8 Video Marketing Mistakes That Are Killing Your Sales

Video plays a progressively significant role in marketing and is currently one of the most effective ways of engaging with potential customers and attracting their attention.

However, many marketers don’t understand that this approach is a little bit more complicated than simply shooting a video and making it available on the Internet.

Video marketing is just a tool, and just like any other tool, it has to be used right. If you want to achieve results, you have to avoid making mistakes – and in this article, we will cover some of the most widespread reasons why video marketing efforts just don’t work.

1. Wasting time

With the human attention span notoriously being about 8 seconds, you cannot afford to lose a single moment trying to convey your message. Be ready to lose at least 20 percent of viewers within the first 10 seconds and up to a third within the first 30 seconds. This means that if your video starts with long music and a text intro, speaker introductions and suchlike, a huge portion of your viewers isn’t going to see anything but this useless fluff.

Thus, you have to take it as a given that you have less than 10 seconds to engage with your audience. Drop introductions, get right to the gist of the matter, and you will get a chance of grasping their attention. Study online guides and manuals to get a better understanding of what makes a good video and use this knowledge in practice.

2. Making long videos

When a visitor clicks on a video and sees that it is ten minutes long, they are going to watch it only if they have a strong commitment to doing so. Otherwise, they are likely to leave immediately.

An optimal length of a business video has been a debated issue for a long time, but most of the latest studies show that it is about 2 minutes. Until that moment most videos show about 70 percent engagement, with an abrupt drop immediately after. It is an interesting point that engagement graphs don’t show a gradual decline after that – instead, it demonstrates two other noticeable drop-off points, at 6 and 12 minutes. In practice, this means that 2 minutes is the length you should strive for, and if you’ve made a video and found it to be slightly longer than 2, 6 or 12 minutes, you should try and shorten it to before the nearest drop-off point.

3. Trying to sell too hard

Of course, marketing is, by and large, an effort to sell your product or service. However, this doesn’t mean that you have to keep your audience on a diet of a sales pitch.

Of course, there should be a place in your strategy for videos focused solely on sales, but these should usually come closer to the end of the funnel. Customers who are still at the beginning of the sales funnel are more interested in what you can give them, you have to build a relationship with them, be it by giving useful advice or providing valuable content.

Whatever you are going to give them early on, it should be something that can be delivered without a sales pitch. If a visitor feels you are trying to sell them something right off the bat, they are going to move on.

4. Neglecting to use video analytics

Just posting videos and not following it up with proper use of analytics tools is like shooting with a blindfold over your eyes.

Analytics can give you all kinds of useful data about your videos: who watches them, what videos they watch, for how long they watch before leaving the page and so on. This information can give you many useful insights about how to tweak your strategy. You will know which videos perform better, what content your customers are most interested in and so on.

5. Putting selling points in the end

Putting your main selling points near the end of the video and using the rest of the run time to lead up to them gradually may sound like a natural approach, but if you do, you risk losing most of your audience before they reach the important part. So, no matter how grating it may be, do things the other way around – place the meat of your message in the beginning and follow up with supporting details that are not crucial in understanding the point.

6. Failing to do SEO

You may have heard that content is king, but even with top-notch content, you have to make sure people can find it. When it comes to videos, search engines mostly operate with the help of metadata accompanying the video, so make sure it contains all the right keywords and phrases. Check all the categories, descriptions, title and tags and make sure they contain keywords relevant to your content.

7. Using clickbait

Your goal is not to have your video opened by as many people as possible, but to have it viewed by as many potential customers as possible. This means that using misleading titles, irrelevant thumbnails and other dubious tactics of this kind is counter-productive.

You may get more clicks as a result, but those will be by visitors who are going to leave a couple of seconds later. Instead, try using intriguing yet truthful titles and thumbnails to attract exactly the people who may be interested in becoming your clients.

8. Failing to introduce a call-to-action

Remember the main reason why you shot a video in the first place? You want viewers to do something. After watching your video, they shouldn’t be in two minds as to what they are supposed to do. Don’t present it as a sales pitch, but try to persuade them in a strong and trustworthy way, make a valuable suggestion for them to follow.

Wrap

Video marketing can be an extremely effective and efficient tool, but when used incorrectly it can use up a huge amount of your resources without showing anything for it.

Guest author: Melissa Burns is an independent journalist and business consultant. Marketing, business innovations, and technology are central topics of her articles. She started writing with a single goal of sharing her expertise with other people. Melissa also provides workshops for start-ups and small businesses.

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