Are you making these mistakes with your marketing video?

By April 28, 2016General

You want a viral marketing campaign. You’ve heard that YouTube is amazing for reaching out to new customers. So you set about creating your own marketing video.

You’ve put loads of blood, sweat and tears into what you’re sure is going to be one of the best viral video campaigns of all time. You’ve uploaded it to YouTube, posted it on Facebook, and tweeted it to your friends.

And then you wait. And wait some more.

Then you start wondering where you went wrong.

Why isn’t anybody watching it?

It could well be for one of the following reasons:

No-one can find it

People can’t watch your video if they can’t find it.

If you haven’t spent enough time on your metadata – in other words, if you haven’t written the best possible titles, tags and descriptions for your video, nobody will be able to find it when they’re searching for videos on Google or YouTube.

To make your videos more searchable, make sure the description is rich in keywords; this will increase your chances of it popping up in the “related videos” section of YouTube.

Your campaign is unoriginal

There are literally hundreds of thousands of online video marketing campaigns for consumers to watch at any given time, so yours has to stand out. In the world of viral video, only the strong survive and to be strong you’ve got to be original.

You want to blow people’s minds and most importantly, provoke emotion – whether it’s making them howl with laughter, cry in despair, or amazing them with something that hasn’t been done before.

You haven’t shared your video on social media

Uploading your video to YouTube and leaving it there isn’t going to do you any favours. You might get the occasional view, but ultimately, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

Posting to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc. is the fastest way to draw attention to your video.

Once a video is shared, it gains attention and can be shared again, attracting even more attention, bringing in more views and possibly more website traffic too.

Your video is too long

You might get a lot of viewers who start watching your video, but they’ll lose interest and leave if your video is too long. If your intention is to catch their attention and lure them to your website, your video needs to be about a minute long.

If they are intrigued by the shorter video, you can start to drip feed them more in-depth information about your product or whatever you want to describe, because they’ll have a longer attention-span.

Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.