5 Most Common Video Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Video marketing, over the years, has proven to be one of the best forms of marketing in the digital era that we live in. Businesses are beginning to explore all kinds of video marketing content to promote their brand and build a stronger connection with their target audience. However, it is not just about creating videos for the sake of it. Businesses need to know how to create videos that will perform excellently in order to receive the benefits that video marketing can offer.
Thinking of using video marketing to promote your business? It would be a good idea to contact a content marketing agency to ensure that your videos achieve your desired results. Here are the 5 most common video marketing mistakes to avoid.
1. Not having a clear plan for the video content
Not having a clear plan for the video content is the first great mistake that would lead to the failure of the marketing campaign. Brands must take the planning process seriously for video content creation. This is just as important as any other marketing plan created for a campaign. Businesses must have a clear purpose for the video content and ensure that the purpose doesn’t in any way conflict with the objective of the organization. In addition, businesses must understand that the duration of the video can affect the entire video creation process as well as the effectiveness of the video. So how long should the video be? This has to be put into consideration when planning the content for the video.
Brands need to understand the behaviour of their target audience on the different digital marketing platforms that they would be promoting their video content. The first ten seconds of the video should be well planned in order to grab the full attention of the target audience. If it is possible to have the same video content in various durations and test the reaction of target audience when viewing the short or long ones, this would help the business to understand which video duration would be more effective.
2. Failing to properly brand the video
Video content interacts differently with the target audience as there are no links to click on. This compares to blog content or other marketing strategies. Because of this, brands need to find creative ways to ensure the continuity of ‘brand connection’ established through the video. And this is where branding the video content becomes necessary to achieve that continuity. Branding is not all about plastering the logo or the colour of the brand all over the video. Rather it is a combination of doing all that in a minimal amount and focusing on reflecting the brand’s personality while trying to market the products. This is why marketing videos of brands like Pepsi and Coca-Cola always have some lingering effect on the target audience. Depending on the overall purpose of the video, brands can include other things like the website URL or a special website URL, contact number, social media handles, email address and so on.
3. Not paying attention to the video direction
The content of the video is integral to the success of any video marketing campaign. The content determines the video’s directional strategy. As with any written content, there should be an introduction, body and conclusion. Of course, it would not be as elaborate as writing an essay. Having an outline of the content for the video will help define the duration of the video. It also helps to determine whether or not you need a clean script for voice over. The video outline also sets the direction the video will take from the beginning to the end. It will also help during the video editing process to ensure that important footage is not removed in the editing process.
Outlining the content of the video beforehand also helps to narrow down the message of the video to one single message. Brands are able to take out unnecessary information in any video content that is not in line with the central message that they want that video to communicate. Doing this also helps with being clear on the call to action that would be most effective for that video. Just as call to actions are essential to images or email marketing contents, they are also very important in videos.
4. Ignoring the need to optimize the video content for search engines
Optimizing video content for search engines is critical. Getting this right will allow the video to rank high on the search results page which increases the chances of being viewed by the target audience. It is true that search engine optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in any type of content shared online, and video is certainly not an exception. SEO tells search engines what the video content is about so that their web crawlers can properly index it. This way, the video is made available when people search for terms related to what you have described the content to be.
Now, because video content provides very limited options for imputing text that web crawlers can easily pick up, businesses have to be a little more creative with optimising the video for search engines. This is done by infusing the right keywords in the title of the video, video captions and in the video description before it is published online. Also, the file name of the video should be edited to carry essential keywords. The properties of the file (when opened on a computer) can also be edited to carry essential keywords too and other metadata you can edit. These are the textual information that web crawlers can easily pick up and work with to optimize that video content for search engines.
5. Publishing videos on single platforms
Creating an awesome video and sharing it on the brand’s website is not enough. How do you think videos get viral? There was definitely someone or more people sharing that same video on multiple channels online. That you created a larger-than-life video would not get the word out about that awesome video – you need to circulate it well! Share it on all social media platforms, ALL! Whether or not your target audience is there does not matter. This is because there is power in accessing the smaller networks of people on various platforms who also find that content awesome and share with people within their network.