With 60 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute, how hard could it be? All you need is an iPhone and an internet connection and a little charisma, right?
Wrong.
While video is automatically more interesting than plain text, that alone isn’t enough to carry your marketing objectives forward. As it turns out, it’s just as common for businesses to make mistakes in their videos as any other marketing campaign, but it can hit them harder because videos traditionally take more time, planning, and money to create.
In this post, we’re going to look at the seven most common video marketing mistakes you’re probably making and how to avoid them.
1. Making it All About You
First of all, all of your video content shouldn’t be only about selling; your videos as a whole should be diverse, and include goals like:
- Building relationships
- Telling your brand’s story
- Providing value to viewers
When your videos are designed to sell, however, it shouldn’t be all about you, and—with only a very few exceptions—you shouldn’t be going for the hard sell. Make the video about your customer; show them why they care, and how it helps them. Customers don’t care about supporting your business, they care about what you can do for them. You should focus on this, too.
For example, Covergirl makeup’s video channel has plenty of self-promotional content to drive sales, including the following:
But this video, which they’ll greet you with on their channel, is more about rapport building:
2. Ignoring All Stages of The Buyer’s Journey
A lot of businesses focus only on social media videos, or only on a landing page video. They also have a tendency to create videos focus on users at the top of the digital sales funnel, instead of creating videos designed to appeal to users at all different stages.
Ideally, within your video marketing library, you should have:
- Short videos introducing your brand and products to new potential customers; they should be no more than 2 minutes long, and ideally under 1 minute
- Videos that go more in detail with feature-benefit selling, which are ideal for customers in the consideration and purchase stage
- Video content like advanced tutorials showing users how to fully benefit from your products or services once they’ve purchased
3. Creating Videos With No Marketing Goal
If you want to see real results with your videos, you need to have goals of what you want those results to be. You can’t just say “Let’s just shoot some video around the business and see if people want to click to our site.”
Instead, each video should be created with specific goals in mind; ideally, these goals should be measurable, like clicks, shares, or conversions. It’s often most beneficial to have these videos paired with other marketing campaigns, like an email campaign or a landing page. This will give you focus, and your videos need to be on-point if you want users to take whatever action it is you’re suggesting they follow at the end of it all.
These goals do not have to be complex; even creating video content just to ramp up engagement on social media, like the example above, is a great goal. You just have to know what it is or your results will fall flat.
4. Forgetting SEO
SEO isn’t a nice add-on; it’s a necessity. If you want to capitalize on the full potential of your video marketing, every single video you post (including the ones on Facebook) should be optimized for search engines.
You can do this by placing keywords in:
- The video’s headline
- The video’s description
- On YouTube, in the video’s keywords
5. Assuming They “Cost Too Much”
According to one study, 43% of marketers said they’d created more video if there weren’t as many obstacles like time or money; even more small businesses handling their own marketing are also intimidated, largely by the cost but also by the time. Sometimes, this results in businesses actually paying far too much, too.
As it turns out, video creation doesn’t have to cost an arm, a leg, and your firstborn child. That’s why we created Shakr, so that high quality, easy-to-use video editing and creation software was available to all small businesses and marketing agencies. This can significantly reduce the time and money you spend creating videos, but without sacrificing any of the quality. You can learn more here.
6. Leaving Out the Branding
Most businesses and marketers want their video content to go viral, or at least be shared as much as possible. When a video is shared on social media, though, sometimes it’s clear that the video was shared from your profile. When users share an external link to, say, a YouTube video, the identity of its creator is less clear.
To properly build brand awareness—and to make sure you get credit for all your videos—add branding to every video you create for your business. Whether you open with “Presented by [business name here]” or have your logo planted in the corner throughout the video, you want there to be some trace that users can hunt you down with.
7. Not Telling a Story
Videos give you a chance to tell a story, and every single video (including how-to tutorials) should have a beginning, middle, and end. Even if this story is just “introduce the problem, present the solution, explain why the solution is so effective,” viewers want to feel like they came full circle and that there was a point to them watching the video. A story helps with that.
Even more importantly, though, personal stories help us create emotional connections with brands. This helps the content stand out in our minds, and increases the likelihood that they’ll share it and act on it. To create a story, just map out your video’s content clearly like you would a blog post or an ebook before starting. Ask yourself if it feels like there’s a natural progression or end to the video, or if it feels like you’re just dumping information on the user with no introduction or resolution.
Final Thoughts
The video marketing mistakes on our list are extremely common; most businesses make at least one of them when implementing video into their marketing strategy. By knowing what they are, though, you can easily avoid them and gloss over the most common obstacles many businesses will face with video marketing.
What do you think? Which video marketing mistake have you made? How do you watch out for them? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!
