The moment when internet marketing experts declared video content marketing to be a solid tactic for gaining traffic and rankings, the floodgates opened. Suddenly everyone began slapping videos up all over their websites. Unfortunately, most of these videos did nothing to help traffic or rankings, because nobody was watching them. Creating video for video’s sake is no way to generate clicks to your content.
One: Your Video is Not Interesting
When you’re filming a video for your site, take a second and think about it in terms of home videos. There is nothing worse than being cornered by a friend or coworker who insists you watch their “hilarious” video of Uncle Frank falling into the pool on his birthday. And they make you sit through three minutes of boring party activity featuring people you don’t know, so by the time you get to the actual fall, you just don’t care.
The same principle applies with your business video content. You want to get to the point quickly, and make that point interesting and useful. Have a plan for your video and a well written script. If you are struggling to come up with ideas of what may be interesting to your audience, focus on a problem your clients have or questions your customers ask all the time. Hook the viewer as quickly as possible. If you don’t catch them in the beginning, they’ll click away. Keep your videos short, interesting, and leave the viewer wanting more.
Two: Your Video is Poor Quality
In a world where our phones can produce HD-quality video, it’s a turn-off to come across content that looks as though it was shot on a camcorder from 1994. There is no excuse for low-quality video unless, of course, you’re shooting Uncle Frank falling into the pool.
Your clients and potential clients will expect a high level of video and audio quality when they see that you’ve produced a video. It’s important to invest in quality equipment, use lighting properly, and edit the video before uploading. Don’t just grab your iPhone and slap something together. The more time and effort you put into shooting your video, the better the results will be.
Three – Nobody Can Find Your Video
So you’ve made your video. It’s interesting and compelling. The quality of the picture and audio is movie-studio grade. You put it on your website.
But nobody’s watching it.
Unless you are Buzzfeed or LOLCats, people probably don’t know to visit your website for videos. It is critical to upload your content to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and other websites to increase the number of eyes that will see it.
A crucial component of video marketing is, well, marketing. You’re going to have to put some work into getting viewers, and a lot of the basic principles of internet marketing apply to video marketing. Did you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world? That’s right. The only search engine people visit more is Google, which directs users to YouTube nine out of ten times. So it’s not enough just to upload your content. You have to optimize the text you provide to YouTube so that your video will show up in search results. You need a descriptive title, an informative description, targeted keyword tags and useful thumbnails. Optimizing your text increases the chances that people will be able to find your video and will watch it.
Four – You Don’t Know Your Audience
When creating video content, it is critical that you truly understand and know your audience. Take mothers, for example. How many products and services are marketed to mothers every minute of every day? Think about the commercials and video content directed at this audience that you’ve personally seen. Often times, companies will use a “mom” to talk directly to the mothers who are watching the video. Mom commercials are rarely funny or interesting.
But in 2012, Fiat UK created a video directed at mothers that takes a different approach. It hits on everything that is serious and also hilarious about motherhood, and wraps it up into a catchy song that will get stuck in your head whether you’ve given birth or not. It’s obvious that Fiat understands what it means to be a mother.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVde5HPhYo]
Five – Load Time
We live in a world where we’ve all come to expect instant gratification. Our attention spans are short, and if a video doesn’t load in ten seconds or less, we hit the back button. In fact, many researchers say five seconds is even too long a wait for some consumers.
When you upload your videos, make sure you pay attention to the buffer and load times and that you test your video on computers, tablets, and smart phones. Just because your video loads fine on a laptop doesn’t mean it will run as efficiently on a smartphone. If it works great on an Andriod it may not load so well on an Apple device. You can’t control the data speed of all internet providers, but if you take the time to set everything up correctly, you’re less likely to lose viewers.
If You Need Help With Video Content, Ask
If you’ve decided to try video content marketing, it can help to seek out the help of a professional. Putting the extra time, effort and money into working with a professional video marketing company can help to ensure that you’ll generate interesting and well-produced videos that speak directly to your target audience.