What Challenges do Businesses Face when Doing Video Marketing?

As more and more businesses are realizing the importance of using video to increase brand awareness, drive consumer engagement, and generate sales many are also finding that video is much more challenging than any other form of content is to create. In fact, while many businesses have found great success with video marketing, equally as many have faced great challenges in establishing strong video marketing campaigns. But, what challenges do businesses face when doing video marketing?

Most brands that fail at video marketing do so for one of the same top reasons. They either lack strategy, budget, quality of content, or metrics. Many fail to implement a campaign strategy which incorporates all of these important elements for success. 

Video Marketing Challenge #1: Where to Start

While many brands fail at video for a number of reasons, many more fail because they never even get started with video marketing in the first place! According to a recent study, one of the greatest challenges faced by businesses in video marketing is not getting started or not knowing where to get started and how to start in the first place. Nearly 20% of businesses found getting started with video challenging because they:

• Didn’t know how to go about creating video.
• Didn’t know what types of video to create.
• Felt overwhelmed with the entire video production and video marketing process.
• Didn’t have the equipment, skills, technique or resources to create video.

As you can see many of these same concerns have to do with the reasons why businesses fail at video marketing, too.

Video Marketing Challenge #2:  Lack of Strategy & Objective

Defining the objectives of your video marketing campaigns is absolutely crucial to the success of the entire process. So, what challenges do businesses face when doing video marketing? Specifically, business owners often either dive right into video marketing without a plan or strategy in mind or they forgo getting started because they don’t know what they should use video for or how. 

Planning and executing your video strategy is vital to the success of your campaigns. It’s important to consider:

• Why you’re creating videos? (ie. To improve customer experience, gain trust, increase brand awareness, generate more leads, increase traffic, etc.)
• Who you are creating videos for? What is the target audience and how do you intend to reach them?
• What problem are you trying to solve with your videos?
• How do you want your audience to feel after they see your marketing videos?

Failure to strategize and plan your objectives ahead of time can crush your marketing campaigns. Video isn’t cheap, it takes substantial resources in regards to time, talent, and technology – you shouldn’t be “winging it” Every aspect of your marketing should be carefully planned prior to execution.

Video Marketing Challenge #3:  Lack of Budget

The average cost of professional video is between $1,000 and $10,000 per finished minute. Most marketing videos are between 1 and 2 minutes long, resulting in marketing videos costs that can range from tens of thousands or more for a single video. Lack of budget is a real challenge for business owners, especially for those who are unprepared for the true costs involved in professional video production. 

Even businesses that decide to produce video in-house face significant challenges in regards to budget. The cost of purchasing camera equipment, lighting, audio and other needs associated with producing professional business quality videos is simply out of range for many businesses, and as with any industry, you get what you pay for.

Video Marketing Challenge #4:   Lack of Quality Content

As we seek to understand what challenges businesses face when doing video marketing, quality is a key factor. With more than 86% of businesses using video in their marketing campaigns, it’s more challenging than ever before to come up with unique content that is going to stand out against the competition to reach your audience and engage them. 

With more and more consumers streaming content similar to what would be seen on YouTube or other channels, brands are facing a point where they must pivot in order to deliver consumers the type of content they are looking for.  This means the creation of more than just standard commercial style videos. Brands are now finding that they need things like instructional videos, product demos, testimonials, behind-the-scenes videos, and a variety of other forms of content in order to effectively keep their audiences engaged. This can be particularly challenging for brands as can maintaining consistency.

Video Marketing Challenge #5:  Lack of Tracking Metrics

Measuring the success of a video marketing campaign requires goals and metrics in place to determine success. So, what challenges do businesses face when doing video marketing in regards to metrics? Many brands start with a lack of strategy, which means they have no roadmap to measure their success by. Without clearly defined metrics to measure the success of video marketing campaigns, brands are flying aimlessly without any true direction.

The metrics that should be used to track video marketing campaigns will vary, largely based on the goals or specific details of the campaign. For businesses, it’s important not only to know who is watching your videos, but when, where, and for how long? It’s also important to track product sales or other lead conversions that occur as a result of your video marketing.  If you don’t know whether your videos are generating interest among your audience and you’re not sure whether audience members are following through with your call to action, you have little way to know if you should be creating more videos of that type or if your video marketing is effective even at all. 

So, what challenges do businesses face when doing video marketing? It all really depends on the business owner and what steps they are taking over the course of their video marketing campaigns and initiatives, but many face the same challenges  that other businesses owners face particularly in regards to metrics, planning, quality content and budget.