Last year, Subrat Kar, the CEO and co-founder of Vidooly, published a great piece on Your Story about video marketing for startups. Kar emphasized how startups can depend on video to grow brand recognition and reach new customers on a limited budget.
Of course, as a video marketing consultant, Kar’s article was written through the lens of someone wearing rose-tinted glasses. While he shared some great strategies, he didn’t focus much on the challenges of video marketing.
The sad reality is that while video marketing is a great marketing strategy for brands with limited budgets, it also has a steep learning curve. Startups often make a lot of mistakes, which can be expensive and potentially damage their brand. Here are a few to pay attention to.
1. Offending Your Viewers
Obviously, you don’t want to post anything that offends your visitors. Unfortunately, it is very easy to do, if you aren’t careful.
Sony made a very boneheaded mistake in 2014. They posted a YouTube video about a female doctor making sexual overtones to one of her patients. This obviously struck many viewers as misogynistic. After facing serious backlash from customers, Sony pulled the video from its YouTube channel.
The lesson from this fiasco is that you must be sensitive to your viewers’ concerns. Don’t assume that messages that seemed appropriate 20 years ago are acceptable today.
Societal perceptions have changed and you can face a lot of criticism for posting things that upset your customers. You certainly don’t want to have those mistakes broadcasted all over YouTube.
2. Not Getting the Right Promotional Balance
Promoting your brand on any social media site is tricky. On the one hand, you need to generate exposure for your brand. There is no point spending money to develop a video and paying to advertise it if it won’t help generate new leads or strengthen your brand image.
However, you also can’t be too promotional. If your entire video is a single annoying advertisement, then it won’t get many views or shares.
You need to find the right balance. Try to either be entertaining or provide useful information. Make sure any shameless plugs are naturally worked into the video. They can be worked in as jokes, part of a script or a genuine discussion about your product.
3. Pulling a Bait and Switch to Get Clicks
You probably see all kinds of annoying click-bait ads on Facebook. They probably annoy you and your friends to death. Yet, you are probably mimicking them with your video marketing strategy.
Sure, you can get more clicks on your videos by sensationalizing things. You can write a bold, exaggerated headline that exaggerates the content of your video.
But it won’t bring in qualified leads. Deceiving viewers is also a good way to tarnish your brand’s good name.
4. Neglecting to Edit and Test Multiple Variations of Your Videos
Testing is the basis of all marketing strategies. You need to test different variations of your videos on different video platforms.
Follow these steps:
- Create multiple variations of your video
- Post to different sites
- Try using a greenmp3 to embed content from other popular (non-copywritten) videos (and see how the mocked-up videos perform)
- Monitor data
It takes a lot of trial-and-error to find out which videos work the best, so start testing early on.
5. Choosing the Wrong Channels for Paid Ads
Some videos go viral on their own, but they are few and far between. You shouldn’t count on that, especially if you are in a niche that doesn’t have very high appeal among everyday YouTube users.
If you really want to gain exposure for your videos, you will probably need to invest in paid ads. Make sure you choose them carefully.
The biggest mistake brands make is choosing channels based on the number of subscribers they receive. Instead, you should focus on choosing channels by relevance. YouTube has plenty of analytics data on different channels, so review it carefully before placing your ads.
