Don’t Make These Mistakes With Your Website Video
Posted by Catie Foertsch on Wed, Feb 10, 2010 @ 07:55 AM
There's a local tech company that paid their video production company (one of our competitors) to create four videos explaining features of their product. The videos are beautiful and the company was very pleased with them. So the company sent the videos to their website people with these instructions: "Put them on our website."
What happened?
Mistake #1: The website people made the videos difficult to find. They put a small text link on the home page: "Click here to view videos." Then they connected that link to a page that starts with text about the product, with no mention of videos. The text explains the same features the videos discuss, and there's enough text so that the videos are now ‘below the fold' - a visitor has to scroll down to find them.
Mistake #2: The videos are framed incorrectly. The website people don't know 
anything about hosting video, so they subscribed to an online hosting company, uploaded the video, and then took the embed code to place video on the page. But they screwed up when they uploaded the video. They must have known it, because they used different upload settings for each video. The result is that one is squashed into a 4x3 frame, though the videos are all 16x9.
Another video has the correct aspect ratio but achieves it by placing big black bars on the top and bottom of the frame, making the video very small. The other two are even messier - stretched, squashed, and black bars. And though the videos have been up for almost a year, no one in the company seems to understand that they don't look right. Or maybe they haven't looked at them, but just assumed that "we have video on our website."
Mistake #3: The videos are all very small. They look like postage stamps. They're too small to see much of the product detail, or to read the text that's in the video. And the viewer certainly isn't noticing the gorgeous video the company paid a lot of money for.
Mistake #4: The videos are placed all on one page. They're stacked, one underneath the other. As though videos are set pieces that can't stand on their own, when in fact they're most effective on their own, one to a page. With four stacked on a page, the viewer sees a swarm of videos, randomly picks one, and ignores the rest.
Mistake #5: The videos were placed and forgotten. The company paid good money to make good videos, and assumed that was enough - that somehow those videos would do the job just because they're good videos.
What should have happened?
The process went wrong all the way back at the beginning, when the company had an idea: Let's make some videos. WRONG starting point.
The right place to start is with a question: How can we use video to market our product?
The answer to that question is:
First, make a video or a series of videos that communicate the right message to the right audience. This means that before you start production, you have to understand the audience(s) you're trying to reach, and the individual messages you want your audience(s) to receive.
Second, understand how you will connect the right audience with the right video(s). How will you make them easy to find? How will you make them easy and fun to watch? How will you focus the viewer's attention on the one single message in each video?
Third, how will you understand whether the videos are doing what you want them to do? What will you measure? Videos are communication tools. To know if they're doing the job you created them to do, you have to check up on them. You have to understand what you're asking them to do, and how you'll know if they're doing their job.
The mistake too many companies make is in assuming that all they have to do is make video that shows off their product and place that video on their website somewhere. And then Bingo! Magic will happen.
In reality, video absolutely can work magic for your company. And it will, IF you understand the rules of video marketing.