Video Marketing Blunders That Kill a Campaign Before it Starts

Running a successful video marketing campaign is a science, or close to it. Avoiding video marketing blunders should be relatively easy, but it happens. All too often, video marketers concentrate on one or two aspects of video marketing. They focus on the production while ignoring distribution challenges, or vice versa.

Running a successful campaign involves paying attention to all the important aspects of video marketing. If you follow the basics you’ll have a profitable campaign. If you ignore the proven strategies, you risk killing the success of your campaign before it starts.

5 Video Marketing Blunders to Avoid

Let’s run through some of the most common mistakes people make when marketing their product or service with video.

#1: Making Just a Single Video

You ever hear the expression “don’t put all your eggs in one basket?” Making just one video and expecting any kind of significant return is naive. This is a video marketing blunder that is easily avoidable and easily rectified. Unfortunately, too many people think that uploading a video introducing their company, product or service is sufficient.

This may be the case if you’re trying to rank for very specific long-tail keywords in the SERPS. However, if  you are trying to get your brand name out there and build relationships, you need to create a lot more than one video. And here’s why.

Typically, when a video goes viral, it is not the first the company or individual has produced. In fact, it may be one of many videos that have been attracting a following over time. To be successful in video marketing you need to use your video to establish a connection with your target audience. They, in turn, will support your content, often sending it viral.

To build up this relationship takes time and lots of videos!

#2: Bad Timing

Often you’ll make a video to promote a product launch, live event, trade show or presentation. However, timing is everything. Often times video promotion campaigns are not launched in time to allow for a significant build-up and lead-in to the event they promote.

Videos are best used to create buzz in advance… to get people talking, sharing, and generally excited about an event. Typically, companies and individuals spend too much time promoting the video after the event when most of the buzz has died down. Starting your video marketing campaign after the fact is a big mistake.

While promoting a product after the launch is certainly still necessary, starting your marketing campaign early is a video marketing blunder you can avoid. Be sure to spend more time on video promotion leading up to a key event and not rely solely on post-launch promotion.

#3: No Call to Action

Never assume your viewers will spontaneously take the action you want to trigger from your video content. Video viewers are easily distracted, have short attention spans, and will forget about you very quickly as soon as the video ends.

If you make this video marketing blunder, you’re just wasting your time.

Your viewers won’t seek out your website or opt-in to your email list unless you tell them to do so. Without an explicit call to action in your video content, your campaign is likely to bomb. Use explicit directions inviting users to take action. Better still, offer incentives such as promo codes, contests, and teasers to engage them and pull them into your funnel.

#4: Neglecting Social Media

The whole point of producing a video is to generate buzz around you and your product or service. The best way to do this is through social media sites. Social media should be an integral part of your video marketing strategy.

Used effectively, it can be a powerful force.  Sharing your promotional vids on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even Instagram is practically a must these days. Using video to drive viewers on social media to your product and can often be responsible for your content going viral.

#5: Lazy Tagging & Descriptions

It’s vitally important that you tag your videos with keywords that are relevant to the content. This is critical to your video being found online by the audience you are targeting. Yet another video marketing blunder easily overlooked or ignored.

Don’t be tempted to steal a ride on popular, in-demand keywords. Ultimately this will harm your campaign. Users who expect one type of content (indicated in the tags) but find the content is unrelated are very unforgiving.

Make sure your tags and descriptions are true to your content. In this way, you’ll receive far more targeted traffic. Additionally, viewers who like what they see and don’t feel duped are potential loyal followers. And we all know it’s the loyal followers who share content. You could generate more views and followers by being accurate that you could from using spammy tags.

Conclusion

These are just 5, but very important, tips you should heed when you decide to add video marketing to your overall marketing strategy. If you have more video marketing blunders to avoid, I’d love to hear them!