With companies rushing to online video as a means of expanding their online presence and reaching out to a much broader and more diverse audience, they wind up making a few key mistakes in their production efforts. Some mistakes can wind up damaging their case and doing more harm than good in the end. To help companies avoid these costly errors, here is a look at nine of the most common video errors, laid out by one Dallas video production company.
Failing to Make Goals
Before they ever begin the video production process, companies need to decide what their goals are in these strategies. They will need to question their motives and work out their own reasoning, such as exploring issues of increasing conversion rates through product or service demonstration, or how these videos can help build and strengthen their brand. Companies will need to write their financial objectives and strategies on paper before going any further.
Unauthentic and Uninteresting
Perhaps the two greatest benefits of web videos is a) their ability to communicate large amounts of information to the viewer in a very brief window of time by being far more dynamic and exciting than traditional plain text content, and b) their ability to create a human connection, which tends to be absent in most online marketing strategies. Therefore, in order to be effective, companies will need to create video content that plays to these strengths. Creating dull, uninspired video content completely defeats the point of using web videos at all.
No Call to Action
In order for videos to be successful as a marketing tool, they absolutely must contain a call to action. This is a simple matter of including a statement near the end of the video’s message that spurs the viewer into taking the next step towards becoming a customer. It should direct the viewer to an action, be it visiting the company’s website, sharing the video, providing certain information to the company, etc. Without the video containing a call to action, there is no point at all.
Ignoring Customer Input
Yet another great benefit of web videos is the ability of the viewer to share their thoughts and feedback after watching it. This input can be an invaluable tool to companies, as it can allow them to tweak and refine their future video production efforts to better fit the needs of their viewers. Should companies fail to accept this advice so readily given is simple ignorance on the part of the company and setting themselves up for failure later.
Failure to Apply SEO Techniques
Search Engine Optimization, once a tool solely for text content on the web, has now come to represent one of the greatest techniques available to companies to ensure that their video content reaches the widest audience possible. Video SEO is a simple practice of using carefully selected keywords to tag the video, allowing it to be more easily recognized by search engines. As easy as this is, there is absolutely no reason for companies not to do so, unless they’ve just decided that they really don’t want anyone to see their videos.