8 Common Video Marketing Mistakes (& How to Avoid Them)

Recently, video marketing has emerged as one of the most valuable forms of marketing available. According to HubSpot, simply including a video on a landing page can increase your conversion rate by 80%.

What’s more, 92% of mobile internet users share videos with one another. These figures go to show that video is more than just an “up-and-coming” trend: it’s a valuable and productive marketing strategy that can take you far in the world of online content.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to make video marketing mistakes if you’re unfamiliar with the area. Luckily, you can take proactive steps to understand how these errors happen and avoid them before they do.

8 Video Marketing Mistakes You’ll Want to Avoid

Whether you’re new to video marketing altogether, or you’re simply looking for a way to improve your existing video marketing strategies, avoiding these eight mistakes is critical:

1. Not Branding Your Videos Correctly

As it stands now, more than 80% of consumers remember a video they watched in the past month. But do they remember who produced it? If you’re not branding your videos correctly, it’s possible that customers will remember the content of your videos, but not the company behind them, which can be devastating for you.

To avoid this, BusinessCollective recommends making sure that you’re branding your video with your business logo, URL, or tagline. These things can help increase customer recall and make your videos more memorable.

2. Forgetting Who Your Target Audience Is

Videos that don’t cater to your target audience don’t do your customers or your marketing budget any good. While you want your video to be attractive to a wide variety of clients, you also want it to be specific enough to appeal to the people who are going to convert.

With this in mind, be careful not to cast too broad a net. When you speak directly to your most valuable target audiences, great things happen.

3. Expecting Your Video Marketing to Drive Immediate Results

Video marketing is a lot like SEO in that it’s a long-game approach. If you expect your video content to drive immediate results, you’re only going to be disappointed. With this in mind, be realistic about what you expect your videos to do for your brand. While everyone wants a marketing video to go viral (like Dollar Shave Club’s launch video did, for example), this is an exceedingly rare occurrence, and it’s unlikely to happen to you right out of the gate.

Instead of expecting immediate internet success from your videos, focus on creating quality content your readers enjoy engaging with. This will lay the foundation for virality down the road and help you become a better video marketer.

4. Getting The Length Wrong

 The length of your video can have a significant impact on how well (or poorly) it performs. If your video is too short, it won’t get your point across to users. If it’s too long, though, you risk losing your viewers’ attention.

Because of this, it’s critical to  keep your video at the ideal length. According to recent research on the topic, a 60-90 second video will perform the best on most platforms. Just be sure to keep it engaging and compelling from the get-go, since 20% of viewers will abandon a video within the first 10 seconds if it doesn’t grab their attention.

5. Not Optimizing Your Title

You probably know that the title of your blog posts are some of the most critical components of the content, but what about the title of your videos? As it turns out, video titles are no less important than the titles of your text-based content, and you can’t afford to phone them in.

For best results, optimize the titles of your video content. By including relevant keywords and search phrases, and making sure the titles of your videos are engaging, attention-grabbing, and exciting, you can dramatically increase your viewership and make it easier for people to engage with your material.

6. Getting Confused About Your Message

While videos are designed to deliver a message, getting confused about which message that is can harm your video marketing ROI. For best results, keep each video you make focused on one message and one message only.

For your video to be productive, your audience needs to know what to expect from its content. They also need to know that they can trust your brand to deliver on the promises made in the title of the video and that your content won’t waste their time. By keeping each video you make focused and specific, you can deliver all of this and more.

7. Not Plugging Your Video into Your CRM

When you plug your video into your marketing automation platform or CRM, you can gain all the analytics and insight you need to make your video marketing efforts productive and lucrative. What’s more, integrating your video marketing efforts with your CRM makes it easier for your sales team to use the information gained from your analytics to convert leads to sales, which is a major boon for your brand.

8. “Hard Selling” in Your Video

Nobody likes to be hard sold, especially in video content. Today, videos are less about forcing people to purchase your product than they are about building trust, strengthening your brand voice, and creating content that makes people want to engage with you.

While focusing on these things will allow you to create productive and exciting video content, working too hard on “hard selling” will only drive your viewers away.

Better Video Content Starts Here

Today, video marketing is one of the most productive and engaging forms of marketing in the world. And because experts expect video content to represent 74% of all web traffic by the end of 2017, it’s also one of the fastest-growing.

Although video marketing can be intimidating to break into, avoiding these eight mistakes is a smart way to ensure great results from the get-go, and build your brand through relevant video content.

Need help making your video marketing pop? Contact Thrive Internet Marketing – your source for all your digital marketing needs.