5 Obstacles to Video Marketing Success (and How to Overcome Them)

In a recent Video Marketing Survey, the research and marketing professionals at Ascend2 uncovered the most challenging obstacles to video marketing success, based on responses from 280 US and international marketing, business, and sales professionals. Check them out below, and then read on to learn more about how to overcome each of the top five of these obstacles.

Lack of an effective strategy

The number one obstacle, with 48 percent of respondents indicating they felt it was a challenge, was the lack of an effective strategy.

When it comes to video marketing, you can’t just throw any old video up and expect it to help you grow your business, drive sales, increase brand awareness, or achieve whatever you’re trying to achieve. You need to put some thought into what your objectives are and build a strategy around meeting those objectives.

There are four primary things you should think about when building your video strategy:

• What are your objectives? This is incredibly important because, if you don’t know what you’re hoping to achieve, how will you measure your success?

• What type of videos will you create? This follows your objectives. Certain types of videos perform better for different goals. For instance, if you want to sell more products, creating product videos can give potential buyers a better glimpse into what you have to offer. If you want to promote brand awareness, creating fun videos or how-to clips that show off your expertise can be great for spreading the word about your company on YouTube and social media.

• Where will you post your videos? When it comes to distributing video content, there are a variety of platforms and locations. You may be posting videos on your website, to social media and YouTube, or even looping them in your storefront or at a tradeshow. Where you plan to post will make a difference in your strategy. For instance, for Facebook you’d want to plan video content that hooks viewers in the first few seconds to capture their attention as they scroll through the news feed. For more on this, check out our blog post on 3 Steps to Formatting Your Videos to Entice Views on Facebook.

• How will you measure your success? Are you interested in views? Click-throughs? Conversions? Determine this up front so that you’ll be able to measure whether or not your campaigns are successful.

Lack of compelling content

Because of the huge amount of video content online, viewers attention spans are shorter than ever. Therefore, it’s important to put compelling content out there. What makes content compelling? It could be content that creates an emotional impact, content that teaches the viewer something they didn’t already know but wanted to, or content that helps them with their purchase decision.

Before you start making a video, ask yourself whether or not they add anything to the customer experience. If the answer is yes, move forward.

Don’t think you have anything compelling to share? Start thinking outside of the box. You’re an expert in the industry you work in. What do you know that others might be curious about? Is there a question you get from a lot of customers that you could answer in a video? Is there something you could illustrate more clearly on your website with video than you currently are with photos or text?

Inadequate video budget

39 percent of respondents named inadequate video budget as an obstacle to video marketing. When people think about video, they think about pricy agencies and complicated editing tools. The truth is, though, that in today’s DIY economy, video production is less expensive and more attainable than ever. Using photos and videos that you shot on your phone, and simple editing tools like Animoto, you can easily and affordably create video content on your own.

Check out the following video from New York Yoga. It was shot on an iPhone and created using Animoto by someone with no professional editing experience. To find out more about this video, check out our blog post on how to get more foot traffic with storefront video.

Lack of production resources

Similarly, 38 percent of respondents named lack of production resources as an obstacle. Once again, a lot of people believe that in order to create great video content you need a fancy camera, a studio space, and a team of professionals. But using DIY tools, it’s completely possible to create great video for yourself.

Lack of performance metrics

Finally, 30 percent of respondents found a lack of performance metrics a challenge with video. How do you overcome this one? This goes back to our fourth point in building an effective strategy — deciding how you’ll measure your success. Before you get started, make sure to set goals and take note of important metrics tied to these goals. As you grow your video marketing efforts, pay attention to how these metrics change. Here are some things you might pay attention to:

• Increase in conversion after adding product videos (you may want to test how products without videos perform against products with videos)
• Facebook engagement on posts with video, as opposed to posts without
• Facebook likes, Twitter, followers, and YouTube subscribers
• Click-through rates on content with video

What do you see as the biggest obstacles to video marketing success? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

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