Using videos to market a product, service or brand may sound easy at first glance, but there are a lot of mistakes that could affect your ability to leverage its advantages. That is why knowing what these mistakes are and how to avoid them is important, as it could make a world of difference in the results that you obtain.
Plan for Success
Arguably the best way to avoid many common video marketing mistakes is to make sure that you have a detailed plan of your overarching strategy, how videos will fit into that strategy, and how each video will fulfill its role. For example, your overarching strategy may be to promote a product and you may use demonstration videos to build awareness and generate leads.
To build awareness, you will want to distribute your videos across various social media and video sharing platforms. On the other hand to generate leads, the videos will need to contain a call to action and a link that points to your website.
Needless to say that is just an example, but it should illustrate the importance of having a plan. Without one, your videos may not be able to play their part and may be of minimal benefit.
Create the Right Video for the Right Reason
In conjunction with your video marketing strategy, it is equally important that you create the right type of video. All too often the videos used in marketing campaigns are ill-suited to their purpose – and you will want to avoid this by looking at a few areas in particular:
- Type of footage
Some types of video footage are more suitable for certain types of videos. For example, screen capture is ideal for video guides involving apps, but not so much for demonstrations of physical products.
- Duration
There is no ‘one size’ fits all for video length – and it varies by platform. Generally videos should be a minute or less for social media, but can be slightly longer if used as content on a website or video channel.
- Promotional vs. informative
Although the video is being used for marketing, it is never good to be overly promotional. In some cases it may be best for the video to be almost completely informative, such as when it is being used to build brand loyalty.
- Emotions and entertainment
It goes without saying that the good videos have to be entertaining in some way – but the best ones also leverage emotions. Whether it is inspirational, humorous, uplifting or touching – your videos should try to provoke an emotional response.
All of the advice above should help you to dodge the most common video marketing mistakes. More importantly, it will provide you with a structure that you can use to run a far more effective campaign using videos. Make no mistake it still isn’t going to be a walk in the park, but with the right approach you should be able to see encouraging results sooner rather than later.
