Video marketing is the most popular marketing technique. And video marketing mistakes are equally popular among businesses.
Video content is loved by consumers, it is highly engaging, has a high conversion rate, and it can be easily shared across leading social platforms.
But not all videos are equally impactful.
A lot of businesses and marketers make common video marketing mistakes.
If you are new to video marketing and started recently, you are likely making one or more common video marketing mistakes.
This actionable guide uncovers the top 10 video marketing mistakes and how you can avoid them at little to no additional cost:
1. Not Having an Objective
If you are creating a video for the sake of video marketing with unclear objectives and purpose, you’ll end up with poor performance. The lack of setting clear video objectives upfront is the biggest video marketing mistake made by a lot of marketers and businesses.
Video content is the most popular content type that has the highest engagement and conversion rate. A study reported that 74% of Gen Z use TikTok as their primary search engine to find things they are looking for primarily because it offers video content – which is the preferred content format of most people.
This persuades businesses to publish a lot of new video content on a regular basis. This is where you end up creating videos that have no purpose and are created for the sake of pushing more videos out there.
Videos that don’t have a clear, well-defined objective perform poorly. In fact, it gets really hard to track performance as you don’t know the right metric to track performance.
How to Avoid It
Set clear objectives for your video content.
Ask yourself the following question: What do we want to achieve with this video?
- Do you want to reach a specific target group?
- Do you want to drive clicks to a landing page?
- Is your video aimed at promoting a product?
- Is it for brand awareness?
Setting an objective makes it easy to identify the metrics to measure video performance. It helps you track ROI at a granular level.
The best way to do it is by creating an editorial calendar (similar to the one you use for blogging). Add a list of videos you want to create, the purpose of each video, CTA, publishing channel, time, and other details in the calendar.
It helps you have a purpose for every video you publish.
Here’s an example of an editorial calendar you can use:
You can create a video calendar like this in Excel and add relevant details to streamline video creation with a focus on setting objectives.
2. Pitching Multiple Messages
Have you ever seen a long video that delivers multiple messages?
These are the videos you should avoid creating.
The average attention span of a human being is around 8 seconds which is lower than the attention span of a goldfish. The attention span of a person watching an online video is around 47 seconds:
Attention span is defined as the time when a person can concentrate on a specific activity. A short attention span means people lose attention and get distracted quickly. And when they lose interest, you lose a potential customer.
Adding multiple messages in a single video makes it even harder for viewers to concentrate.
How to Fix This
Stick with one message per video.
Whether it’s an informative video or a promotional one, it must have a single central theme and message.
If you set a clear objective for every video you create (see above), it’s most likely you’ll have a single theme per video as that’s the only way to achieve clarity.
Follow these guidelines to avoid delivering multiple messages in a video:
- Define the purpose of the video
- Choose a theme for informative videos and keep them short
- All the CTAs in the video should lead to a single offer
- Promote one offer per video for promotional videos.
3. Lack of CTA in the Video
A call to action is an essential part of video content. A CTA tells the viewers what action they are supposed to take after they have watched the video.
A common video marketing mistake made by a lot of businesses is that they don’t add a CTA in the video rather they add it somewhere outside the video. In most cases, businesses assume that their audience knows its way and it can take the necessary action to convert.
That’s not the case.
Viewers need clear instructions on what they should do after watching the video. As much as 23% of people appreciate videos that have a CTA. It shows your audience wants to see CTA within videos:
A study reported that videos that have a CTA receive up to 380% more clicks than videos that don’t have a CTA:
You lose potential customers and sales by not adding a CTA in the video.
How to Fix it
Add at least one CTA in the video. It is essential for all types of videos you create including informative ones.
For example, you can send viewers to a squeeze page or you can send them to a relevant blog post where they can find more details.
Follow these tips to add CTA in videos:
- Embed CTA within the video and make it clickable
- Add multiple types of CTAs in the video including clickable, visual, and verbal
- All the CTAs in a video should lead to the same landing page
- Use action words in the CTA to boost CTR
- If you don’t have a relevant landing page or offer, consider adding CTAs to subscribe to your channel, subscribe to the newsletter, or recommend another video or article
- Keep CTA descriptive and concise.
4. Low Quality Videos
If you don’t focus on the quality of the videos you create and publish, you are making a mistake. Your target audience considers video quality an important factor when deciding to buy from a brand.
As much as 91% of people say that video quality impacts their trust in the brand and this directly impacts their buying decision:
According to TikTok, videos recorded at 720p resolution or higher have a 312% higher conversion rate than videos having lower resolution.
Another study by Aberdeen found a significant correlation between video quality and conversion rate. Websites that feature a low-quality video convert 2.6% while websites having high quality videos convert 7.6%.
It’s not just about video, but it’s about high quality, professionally recorded and edited videos.
How to Avoid it
Focus on video quality instead of quantity.
The problem with most businesses is that they don’t have the resources to create professional-level videos.
Up to 24% of video marketers (not businesses) outsource video content primarily due to a lack of resources to create videos in-house.
