While not surprising when you consider how multi-faceted employees are nowadays, recent studies report that 43% of small businesses rely mostly on their employees to plan and execute their digital marketing, including video production.
As a small business owner or marketing manager, you’re juggling a lot of things at once, and we get that. Even the biggest, most world-renowned companies get marketing wrong sometimes. Seeing as marketing evolves at such a rapid rate in the digital world, it’s normal to feel like you can’t keep up sometimes. However, it’s never a good idea to over-extend your employees’ reach when it comes producing digital marketing content.
Arming yourself with some basic facts about going to market with video will help you avoid making the common mistakes we’ve outlined below that many similar businesses find themselves committing.
Video Content with No Purpose or Storyline
As Forbes put it once, modern-day consumers aren’t just looking for different experiences but different delivery when it comes to the marketing content they consume and the brands they engage with. Due to the over-saturation of many markets when it comes to video content, to really attract and retain a viewer’s interest, you’ll have to form a deeper connection with them. And the best way to accomplish that is to have a solid storyline that aligns with your overall video strategy.
Sure, everyone could benefit from watching your video, but they probably won’t, especially if it doesn’t serve a purpose for them. What’s most important is identifying a single target viewer understanding where they are in the buyer’s journey and then crafting a storyline to get them to progress through that journey.
Videos that don’t have a defined purpose and that don’t tell a story to serve that purpose is the single most common mistake that most businesses make when producing video marketing content. Often times marketers will want to focus more on producing a lot of content at the cost of true quality, both from a video production process and storytelling perspective. Videos that tell a story will always produce higher view and retention rates, which ultimately lead to increased ROI for your investments in video.
As part of crafting a compelling story, it’s important to include a call-to-action at the end. While this might not seem like part of the story, it’s actually one of the most important ways in which you can creatively turn your marketing video into a conversion tool. Give your viewers something to “do” after they view your video. Don’t just tell them a story. Connect with them and then prompt them to take an action, whether that’s to buy, subscribe or simply like. It’s all about pushing them through the customer acquisition cycle.
Corporate Videos That Are Too Self-Centered
While the goal of video marketing is to talk about your company in order to relay information, audiences can easily sense when something is overly promotional. Videos nowadays need to provide viewers with quality information that ensures they’re leaving the page with more knowledge or information about an important subject that they didn’t have before they got there. Give them enough to understand more about your company without being too “salesy.” One thing to definitely avoid is staging your brand logo in multiple places. This is something that is commonly done by most businesses that attempt to make video content in-house.
How do you avoid creating marketing videos that are too promotional? Plan beforehand or work with one of your local video production companies in order to craft a well-planned video marketing strategy that suits your company and its current and long-term needs. During this process, you should be able to clearly define your general marketing goals as well as the goal of each video you’ll be producing.
Low-Quality Production and No Distribution Plan
There is a time and a place for using your smartphone to record video marketing content, and producing professional corporate videos isn’t one of them. The quality of your video will have a strong impact on the perception viewers will build of your brand.
One the flip side, that’s also the beauty of video marketing. With video you have the power to literally shape and influence people’s perceptions of your brand which can be extremely advantages for smaller businesses competing in markets with well-established players.
If you’re going at this alone, be sure to at least answer two questions: Where will the video be viewed? Will it be on your homepage, a social media channel, a landing page, etc. Depending on the channel you may want to produce multiple call to actions which leads to the second question. What do you want your audience to walk away with? Think about the impact you want to have regarding your prospective customers or clients and adjust your strategy accordingly.
For example, if you want to reach your existing audience, you’ll probably want to generate awareness for your video through an email campaign. If you’re looking to expand your reach you may want to develop a YouTube video advertising plan to get your video in front of the people that are actively searching for what you’re providing.
If you want to get results from the hard work you’ve put into crafting a compelling story and connecting with your audience, you’ll need to ensure they can easily find the video and interact with it. Simply putting a video online doesn’t ensure views, you have to have a plan in place to help drive traffic to the video.
In addition to where you place your video, equally as important is optimizing your video when you’re uploading it to different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Be sure to use target keywords in the descriptions, titles and tags to enhance your SEO. Small, actionable tips like these are easy to implement but often overlooked by busy small business owners and their marketing teams.
Choosing the Right Video Production Company
If you’re reading through all of these tips and still feeling overwhelmed, it’s likely because you don’t have the right video production partner or in-house talent and expertise to help you produce quality content. While we pride ourselves on being one of the top Denver video production companies, we also understand the importance of finding the right team to work with. A team who truly “gets” your brand, understands your markets and can support your goals is ideally who you should be working with to produce your marketing videos.
It’s important to meet with different production companies and get a feel not just for their video production capabilities, but also for their understanding of marketing, especially with regard to video marketing. If you’re able to master that mixture, you’ll find yourself reaping the benefits of optimized, engaging video content in no time.