Video is a marketer’s dream tool. Effective use of video in marketing can increase your conversion rate by up to 80% while building trust, an audience base, and your SEO strategy.
Incredible, right?
But experiencing these benefits isn’t guaranteed. Marketers have to carefully plan if they hope to avoid the challenges and pitfalls that keep video content from having the success that you want it to achieve.
Overcoming these challenges begins with identifying them. Here’s what you should avoid and strive for when producing video marketing content.
Common Video Marketing Challenges
Video marketing may sound simple—that is until you actually begin the process.
Producing video content requires effective planning and storyboarding, memorable performances, and great editing just to end up with an engaging bit of content. Then, there’s the challenge of sharing that content with the world and ensuring it reaches the right audience.
A great video marketing strategy begins in the planning stage and carries forward to when and where you share your content. The following areas are where many video marketing efforts go awry:
Failing to properly plan
Simply jumping into video production without clear goals and a plan of attack is a recipe for disaster. Video content requires aligning your business priorities with data-driven research into what your audience wants to see and how to give it to them.
Additionally, you need to have a clear plan in place for what metrics you are going to track and how you’ll track them. How will you associate conversion metrics to various types of video? How will you measure this performance? And who will take care of each stage of the production process?
Video production can involve anxiety-inducing tasks, from performing in front of a camera to scraping together an analytics strategy. Plan for every stage of production before you enter the realm of video marketing.
Limiting your audience
Video is typically pushed as a must for younger audiences. Surely, these tech-savvy youth require everything handed to them in video form for easy digestion. The truth is, video is a great tool to market to any audience.
Many video marketers fail to promote their videos to older demographics or audiences they assume fall outside of their target range. Often they are neglecting valuable data points, like the fact that 1 in 3 baby boomers uses YouTube to learn about a product or service.
Do your research and explore how you can use broad digital audiences to increase conversions through video marketing.
Failing to implement accessibility features
Similarly, many video marketers fail to address how a lack of accessibility accommodations in video marketing can limit their audience. One and a half billion people in the world live with some level of hearing loss. This is a huge market you’re ignoring if your video does not provide captions or transcripts.
Additionally, 85% of Facebook video content is watched with the sound off. This is likely because users tend to consume this content around others and want to avoid disturbing them. Providing captions ensures that audiences can still receive information without the need for audio.
Overcoming the Pitfalls
With challenges like these common to video marketing, you should include solutions in your video production plans. Maximizing the success of your content can come down to careful coordination of your marketing team and your analytical tools.
Use these strategies to help you overcome common pitfalls in marketing great video content:
Streamline your video production process
Video is not simple. It takes storyboarding, writing, acting, interviewing, and more. Because of this multifaceted process, you need a careful organization strategy to ensure that you can produce quality video content without overly relying on one team member.
Build a team that understands the process clearly from the leadership level on down. An effective marketing manager will oversee the creation of new content that clearly aligns with branding and understand how to apply research and social media insights to make the most of this content.
Use social media to maximize content potential
Social media is an immensely powerful tool in generating audience interest and promoting content. These platforms have experienced a boost in engagement across the world in recent years, leading to widespread marketing adoption. Fifty-eight percent of brands now say that social media is a key part of their marketing strategy. In the future, these platforms are likely to be only more important.
Honing your social media video marketing strategy requires carefully engaging with your audience and assessing your metrics to produce better results. Use social media insights to see where and when posts are failing. For example, you can study common times during the week when video content gets the most engagement and schedule your uploads accordingly.
Use social media to maximize content potential
Social media is an immensely powerful tool in generating audience interest and promoting content. These platforms have experienced a boost in engagement across the world in recent years, leading to widespread marketing adoption. Fifty-eight percent of brands now say that social media is a key part of their marketing strategy. In the future, these platforms are likely to be only more important.
Honing your social media video marketing strategy requires carefully engaging with your audience and assessing your metrics to produce better results. Use social media insights to see where and when posts are failing. For example, you can study common times during the week when video content gets the most engagement and schedule your uploads accordingly.
Implement accessibility standards in your video production process
From the beginning of your video content planning, incorporate methods for all kinds of users to be able to enjoy and engage with the video. This means providing captions, clear graphics, transcript options, and screen reader compatibility to all contextual content.
If manually transcribing your videos sounds like an impossible task, there’s an automatic transcription tool that can do the job for you.
With so many users consuming video content with the sound off, the focus should be definitive visuals that can be assisted by captions. But don’t neglect audio altogether. Visually impaired users should still be able to access and get something out of your content.
Maximizing Video Content Success
Your video marketing strategy will only be as good as the process you’ve developed to produce and share your content. Avoid pitfalls by carefully planning your process, researching and expanding your audience, and focusing on accessibility. As a result, you’ll create more useful videos that have high rates of engagement.
Video marketing can be a challenging task, but by overcoming these challenges and following these strategies, you can boost your conversion rates through this popular marketing approach.
Author
Luke Smith
Luke Smith is a writer and researcher turned blogger. Since finishing college he is trying his hand at being a freelance writer. He enjoys writing on a variety of topics but technology and digital marketing topics are his favorite. When he isn't writing you can find him traveling, hiking, or gaming.
