There are certain video marketing mistakes that anyone can make and everyone should avoid. Regardless of what your specific approach is, watch out for these common pitfalls when you’re creating your own video content.
The only thing worse than not doing video, is doing video wrong.
In this post, we reveal the absolute howlers you must avoid in order to make the most of the massive power of video to grow your business.
Mistake 1 – Making your video too long
Making a video too long is one of the most common mistakes in video marketing. In the case of video marketing, the principle of more is better simply doesn’t apply. There’s no room for filler or fluff in video marketing. Your audience will leave, and it will reflect badly on your business or brand if you’re pumping out videos that don’t offer genuine value for your audience. After all, they’ve chosen to invest their time in watching your video content, so don’t abuse that trust. You need to understand how much time your viewers are willing to invest in your content.
Shorter is almost always better, especially for video, and keeping it too long is an easy mistake for you to make. So please, just don’t. It really is best to keep your video short, sweet, and to the point.
Your video should be long enough to communicate what you want to, to leave your audience enlightened or entertained without boring the pants off them. Video really isn’t an excuse for you to bang on for 40 minutes about stuff that won’t make your audience’s life better in one way or another.
The longer your video is, the less likely your audience is to finish watching it. So, mention your key points at the beginning, and cut out any irrelevant content that extends your video length. Dump the long intro and get straight to the point. It doesn’t matter how good the content is. If you fail to get users to watch past those first few seconds, no one will see the gold that lies further in.
Remember, your video is not a long-rambling missive, but hooky chunks of valuable information to entice your target customers. Remember as well, it’s not about you. It’s always about the audience, so make videos that help them.
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Mistake 2 – Not including a clear call-to-action
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Have you used anything like this at the end of your videos? If you haven’t, you’re missing out a huge opportunity. Just creating an engaging video is not enough. Without a proper closing statement or call-to-action, you’re leaving your viewers in a dilemma about what comes next. If you’ve left a viewer thinking, “So what now?” after watching your video, you’ve not fully completed your job. Even the most intelligent viewer needs to be told what to do after watching. Also, this might mean that you just lost a valuable lead, a click, or maybe even a sale, and that is a huge video marketing no-no.
Remember the main reason why you shot a video in the first place. If you’ve got a goal you need to achieve, then you probably want your target audience to do something after watching your video, which means you’ll definitely want to include a call-to-action, or CTA. It really doesn’t have to be too complicated. You don’t want to be too salesy, but equally, that doesn’t mean you should go to the other extreme and have no CTA’s in your video content at all. In some ways, your CTA’s are as important as the quality of the video you make. After all the hard work you did to get your target customers on your website or watching your content, you don’t want them wandering off elsewhere because a strong CTA didn’t exist.
Mistake 3 – Not having a clear video strategy in place
Jumping head first into video marketing without understanding how it aligns with your brand’s overall strategy is a recipe for disaster. As the well-worn adage has it, when you fail to make a plan, you plan to fail. You see, it’s not just a case of making a single video and then ticking off video marketing from your to-do list.
Just like any other kind of marketing, video content marketing doesn’t work that way. Before you create any kind of successful video, you first need to know exactly what you want to achieve. No matter how educational and entertaining your video may be, if there’s not a strategy underpinning it, it’s unlikely to have any noticeable effect. Your video content, and what you want for it, should be carefully considered in relation to your wider business aims and current content marketing strategy.
If you want to increase conversion rates, what kind of videos will work best? If you’re looking for brand awareness, how will video best serve that aim? So definitely plan and set goals before you press record.
Mistake 4 – Forgetting about SEO
Everyone knows how important a strong SEO strategy is in your content marketing, but many businesses forget about it when it comes to video.
Now that you’ve made your marketing video, the next big thing is to get your target customers to see your video. You want to make sure that when someone is researching their problem, your video content will be there as a solution. Just posting it on YouTube isn’t enough anymore. In order to see your video ranked number one on the internet, you need to optimize it with the right keywords, right metadata, and a great thumbnail image.
Disregarding video SEO factors is a massive mistake that will have a cumulative effect over time and ultimately really restrict the reach of your video content.
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Mistake 5 – Not branding your content
Hearing people talk about your video is fantastic, but if they can’t remember the name of your company, quite frankly, that’s a bit of a marketing fail.
Video is one of the best ways to raise awareness of your brand or business so it’s really important to effectively brand your business in the marketing videos you make. Using your company logo as a bug or as an end board in your video, mentioning your business tagline, your URL, all these things are essential to successfully convey your brand identity. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in actually making a video that you can easily neglect to make sure that your video is doing one of its primary jobs, which is raising brand or business awareness. So, don’t make this mistake. Don’t forget to brand your videos.
Mistake 6 – Poor video quality
This may seem like a complete no-brainer, but it’s important to produce high quality videos.
Businesses are quick to jump into creating video as they feel the need to produce content right away. But remember, your video content is a representation of your brand. Your video is critically important in making a first impression.
If you create poor quality video, what does that say about your company as a whole? People are going to associate it perhaps with poor service or a rubbish product, and you could be missing countless opportunities to turn newcomers into customers. So, make sure you don’t rush and produce substandard content that could ultimately damage the perception of your business or brand.
Also, a lot of inexperienced video makers fall into this common trap, prioritizing video quality over sound. Sound is absolutely critical, and nothing turns viewers off quicker than shoddy sound. And once those viewers have gone, they won’t be back, so make sure your video is technically as good as it can be. Invest in decent kit if you’re adopting the DIY production approach, especially when it comes to microphones.
Final Thoughts
So, there you have it, six absolute howlers of mistakes you must avoid when producing videos.
As I mentioned just now, there’s loads more inspiration lurking on our channel, so be sure to check out our other videos covering strategy and production, everything you need to make the most of video for your business.
And if there’s something you think we should cover, ping us a message in the comments below, and we’ll sort that out for you.