Most of the time here at 50Wheel we talk about what YOU should do when it comes to online video and marketing, we rarely discuss what not to do. As things typically go, its a lot easier to learn from mistakes then to learn from successes. Here are few of the biggest mistakes we see marketers making when it comes to online video and video marketing.
1. No Strategy or Plan for Deployment and Execution
The single biggest mistake we see with marketers that are just getting started with online video is that they have absolutely no plan. A stat in a blog or a competitor may be using video which has sparked a drive to integrate it into existing practices. The marketer starts producing customer and explainer videos and posting them to YouTube — embedding them around the website, but no plan in place as to where to head next. Instead of looking at video as a standard piece of content it is treated completely separate. Execution without strategy will not work.
2. No Success Goals or Measurement Metrics
Most commonly, goals for online video are never established and don’t align across content types and channels. For example, a marketer may not know how to measure the impact of online video, so the “number of views” is the metric of measurement. Meanwhile the unit of measure for all other collateral downloads is “leads,” the two don’t line up and its really hard to be successful when you are comparing apples to oranges with your team.
Instead put goals into place for all videos, goals such as “generate 50 leads a month from video content,” see if you can meet that goal and then adjust or shift. In most cases, marketers will be opening up online video as a lead source for the first time.
3. No Technology in Place to Power The Strategy
This is a big one, probably second biggest mistake. Not having the right technology in place to power video marketing efforts leads to a disjointed, costly, unmeasurable strategy that will have minimal impacts on a marketing program. Commonly known as a ‘YouTube syndrome,” which involves nothing more than hosting videos on the YouTube and embedding them into marketing campaigns. The impact here provides no control, no measurement, and no conversion.
If your team is serious about video marketing, put software in place the host, distribute, and enrich your content — plus make sure video is integrated into the marketing systems you use today like marketing automation and CRM.
4. Lack of Content Consistency
Related to content creation primarily — the consistent release of video is a must. Its easy to pump out content and then stop for a quarter and then be back at it again. Commonly caused by a lack of production resources needed to create video, but can be quickly overcome with a great content creation partner. Just like you would create blog series, do the same with online video. A good example of this is a software startup that puts out a video every week called “Feature Friday,” which highlights a new compelling feature each week. Stay consistent and people will engage.
5. No Call-To-Action
A big marketing NO NO, but people do it! Every video should have a call-to-action in or around the video player. What is the point of presenting great video content with no next step — blogs and emails alive require a strong CTA and so does video. Learn more about video CTAs in our video gating guide.
These are simple mistakes, but without making them first its hard to know what one is doing wrong. In future articles we will talk about more advanced mistakes that are made with things like marketing automation, gating, and production.
