When it comes to your video marketing strategy, are you taking all the right steps to ensure you see positive results?
Too often, marketers make common, easily avoidable mistakes with their video content. It ends up driving viewers away, reducing conversions and overall hurting your business. If you can’t connect to your audience through video, you might not get the opportunity to effectively market to them any other way.
Around 43 percent of consumers say they want more video content from marketers. However, if you’re guilty of committing the most common video marketing mistakes, it’ll prove challenging to provide your audience with valuable content they’ll enjoy.
Let’s look at five mistakes marketers make with their video content and how you can avoid them to reach success.
1. Lack of strategy
When you think of branding, does creating a strategy come to mind? Or were you thinking you could wing it and still get the results you want? If you’re going to generate leads and improve engagement with your video content, then having a strategy is essential.
To create a branding strategy that brings your business success, you need to know your target audience. If you don’t, you can’t create content that caters to their needs, interests, and pain points. It’s crucial to do your due diligence and perform the research necessary to know your viewers so you receive a positive response.
Craft buyer personas of your target audience and include information about them you need to know them better. This includes their age, location, interests, issues, buying behaviors, and more. The more you know, the easier it’ll be to create the right type of videos.
When you know who you’re creating content for, it’s easier to create a video marketing strategy that works for that specific audience.
The Dollar Shave Club is a subscription service that sends customers razors in the mail for just one dollar per month. Its target audience is men aged 17-30 with shaving needs. As such, the company creates video advertisements that catch their audience’s attention and persuade them to purchase through immaculate branding and humor.
2. Poor branding
When you watch YouTube videos of popular content creators, you’ll see something that most of them share in common. They have an introduction at the beginning of each video that signals to the viewers whose content they’re about to watch. YouTubers do this using music, graphic design, catchphrases, and more.
When you have a branding strategy in place for your video content, it’s easier for viewers to familiarize themselves with your brand. You want your audience to know whose content they’re watching as soon as they click through to build brand awareness and further its reach. So, if you have a less-than-impressive branding strategy, it’s time to revamp it for your videos.
Implement your brand logo, color schemes, fonts, and visual components into your videos, preferably towards the beginning. You can add your website to the bottom corner while the entire video plays so users remember to visit after the video finishes. As long as it’s something your viewers can easily remember, you should add it to your branding strategy.
3. Long-form content only
If you think the only way to get viewers on board with your products is by creating exclusively long-form content, think again. On average, people spend over 3.5 hours per day on their smartphones, and they’re using them to watch videos.
In today’s fast-paced world, people want short-form content that’s easy to digest and quickly gets the message across. So, if you’re only producing longer videos that require a lot of viewers’ attention, your strategy is failing you.
Don’t forget the value of short-form videos and what they can do for your business. If you can get your point across and do it well in a short time, you’re likelier to appeal to your audience and encourage them to take action. Providing value quickly is no easy task, and doing so effectively prompts your audience to engage with your brand.
4. Neglecting CTAs
If you use your videos to spread your marketing messages but fail to incorporate CTAs, what are you doing? The point of a video marketing strategy is to get your audience’s attention so they can perform an action that benefits your business. Failing to add calls-to-action to your video content hurts your conversions and does nothing to spread brand awareness.
When people watch your video, they aren’t looking to act unless you specifically tell them to. Sure, it may not persuade every single viewer to take action, but it’ll convince some. The viewers whose attention you do catch are likely to listen to your suggestion.
Take a look at how GoPro used a huge “Subscribe” CTA button to persuade viewers to subscribe to their channel:
Create strong CTAs for your video content that leads viewers in the right direction. Some marketers add their CTA at the end of the video whereas others add it to the beginning. It depends on how promotional it comes off since your audience doesn’t want this type of content shoved down their throats.
Whether you want viewers to subscribe to your channel, click on your link, or buy your merchandise, state it loud and clear. Use strong, simple language that encourages action and leads users the right way. Avoid sounding complicated so it’s easy to follow and you see higher conversions.
5. Ignoring the data
How often do you review your video content analytics to see how it’s performing with your audience? If the answer is not that often, then it’s no wonder your brand isn’t producing the conversions you hoped for.
You can’t create, publish, and then leave the content alone expecting positive results to pile in. You must remain proactive during all phases of your video marketing strategy to get the best results.
Periodically monitor and track your analytics and KPIs to determine what’s aiding and hurting your current video marketing strategy. It doesn’t make much sense to check on them every day since the numbers will fluctuate. Instead, pay attention to weekly and monthly fluctuations to get an authentic picture of your videos’ performance with viewers.
Some standard metrics you’ll want to take note of include:
- Views: The total number of people who viewed your video
- Impressions: The number of times your video loaded in someone’s browser
- View duration: How long users watched your video
- Engagement: The number of people who watched your video divided by people who stopped watching at a specific point
- Conversion rate: How many viewers responded to your CTA
If you want to optimize your video marketing strategy, you need to be aware of the common mistakes marketers make. Even the simplest components affect how viewers engage with your videos, so it’s crucial to avoid blunders and use the best practices available.
