Avoiding these common mistakes will help you create a video marketing strategy that will connect, resonate, and engage with your target audience. This will increase traffic to your website and improve sales.

1. Excessive “hard selling”

When you apply the “hard sell,” it is much like asking your first date to marry you. There is a very remote possibility, but you increase chances by building a relationship step by step. By creating teaser videos, you will intrigue potential clients and establish a continued relationship.

2. Videos are not part of a campaign

You may only get one chance to make a first impression, and as a result, many companies tend to overload their customer base with info. Pace your message and leave something to the imagination without exhausting the rather short attention span of your viewer.

Campaigns are the way to go. Rather than creating a single five-minute video, entrepreneurs should focus on a multi-faceted approach to creating a two-minute video in concert with six 30-second segments. That still adds up to a total of five minutes. The attention span of viewers is now so short, that short, informative, entertaining, and to-the-point videos are required.

3. Poor title and SEO

Interesting titles and effective tagging are essential in maximizing your SEO and harnessing your views. Having a great video no one can find renders all production efforts useless.

4. Disharmonized content

Video marketing is not just about visual images. Effective videos all harmonize the images with the best use of voice and text. Take these components into consideration when producing your video. Everything needs to be deliberate and intentionally planned.

5. Focus on products, not people

If facts tell and stories sell, then do not make your video a list of facts about your products. Focus on telling stories about people using your products and the benefits that they derive from using them. If your story is well told, people will seek out more information.

6. Not harnessing the power of video

If a picture paints a thousand words, just imagine how much a well-crafted video can communicate. Just make sure that your videos portray the right content and in the right essence. Videos are all about style, and style is actually more important than content. The style needs to be authentic to your brand, elevate your message, and make it resonate with your target audience.

7. Under-using available social media platforms

YouTube is great, but it is not the only game in town, as shown above. Maximize both your reach and your SEO by publishing your videos on all platforms. This does not mean pasting a YouTube link on the other platforms. When you load your video into platforms natively, you get twice as many views. In addition, do not forget email. As the infographic above showed, including a video in your emails will increase click-through rates by 200 to 300 percent. If you want to know how to do that, either ask Sean Sloan (our resident SEO/SEM expert) or me.

8. Videos are too long

We live in a world of immediate gratification and societal ADD. Therein lies the magic formula to capture your audience in a comprehensive, entertaining, yet limited stage. As you can see in the descriptions above, sometimes 10 seconds are all you have, and even TV commercials are being produced as 15 second spots!

So get out there and create! Just know what the critical success factors are, and you can be wildly successful. And if you need any help, just give First Impressions Video a call!