3 Biggest Video Marketing Mistakes You're Making (and you don't even know)

You’ve put out a few videos, you’re constantly working on making the videos perfect, but you’re still not getting the traction you envisioned. You’ve heard that you need to patiently build your brand through videos, but THIS SLOW? REALLY?

At this point, you’re probably thinking ‘Should i just stop making videos and stick to other marketing strategies that are working well for me?’ or even, ‘I’m not cut out for videos. Other brands have more time\resources\money to get that kind of success, I don’t.’

You can definitely match the success of other brands. Yes, patience is essential for success, but only after you know that you’re doing everything right. If you’re making awesome videos, then maybe there’s something wrong with your video marketing process.

I’ve outline 3 common video marketing mistakes brands generally make, which you should avoid at all costs!

1. Creating videos without understanding your audience

There are so many different types of videos. BTS videos, whiteboard explainer videos, Q & A videos, animated videos, and so on. How do you know which video would appeal to your audience the most? How do you know what kind of script do they prefer? Do they like off the cuff funny videos, or prefer a more serious approach?

By asking them!

Brands taking their first few wobbly steps in the video marketing world either blindly follow influencers in their niche, or watch a certain brand’s awesome video and think ‘let’s make a video like this’. If it works for them, it’ll definitely work for us.

Wrong strategy.

Every brand has their own particular audience, and different types of videos appeal to different people and achieve different marketing goals.

So before doing anything else, zero in on your audience.

• Who are they?
• What kind of videos do they prefer?
• What social media platform do they hang out on most?
• How much time do they spent on social media?
• What are they most interested in; learning or entertainment?

Lots of simple, yet targeted questions that will tell you exactly what your audience wants from you.

So how do you get clear about your audience’s preferences?

1. Create personas

A buyer’s persona comes in handy when you want your videos to make your audience whoop with joy and convert into lifelong customers. A buyer’s persona generally consists of the following basics,

• Their demographic: Age, marital status, geographical location, income, employment status, gender and so on.
• Their psychographics: Likes and dislikes, influencers and famous personalities they follow, social media platforms they spend most of their time on, needs, wants and desires.
• The kind of videos they like watching. YouTube stars they follow.
• And anything else that’ll help you understand them.

Here’s what a basic buyer’s persona looks like. You can add or subtract fields from here according to your requirements.

And,

Now, it’s easy for me to say ‘create persona’, but how do you actually gather the information to create them?

Through thorough research. Put your investigation (and stalking) skills to good use, and start finding out everything about your audience.

Make surveys your best friend. Use Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to create compelling ones.

Since people absolutely loathe filling surveys, offer them an incentive in exchange. Don’t just spam subscribers and social media followers with ad hoc surveys. Email your past and present clients\customers and offer them a juicy bonus if they fill in your survey. You can even create a giveaway as well where users need to fill up your survey to participate in the giveaway.

Because, honestly, which one would YOU choose to fill?

This,

Or, this

Obviously the latter, right? Because you’re getting something in return. So make your incentive irresistible.

Here are a couple more examples of brands promoting online surveys impressively.

• Offer a white paper, a report, or any other form of exclusive, worthwhile content. This is what Payoneer does here.

Jo offers 2 lucky survey takers fun goodies. You can, too.

2. Look at what your competitors are doing

Another way of gaining information on your target audience and understanding them is by looking at your competitors’ video marketing strategy. Visit their social media pages and their website. Look for clues.

• What kind of videos do they upload?
• How many people like, comment and share these videos?
• What kind of comments do people post? Are they enjoying these videos?
• What time do they post these videos?
• Which social media platform do they primarily use to market their videos?
• How are they cross promoting their videos?
• Are they just sharing their branded videos, or uploading other’s videos? Are they embracing the 80:20 rule of content marketing or not?
• What kind of language are they using in their videos?
• Are their videos scripted or unscripted?

And so on.

Stalk, stalk, stalk. And make notes.

3. Constantly testing A\B

Now that you have ammunition on your audience, you’re ready to light the digital world on fire with your awesome video marketing strategy.

You’re creating videos that your audience will absolutely love.

You’re uploading videos on the right social media channels.

And you’ve taken care of all the other bits and bobs (particularly point 2 and 3 that we’ll discuss later).

But, you’re still missing something.

A\B testing every component in your video marketing plan. From different types of videos to split testing different video headlines.

Unless you conduct A\B tests for each and everything, you won’t get optimum results. A\B tests will show you exactly what your audience prefers with statistical confidence.

Here Neil Patel explains how long you need to conduct your A\B tests for and why.

