Brands and marketers unite in their praise of video production for marketing. Although challenging, video production has some serious benefits to offer, such as high returns on investment, a good option for explaining complicated subjects, increased conversion rates, higher lead generation, and increased traffic on your website.
With incredible potential on offer, it could all be wasted if you make the following mistakes in video marketing.
- Creating long videos that oversell
It is oft-repeated, yet true. Our attention span is diminishing rapidly. Amidst the noise of innumerable brands vying for the audience’s attention, many promotional videos are lost or, worse, skipped. Now, with that information in hand, producing a long video is a recipe for disaster.
Experts suggest, ideally, the length of your video should be under three minutes. Having said that, factors like target audience, message, goal, and content distribution platforms play a critical role in determining the length of your promotional video.
At this step, it is important to identify what is lengthening the duration of the video, if at all it is. In most cases, it is a bombardment of information or hyper-promotion, read overselling, that lengthens the video.
- Information overload
Extending from the previous point, let us talk a little more about information overload. If you include overwhelming information in your video production for marketing, it is surely going to put off your audience and force them to scroll or skip the video. Blame the declining attention span and the competing videos for this rush.
Focus on delivering the key message, avoid packing information from all information, and cut down on excessive graphics and visuals.
- Unclear/vague call-to-action
Often underestimated, call-to-actions (CTAs) are a video’s closing statements. They function in guiding a user on what to do after watching the video. Essentially, the call-to-action or closing statement of a video plays a critical role in generating leads. Hence, make it a point to end each video production for marketing with a strong CTA like “Please donate” or “Join us today,” for viewers to know what actions to take at the end of the video.
- Focusing solely on the product, not the target audience
Instead of sharing the infinite features of your product or service, the more effective strategy is to tell people how they can benefit from the product. To find this information, you need to find your buyer persona, and what they want. What are the questions they are asking? What are the solutions they are looking for? The trick is to draw attention to the product while attending to their solution.
Furthermore, focusing on the target audience also means guiding the customer through their purchase journey and supporting them through sales. If your video production for marketing meets the customer’s needs, rest assured that the customers will return to consume your content in the future.
- Under-promoting and not implementing an SEO strategy
Apart from popular video-sharing platforms, you can, and must, look at sharing your promotional video on multiple platforms. Most distribution platforms, today, support video content, then why not make use? Share your video on the landing page of your website, use it as a content upgrade on your blog, or include it in your email marketing campaigns.
Incorporating these additional platforms to promote your video promotion for marketing grows your brand awareness. However, while sharing the multiple platforms, make sure to share the entire video, not merely the link of the video. Uploaded videos garner more engagement and views than links to videos.
Now, simply mass sharing the video will not be effective. Videos, like any other type of content, need to be optimized to improve viewership results. If you do not take the required steps to optimize the promotional video, you risk missing your target audience.
The way to optimizing your videos is by adding the right keywords, thumbnails, meta-tags, and title descriptions. Using the SEO strategy, you can drive organic traffic to your site or videos, increasing their ranking in search results.