in a marketing video may lend themselves naturally to specific music cues. For instance, a majestic landscape shot or heart-tugging visual image may all but require a swell of rich, powerful music. Different genres of music can underline the environment depicted in the video, from a farmyard to an urban street.

Despite the undeniable potential benefits of music, not all videos benefit from wall-to-wall musical accompaniment. Explainer videos offer a case in point. If your video features instructions or explanations that call for careful attention, you will most likely want to exclude music cues from those sections of the video.

Your video's editing team may find an effective middle ground between these two extremes by controlling the music's volume. A music cue might start at a prominent volume and then quiet down once the voiceover narration begins. This compromise grabs the audience's attention and sets the mood without creating unwanted distractions.

How Copyright Laws Affect Your Music Choices

Your vision for your company's marketing video might include or even focus on a beloved piece of music. Unfortunately, you can't legally use any song you want, no matter how crucial to the video it may seem, unless you've secured the rights from the music's copyright holders.

Like many other countries, the U.S. maintains and enforces its own copyright laws. This form of intellectual property helps to ensure that composers, performers, and others involved in artistic creations receive their fair share of recognition and financial compensation for their original work.

Copyright owners can license their music in various forms. A mechanical license gives you the right to transfer the copyrighted material to a specific format, while a performance license permits live performance of the work. You'll need synchronization and performance licenses to include the music in a publicly-shared video.

Some composers or publishers give away the rights to use their music under a Creative Commons license. While you won't have to pay for the use of the music, the rights holder may require an onscreen credit. You may also use older, non-copyrighted music in the public domain or commission a music score that you own.

If you want to make sure your marketing videos incorporate the perfect blend of music to get your point across to your target audience, consult the experts at Colormatics. Our experienced video production specialists can choose music that supports your marketing message, brand image, and budget. Contact us today.