You can bypass this by creating fewer videos. One high quality video per month is better than 5 low-quality videos per month. Channelize your video marketing budget and switch to a quality-first approach.
You don’t have to increase the video marketing budget rather reduce the number of videos you produce.
If you don’t have the resources to do it, outsource it.
Quality video recording, production, and editing require high-end equipment and tools. You don’t have to invest in any of that, rather find reliable agencies and content creators that will do this for you.
Follow these best practices for creating quality videos if you shot videos in-house:
- Invest in quality equipment including cameras, lighting, editing software, mics, etc.
- Hire a professional videographer or train your existing workforce
- Focus on lighting as it plays a major role in quality
- Shot videos in at least 720p resolution
- Record horizontally
- Use a tripod for still videos
- Don’t use zoom during recording.
5. Not Distributing Videos
Video distribution refers to republishing your videos across different social platforms and streaming sites to reach a wider audience. It significantly increases your reach and helps you target new buyer personas that aren’t reachable otherwise.
The majority of businesses share videos on their website and email lists. Less than 50% distribute it on social platforms and YouTube:
This is where it gets problematic.
You should distribute videos across different video streaming websites to reach untapped markets. If you are sharing it on your website and with existing audiences through different channels, you aren’t using video marketing to its full capacity.
How to Fix it
Start distributing videos on new channels. You have already created a video, why not publish it on as many streaming sites as possible? Why settle for YouTube only?
With some basic reformatting, you can republish a single video on different platforms. Here’s a list of leading video streaming sites you should consider:
- Dailymotion
- Twitch
- Vimeo
- Playeur
- SproutVideo
- Dacast
- DTube
- JW Player
- Uscreen.
Other platforms you can try include:
- Microblogging sites like Medium and Tumblr
- Quora
- Niche forums.
You don’t have to just distribute video content, you need to engage with the platform’s community. Simply reposting won’t move the needle.
6. Overpromising
It’s an unintentional mistake that video marketers make by creating unexceptional hype in their videos. Overpromising and under-delivering leads to poor UX and other issues.
When you promise something in a video, viewers expect and want the exact same thing.
For instance, if you promote the free plan of your CRM tool in a video, viewers expect the same. If you deliver them a 30-day free trial, it’ll backfire. A 30-day free trial isn’t equivalent to a free lifetime plan.
Overpromising increases the expectation of your target audience significantly and you have to go the extra mile to meet their expectations – which almost always – turns potential customers away.
This mistake can take any of the following shapes:
- Overpromising and not delivering
- Overpromising and underdelivering
- Overpromising and over-delivering (gets very challenging in the long run).
How to Fix This Video Marketing Mistake
Follow a simple rule when creating video content: Underpromise and overdeliver.
You need to set the right expectations by promising what your product is about. No hype. No climax. A simple and clean video with a CTA that tells viewers what they should expect when they click the CTA.
Here’s an example of how underpromise vs. overpromise works and changes the perspective and expectations of your target audience:
When you underpromise, you set low expectations.
This isn’t bad, but the magic happens when you overdeliver.
When you underpromise, you don’t have to push yourself to deliver something exceptional. You only need to deliver your product and it’ll do the trick.
It all comes down to how and what expectations you set in your video.
Set lower expectations and overdeliver to make your customers delighted.
7. Lack of Integration with Marketing Strategy
Video marketing is a subset of your marketing strategy. It shouldn’t work alone.
If your video marketing strategy and campaigns aren’t integrated into your overall marketing strategy, you are making one of the biggest video marketing mistakes. It’s very hard to identify and its impact isn’t noticeable.
Lack of integration or poor integration negatively impacts your marketing strategy, budget, and performance.
Here’s how:
- You might be reaching the same target audience through video marketing and PPC with a lack of integration and might overspend
- It significantly increases your CAC leading to a decrease in CLV
- Video marketing might not help you achieve your marketing goals.
If your video marketing strategy is working alone, you should integrate it into your marketing strategy to overcome common marketing challenges.
How to Fix it
Integrate video marketing into your marketing strategy. Consider video marketing a subset of the overall strategy.
Let’s say your annual marketing objective is to generate 100,000 organic visitors from Google. Your video marketing strategy should work towards achieving the same objective (either directly or indirectly).
If your video marketing efforts aren’t aligned with the primary marketing strategy, your efforts might not be fruitful for the brand.
In the above example, you need to focus on producing videos that rank in Google SERPs. This can be done by:
- Targeting low-competition but popular long-tail keywords
- Invest in keyword research
- Optimizing videos for search engines
- Actively promoting your videos with more focus on promotion than creating new videos
- Optimize video title and description that include your target keyword
- Add timestamps to videos
- Build backlinks to your videos.
While you can try to achieve a different goal with video marketing, it’s not recommended. The alignment can be done by following these best practices:
- Have shared vision and marketing goal
- Have weekly meetings of marketing teams
- Be open and encourage communication across teams and departments
- Use communication app like Slack to streamline communication and projects your teams work on
- The video marketing team should report to the marketing head
- Avoid organizational silos.
