The sheer volume of videos online is growing exponentially in the past few years. Video marketing has now become a staple campaign for more than 85 percent of businesses’ in all sizes, making the digital sphere louder than ever.
Most of those marketers don’t pull the trigger on video marketing trends just because it’s shiny new, but because of the benefits. Using video as a marketing tool can help you to grow revenue up to 49 percent faster than before. What’s more interesting is that it can also boost your online presence for more than 54 percent.
However, that kind of success is not very easy to achieve. When you’re ready to increase the spend to leverage your video marketing campaign, a mistake is something you cannot afford.
With a lot of things going on in the video marketing environment, it becomes offhand to overlook something that can affect the results– even for a professional, savvy video marketer like you.
That’s why you need to make sure that your video content is on the right track to be effectively working on getting the most of it. And to help you get off on the right foot with your video marketing campaigns, here are top five video marketing mistakes you must avoid in 2020:
1) Selling without telling
Many marketers spend almost an entire video just to convince people to purchase their products. But, here’s the harsh truth: your potential customers don’t care what you’re selling, they care about the valuable message you put in your video. By this point, being too pushy and salesy simply won’t do the trick.
Since videos are an excellent medium for storytelling, why not tell a story?
A story in video marketing is essential as it elicits the audience’s emotion and to make sense of complex information. Hence, telling a story that your target customers can relate to is one of the best ways to engage them and make them convert.
Of course, the story isn’t all about you or your product. You can provide your audience with an inspirational or entertaining story so that your audience will easily remember it.
Take this excellent example from Always:
From the story above, you can tell that instead of talking about the product too much, Always talks about self-awareness, social justice, and political undertones– where their target customers (girls and women) mostly can relate. That way, it engages more audience and gives a good impression for the brand. So no wonder if the video gets viral and it got everyone talking about Always.
With great storytelling, the video will prompt the audience to spread the word or influence purchasing decisions. That’s how you boost your online visibility and increase sales without trying to stick the products down your audiences’ throat.
2) Features, features, and more features
Similar to shameless selling, your video marketing efforts will fail miserably if you only talk about the features of the product. Remember, your target customers are only interested in a product that benefits them and can make their life better.
To put it simply, your customers don’t buy your product; they buy the specific results your product gives them. Impressive features are indeed essential for your customers to justify and rationalise their purchase decision logically, but it’s not the reason they purchase– it’s the benefits they receive.
So, instead of wasting time talking about the features of your product, highlighting what the product can do to help your customers is a wise way to get their attention.
Here are three handy steps to promote more benefits associated with your product’s feature:
- Address your potential customers’ problems.
- Develop empathy for them by finding something that can solve the problems much better than your competitors.
- Show how the product solves their problem as quickly and as effectively as possible.
Look how Be My Eyes hit all of the marks in highlighting the benefits of their service:
One thing you can learn from the video above is that the company emphasises on how its service can improve their target customer’s life (blind people, people with low-vision, and volunteers) and give a solid reason why they need to use the service. You can also see the benefits of the service appeal to the emotional side of potential customers to make them care more.
3) The video is for “everyone.”
Another video marketing mistake you should avoid is making everyone as your target customers. You might think that reaching everyone will increase the number of potential customers. But, it’s not how it works.
When you try to make a video that reaches everyone, you end up with a message that resonates with no one. That’s why defining your target audience is one of the essential factors to run a successful video marketing campaign cost-effectively.
Once you define your target customers, you can focus on delivering the products to the audiences that are interested and excited about your product. It makes it easier for you to craft your video to meet their needs and desires better.
The customer-centric video can help you to develop a strong relationship with your customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Let’s take the viral Dollar Shave Club promotional video, for example:
The efforts to lure younger customers are evident in the video above. As they notice that younger customers prefer something funny and entertaining to watch, the company uses smart punchlines and gags to get their attention in the first place. For young, millennial men who are obsessed with silly internet jokes, this viral video hits every note they need to join the subscription service.
4) A long, weak intro
In this era of immediacy, your target customers become more impatient than ever. They click on video content just to find a quick, straightforward solution to their problem. Creating long and drawn out introductions in the first few seconds is a big mistake.
No matter how impressive your video content is, it’ll flop if you put a boring intro in the beginning. As the most-watched section of your video, an intro is supposed to make an impact on getting viewers to stick around. It’s your chance to make a good impression of your brand or product and show the target customers why they can’t afford to miss out on it.
You only have 8 seconds to grab your target customers’ attention– an intro longer than that can drive the viewers away. Getting straight to the point is almost half the battle. If your target audiences aren’t paying attention from the start, they won’t be able to see the rest of your video, no matter how good and exciting it is.
Some easy ways to create a strong intro for your video marketing include:
- Finding your target customers’ pain points (since it’s one of the best ways to spark your target customers’ curiosity).
- Show or say what the video is all about.
- Include the captions since most of your target customers play the video with the sound off.
To get more insights, check out this crisp, straightforward video intro from a famous toilet spray brand, Poo Pourri:
From the first ten seconds, the brand points its target customers’ concerns with the smart use of dry humour. The honest, straightforward first sentences address its target customers’ on-going concern of using the toilet. Its quirky strategy using playful, toilet jokes makes the viewers’ ears perk up and leaves them convinced that the video is worth watching all the way through.
5) An overwhelming flood of information
Most marketers create a video without a good grasp of their target customers’ interests and tastes. They tempt to give as much information as possible about their products, assuming that it’ll help the customers understand more about it. And no, you don’t have to be one of them.
In fact, the more information you give to your target customers, the less they will remember it. That’s because their attention span is only getting shorter and shorter, meaning that they promptly feel overwhelmed by the vast amount of information.
Cramming redundant information in a single video might dilute and confuse the message and make them lose interest in your video, let alone your brand. Remember, the purpose of your video is to break down complex information into snackable chunks so your target customers’ can retain better. So you need to use the chances that the video format presents without overdoing it.
A smart way to avoid this mistake is by relying on visuals to back up the information considering our brain processes the visuals 60,000 times faster than words. However, to ensure you craft a concise, easy-to-digest video content, you’ll want to:
- Focus only on a single selling point.
- Use animations to illustrate the information you deliver instead of pure text or talk.
- Use simple language and limit the technical terms.
- Taking a stab at humour (it helps increase the memorability of your target customers).
Look how Square creates its video concisely and sweet:
Using a customer testimonial as a promotional video might be a wise way to simplify the information of your product. In the video above, Square doesn’t try to overexert themselves by giving too much information about the product. It lets the customer speak for themselves about how the product works and benefits him. Not to mention that the use of a little bit of animation makes it easier to retain this quickfire testimonial video.
Final Thoughts
As one of the most in-demand and fastest-growing forms of marketing out there, the video sector sees trends come and go each year. You can see some trends are fading away while others are ramping up in the blink of an eye. In such cases, every marketer is always on their toes when it comes to new ways of reaching more and more customers. Most of them create video content just for the sake of doing it, so they often end up doing more harm than good. That’s why knowing the most common mistakes that you can easily avoid in advance will help you knock your video marketing up a notch this year.