Video marketing has become an integral part of online marketing, and businesses are making it a top priority. Doing it at randomly without a plan, however, can lead to many mistakes that might ruin your efforts. Here are some mistakes you should avoid to ensure an effective video marketing campaign.
Not having a clear marketing strategy
Having a clear strategy will help a lot in understanding what you want to get from video marketing and how you will do it. To flesh out your strategy, you need to answer the following questions:
- What are the problems your audience wants to solve?
- What types of conversions can you get from each video?
- What are your distribution channels for each video?
- Who will be responsible for planning, production, and distribution?
- How will you measure the performance of your marketing efforts?
By answering these questions, you can create a rough idea of your video strategy. From here, flesh out the finer details, and tailor the strategy to your specific needs.
One important part of building your strategy is deciding where to place video marketing within your larger marketing effort. Some marketers make the mistake of using video marketing only at the start of their sales funnels, which limits its effectiveness. Beyond the initial product videos, there are various ways you can use videos, including:
- Demo videos: These detailed demonstrations help customers better understand the benefits of your product and convince them to make a purchase,as well as use them once they have the product.
- Follow-up videos: Create a personalized follow-up video to tell prospective leads how they can reach you when they’re finalizing their purchase.
- Tutorials videos: These and other self-help videos are a good complement to your customer support system and could lead to greater customer satisfaction.
- Customer testimonials: Filming your customer’s commentaries gives you useful feedback and additional promotional materials for your next marketing cycle.
By using video content during the right stages of the customer’s journey, you can create a more immersive experience for them, which encourage conversions and future engagements.
Poor production values
With the race to release more content, video marketers sometimes sacrifice the quality of their work. This defeats the purpose of the effort, as customers become less interested in engaging if they find themselves watching a poorly-made video.
The first step in resolving this issue is having the right equipment. Note that this doesn’t mean you have to spend a lot on high-end equipment. What you should do is consider the type of video content you are doing and choose the most suitable equipment. Even an average resolution camera and a basic lighting setup will give you good results if you are just doing interviews. This video provides some recommendations for your equipment needs.
Spending a good amount of time at post-production also helps deliver quality videos that will attract people‘s interest. Aside from enhancing the video and sound quality, it would help if you also worked on the flow of the whole content. Add the right kind of cuts and transitions to help your viewers move faster from one piece of information to the next. You should also include subtitles/captions to make your video more accessible, and use YouTube’s transcripts feature as well.
Not targeting the right people
In an effort to catch more audiences, video marketers sometimes do a “one size fits all” approach and use the same video for different platforms. To get better results, tailor your video content for specific platforms. This ensures that people on various platforms can consume your content at their desired pace, which may elicit a better response.
It’s also essential to have a focused audience-targeting strategy. Take advantage of available tools like:
- Custom intent audience: This feature, available on YouTube, lets you display your videos to specific users based on the online searches that they do.
- Personalized calls to action: People are more likely to respond to a call to action that they heard on video than the one that they read. The added personalization also helps draw their attention.
- SEO: Keeping up with the developments in video SEO will help you adapt to your target audience’s changing search habits and ensure that they discover your content.
These tactics will help you attract not just a larger number of viewers but an audience that is more invested in your content and willing to engage.
Video marketing is a complex endeavor, and this list is just some mistakes that you might encounter while doing it. Study these errors, and learn how to avoid them to turn your videos into more effective engagement tools.
Date: June 22, 2019 / Categories: Tips, / Author: Rich Drees
