You probably already know that video marketing is a great way to grow awareness of your brand and drive traffic to your website. However, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Video marketing is challenging for most businesses—and the stakes are high.

If you don’t capture viewers’ attention in a concise and engaging way, they won’t care about what you have to say. But with the right strategy, video marketing can be a simple and effective tool for growing visibility, establishing credibility, and driving leads.

With these tips, you can avoid common pitfalls when creating a video marketing strategy for your business.

Define your video marketing objectives

Every video marketing campaign should have specific goals. Before you even start, you should know exactly what your video will do for your business. This will help you stay focused on what matters and avoid getting caught up in the details.

While there are many benefits of video marketing, pinpointing which ones are most important for your business will help you evaluate which strategies would be the most beneficial.

Here are a few objectives to get you started:

• Build brand awareness.
• Create engaging content that resonates with your target audience and gets your brand out there.
• Convince visitors to become customers.
• Video can be a helpful tool for converting leads into customers.
• Create engaging content.
• Make sure your videos are engaging, helpful, and interesting.
• Drive traffic to your website.
• Create videos that link back to your website and drive targeted traffic.
• Generate leads.
• Create an effective lead magnet that focuses on an action step.

Get to know your audience

Before you start creating content, you need to get to know your audience. Understanding who you’re marketing to will help you create a video that resonates with them.

This will also give you a better idea of where and how to promote your video once it’s finished.

There are a few ways you can get to know your audience:

• Conduct research.
• Look for commonalities among your target audience and the people who are already engaging with your brand.
• Write down your assumptions.
• Get to know the people you’re marketing to by writing down your assumptions about their personality, interests, and needs.
• Identify your brand’s USP.
• What makes your brand unique from others in your industry? This can help you identify who you want to target.

Create great content

Creating high-quality, original content is the first step to a successful video marketing strategy. This means you shouldn’t rely on repurposed content or unoriginal assets.

It doesn’t matter if you’re creating a product review or a how-to video—you should create something that doesn’t exist online already.

When creating videos, consider these tips:

• Include a call to action.
• Your video should tell your audience what to do next.
• Make it clear what your brand is about.
• Direct your video towards your ideal customer by creating content they want to see.
• Keep it short.
• The standard attention span for video is 8-10 seconds.
• Pick the right video length.
• For most industries and businesses, 30-90 seconds is the ideal video length.
• Use high-quality visuals
• Create an engaging video by using high-resolution and interesting visuals.
• Use high-quality audio.
• Your audio should sound clean and professional.
• Use authentic branding.
• Be consistent with your branding when creating a video.
• Use a voiceover, it can help you get your message across to your audience more effectively.

Don’t skimp on production quality

It’s tempting to cut corners when creating videos, especially since a large portion of your audience will be watching them online. However, you’ll want to resist the urge to skimp on production quality.

Why? Poor production quality can turn viewers off, regardless of how great your content is. You might think that good production quality is out of reach for most businesses, but it doesn’t have to be.

There are plenty of affordable ways to improve the production quality of your videos:

• Invest in lighting.
• Natural light is best, but you can also use artificial light.
• Invest in audio.
• Purchase a good microphone and make sure there’s no background noise.
• Get creative with your set.
• You don’t need to go all out—you can create an interesting set with little to no money.
• Use green screen.
• Get more creative with your video by adding visual effects.
• Hire a professional video crew.
• If you’ve got the budget, you can hire a professional video crew to help you create high-quality videos.
• Use stock footage.
• Get creative with your videos by using stock footage to supplement your visuals.

Summing up

Video marketing is an essential part of any successful marketing strategy. However, many businesses make mistakes when creating their videos, which can impact their ability to engage and convert their audience.

To avoid these pitfalls, you should first define your video marketing objectives and get to know your audience.

Then, create great content and don’t skimp on production quality. These tips will help you create effective video marketing campaigns that drive more leads and sales for your business