As American academic Michael Porter states: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” In other words, a good strategy is the result of making smart and incisive choices.

By making conscious choices as an organization, you’re able to create a clear video marketing strategy, ensuring that:

  • The goal to be reached is clear
  • The ROI of all your videos is clear
  • Multiple departments can take advantage of video
  • Video becomes an integrated part of your entire content strategy

To help you set up an effective and successful video marketing strategy, these are the four most common mistakes to avoid.

1. Using metrics as KPIs

Creating videos often requires a heavy investment, both in terms of time and money. Naturally, you want this investment to pay off, so it’s important to determine in advance your success factors and set up the appropriate KPIs to measure this.

A common mistake when setting up KPIs for videos is only looking at metrics such as the number of views and the viewing percentage. Although these metrics are a good indicator of video performance, in most cases they don’t tell the whole story of the goal you want to reach.

For example, suppose you want to increase product sales on your website and use video to achieve this. Obviously, people need to find your video and watch it, but views alone don’t tell you whether or not viewers will make a purchase after watching it. These metrics are good tools to use as indicators, but should not be the sole KPIs that determine whether or not the investment in video was worth the time and money.

Also, keep in mind that video is just a cog in the larger wheel that is your overall marketing strategy. It doesn’t work to choose goals that apply specifically to your videos. All of your marketing outputs ultimately work together and should be able to be measured with the same KPIs.

With that in mind, make sure that the KPIs match the objective. Consider objectives such as increasing your conversion rate by x%, bringing in x number of quality applicants or generating x number of leads.

2. Isolate videos from other content

There’s a very small chance that your target audience will only come across your video and see no other forms of communication by your brand or organization. Video almost never stands alone.  More realistically, viewers will also come across your other marketing resources like landing pages, emails, social media posts and blogs. Within your strategy, video is often just one of the resources you use, which is why it’s critical that all your channels work together to reach your goal.

If we go back to the example goal of increasing the number of products sold; when viewers are convinced to buy by watching your video, they may change their mind if they read conflicting information elsewhere on the landing page.

So–carefully consider what content you’ll need to display in order to support your goal and make sure that it fits together in terms of branding, look & feel, and mission.  In this way, it evokes recognition and all your content fits together as parts of a greater whole.

3. Disconnect between videos

A complete strategy involves several steps you take to achieve a goal. You may need other supporting content in addition to video, and as an organization, you will often need multiple videos to support all your content channels.

To increase your conversions, you want to grab attention with brand awareness videos, but also win people over with product videos. These different videos all need to work together to increase effectiveness.

So as an organization, how do you ensure that you don’t end up with a variety of videos that while effective on their own don’t form a whole or serve a common purpose? Make certain that videos work together on a functional level, and that each video is a building block that contributes to communicating an organization’s vision and achieving its mission.

Think of Nike and their mission to increase human potential or Ben & Jerry’s to make the world’s tastiest ice cream while making the world a more sustainable and better place. Besides the fact that their videos are recognizable due to a signature style, their vision and mission also come through clearly every time. That’s what you want for all of your organization’s videos and other marketing efforts.

4. One video, no strategy

“We‘re only planning on making one video” is a common refrain when video marketing strategy comes up, but even then you need to make strategic decisions. Thinking strategically helps to plan for the future since there is a good chance that more videos will be added in the years to come. It’s key to have a video marketing strategy in place before you get to that point.

By working with a strategy from the beginning, it immediately becomes clear how videos connect to the rest of your content. It also makes it easier to see where new videos will add the most value.

Get started with your video marketing strategy

Want to dive a little deeper into the different facets of your video marketing strategy? Contact us at hello@bluebillywig.com and we’ll be more than happy to brainstorm with you.