Video is a great tool in marketing your business and building a trusted brand in the hearts and minds of your target audience. Today when videos are so easy to plan, produce and distribute it almost feels that you can never going wrong with simply just having a video, right?

The fact is, because videos are no longer nearly as hard or costly as they used to be five to ten years ago, everyone is going into video.

This gives us a challenge. We are now up against a lot of competition when coming up with video content. So now that means that we could actually be making videos that hurt our business. It makes us lose money, time and energy while giving no results or negative results even.

How does that happen? There are various ways, but here are just some of the most common ways that videos might hurt your brand and why we should be avoiding these mistakes.

Making too many hard sells

Business videos are made to sell, correct, but that doesn’t mean that all we should do on video is sell, sell and sell. Many business make this mistake and just constantly hard sells from beginning to end. This isn’t a good strategy to making videos that convert.

Not adding value

So what should we be doing instead of hard selling to viewers on video every five seconds? Here is a good idea- give value first. The old adage goes, “It’s better to give than to receive.” Why? Because no one likes giving to someone who never gives. So before you ask for value- whether that’s money, an email subscription or anything you’d like viewers to do- give them value first.

Not leaving a call to action

While it’s not good practice to hard sell non-stop, it’s also equally as bad to not sell at all. Every video must have at least two to three calls to action. The point of putting out media is to compel people to action and we won’t be able to do that if we don’t provide any direction whatsoever.

Not talking about your viewers

There is power in the word “you.” Viewers love knowing and hearing that you put value to their opinions, needs, wants, desires. We do this by relating with them more and speaking to their issues and how we can be a solution to them. Another great way of doing this is asking for their views and perspectives by getting them to leave comments and suggestions.

Focusing too much on quality at the expense of content

Quality is great, but it shouldn’t be an excuse to under deliver on providing complete, compelling and yet concise content. While we want to have killer videos, what matters to people more is what they’re going to learn from it and how the content will make them feel.

Failing to be entertaining

When it comes to making videos you can never go wrong when you have an intention and plan to truly entertain. Boring is never a good route. That isn’t too hard to understand but yet so many businesses make videos that hurt their brand by being boring. Don’t be boring. Make your videos fun by having fun and being fun!

Not starting strong

Studies show that the first five to ten seconds of your video will determine whether people will watch the whole thing or click away only to never return to your site, channel or business premises ever again. You have one shot to grab people’s attention and majority of that has to do with how you start.

Making your videos too long

I talked about video length last week and I’d like to emphasise more on this point. There’s no perfect length for videos, but shorter is always better. Less is more as they say and the lesser we say the more clarity there is to what we really want people to hear from us.