2. Tracking the wrong numbers

When you upload a video, what do you instantly look at? The number of views that stacked up? This is where you go wrong.

Views are a vanity metric. Unless your goal is just to reach as many people as possible, without converting or engaging, then sure go ahead, just track views. But even then tracking views can give you a misplaced sense of achievement because YouTube counts a view once a user watches just 30 seconds of a video, and Facebook counts a view when a mere 3 seconds are watched.

Instead of focusing on views, you need to focus on the following metrics:

• Social Sharing: How many viewers clicked ‘share video’ because you blew them away with your video content? This is the metric you need to keep a close eye on. It’ll also tell you which social media platform your audience is active on.
• CTR or Click-through rate: The most frequently talked about metric. This tells you how many viewers clicked through to your website, or whatever your marketing goal is.
• ‘Watch-time’ or ‘minutes viewed’: This metric tells you the amount of time viewers spent watching your video. It’s a great way to measure the success of your video and figure out whether your content resonates with your audience or bores them senseless.
• Engagement: Measure the likes and comments of your video to track your video’s engagement levels.

3. Non-existent or all-over-the-place SEO

If you want your videos to appear in YouTube and Google’s search rankings, you need to optimise it accordingly.

Video SEO sounds scary and complicated, but it isn’t. Simple things like creating a great video and using keywords in it’s description box can greatly improve it’s ranking, as well. I’ve listed a couple of other simple and easy ranking factors that can take your video from 19 views to 20k views (add\subtract a few thousands!)

Host your videos on Youtube

Youtube is one of the highest trafficked video hosting platforms so it’s always a good idea to host your videos there. A lot of people focus on creating short videos for social media only, without understanding the significance of building a solid presence on YouTube - there are 3.25 billion hours of video watched each month!

You can then embed this video everywhere to promote it. Your website, social media platforms, blog posts, add it to guest posts, cut it in pieces and use parts on social media linking to the main video, ask subscribers to share it if they found helpful, and so much more. Once you’ve created a video, keep sharing it (in the right context, don’t spam!) in every possible way you can.

Increase your video’s ‘watch time’

The longer your audience watches your videos, the better it’ll rank. Why? Because the more people watch your video on YouTube, the more time they’ll spend on YouTube and YouTube rewards you considerably for it.

Creating thoroughly researched, layman-friendly, and engaging content is the first way to increasing your video’s watch time.

Offering incentives at the end of the video and mentioning it in the beginning will also intrigue them and encourage them to keep watching. If you can hook your audience in for the first 15 seconds, chances are they’ll keep watching. So use a powerful hook for your intro.

Focus on comment counts and increase your comments

Ask viewers to interact with your videos by either posting a strong opinion in the video description, or ending your video by asking them an engaging question.

Brian Dean of Backlinko found that the higher the comment count, the better the chances your videos will rank higher.

Increase your video views to rank higher

Cross promote your youtube videos. Let your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat followers know that you’ve uploaded another video on Youtube and ask them to view it and discuss what they like in the comments section. You can even show a little teaser on these social media channels to intrigue them and compel them to view your video.

Keywords

Use Google Adwords keyword planner or YouTube’s search engine to search for keywords in your niche. Use those keywords in your video’s description box, your title and in the metadata. Add transcription in the description box to further optimise it. And do all of this well before you hit ‘record’. Re-optimising old videos doesn’t work too well, so you need to have your list of keywords ready before you upload your video. Also, try to insert keywords naturally; don’t spam.

You should also utilise Youtube’s tag feature an add as many keywords that relate to your video as possible.

Custom thumbnails

Stunning thumbnails may not directly affect your search engine rankings, but they play a massive role in attracting your audience and turning them into viewers. In a crowd of boring thumbnails, you want yours to pop out and instantly appeal to your audience.

And the higher your viewer count, the better you’ll rank.

PicMonkey and Canva are both great softwares that help you create stunning visuals and custom YouTube art for your videos.

Constantly update your channel by uploading more videos

EposVox’s Adam Taylor recommends having a consistent uploading schedule. At least upload 3 to 5 days a week to keep your viewers coming back more and more. YouTube also states that the number of daily active users is a crucial factor in YouTube’s content success.

Also, according to Pixability’s YouTube report of the Top 100 Global Brands, top aggregate brands published 78 videos per month.

Increase video length

While other social media platforms applaud shorter video content, YouTube prefers longer videos. According to Tubular Insights,

Their data suggests that the longer your video on YouTube, the more viewers will engage with it.

We’ve all made mistakes.

Overcoming them and moving forward is what separates flourishing brands from the pack. Even if you take a few wobbly steps at the start, just keep going. Learn from your mistakes and make a better video next time.