8. No Subtitles
Publishing videos without subtitles is a bad idea.
A survey found that 50% of Americans watch videos with subtitles. The common reasons why they do so include muddled audio, difficult accent, privacy, focus, and learning purpose:
In another survey, up to 88% of people said that subtitles are the most used accessibility feature:
A study by Meta reported that captioned video ads have up to 12% higher view time than their counterparts.
The viewership of your videos decreases significantly when you don’t use subtitles.
How to Avoid it
Add subtitles to all your videos. It’s best to add subtitles in multiple languages and let users choose their preferred language.
Subtitles offer numerous added benefits:
- It is an essential part of accessibility as subtitles allow people with hearing impairments to understand your content
- Subtitles boost the reach of your video as 75% of people watch online videos with sound turned off
- Having subtitles in multiple languages helps you reach new target markets easily
- Subtitles increase comprehension and video engagement
- Captions improve search visibility.
Subtitles have a lot to offer with no potential downsides. There’s no reason why you should skip them.
Here’s a list of best practices and tips you should follow when adding subtitles and captions to your videos:
- Use simple language in subtitles
- Keep subtitles concise
- Use multiple languages
- Synchronize subtitles with audio
- Use a black background and white font to improve readability
- Use proper grammar and ensure there aren’t any mistakes
- Avoid changing the meaning during cross-language translation.
9. Lack of SEO Optimization
Do you optimize your videos for search engines?
A lot of marketers and businesses don’t.
Publishing video on your website or YouTube channel isn’t enough. You need to ensure that it ranks in Google and Bing to drive organic traffic.
Research shows that videos are 50x more likely to rank in Google SERPs than text.
According to 47% of marketers, optimizing the title and description of the video for SEO is the most effective video promotion strategy.
While most marketers know the importance of optimizing videos for SEO, only a few follow mandatory steps to improve video ranking.
As much as 74.3% of marketers optimize videos for search by adding relevant keywords in the title and/or description:
And this is the problem.
Adding keywords in the title and description is the bare minimum. If you are relying on it and expect a high ranking in Google and YouTube searches, you’ll be disappointed.
How to Fix it
Go beyond title and description optimization because that’s what everyone else is doing. You need to stand out from the crowd and the only way to outperform your competitors is by ensuring you follow all video SEO best practices:
- Find a focus keyword and target it
- Add primary keyword in title and description
- Add relevant video tags
- The video should have a relevant thumbnail
- Embed video on an indexed URL on your website
- Use a stable URL for hosting your video
- Create and use a watch page for your video hosted on your website
- Add time stamps to your video as these are loved by Google
- Use relevant schema markup on the page where you embed videos
- Build backlinks to your videos
- Share and distribute videos across platforms and social networks
- Create a video sitemap and submit it to Google and Bing.
10. Expecting Instant Results
Video content indeed has the highest probability of going viral. However, the percentage of content that goes viral is significantly low.
Businesses often make the mistake of expecting instant, massive success with a few videos.
This rarely happens.
Video marketing is a long-term strategy, not a quick way to generate buzz and engagement.
The top 3 reasons why businesses don’t invest in video marketing include:
- Lack of time
- High cost
- Don’t know where to start.
Even if your business, somehow, overcomes these challenges and kickstarts a video marketing campaign. And the first few videos don’t move the needle.
It’ll be abandoned immediately.
High cost and lack of time with high expectations ruin video marketing for most businesses.
How to Avoid it
Video marketing must be a part of your marketing strategy. It shouldn’t be considered a short-term marketing approach.
Continue investing in video marketing even if you don’t see results immediately.
Use video as an additional touchpoint to connect and engage with your audience. Only a small percentage of your target market might connect with your brand through video. It can’t be (and should never be) ignored.
After all, video marketing is the future.
That’s how Gen Z and Alpha consume content:
These generations are your future customers. Better start creating content for them today.
More Video Marketing Mistakes
Here are additional video marketing mistakes and how to avoid them:
- Overly promotional content: Create different types of video content. Avoid talking about your products, services, or brand in all the videos. Promotional videos should have an informative touch such as tutorials.
- Creating too long videos: Don’t create long videos unless it’s necessary. Up to 73% of videos are under 2 minutes. Keep it short and interesting.
- Not measuring video performance and ROI: Use relevant metrics to measure video marketing success. Track video marketing ROI with advanced tracking and Google Analytics.
- Not using storytelling: If you want videos to be engaging, use storytelling. It works for all types of video content.
Final Words
If you are into video marketing, make sure you don’t make any of these video marketing mistakes.
The good news is that all of these video marketing mistakes can be avoided.
You might not be able to identify some of these mistakes such as lack of integration and overpromising. You need to put an extra intentional effort to find and fix such mistakes.
Once you fix a mistake, don’t expect instant results. Give it time.
Video marketing is a long-term strategy. Avoid haste. Stick with it. You will see results in time.
Featured Image: Pexels
