With the new year underway, it’s also time to upgrade your video content production mindset. For many video marketers and aspiring content producers, it’s easy to get stuck in old school thinking.
Whether you’re a beginner video producer or running a video production company of your own, it’s always good to reevaluate what you’re doing and to seek improvement with each video you put out.
But how do you know in the first place you’re stuck in an old-school video production mindset instead of moving forward? If you believe in these five things, then you should take deliberate actions to get out of them.
1. It takes just ONE video to go viral and do it all for your business.
On the one hand, yes, it might just take one video to put your business or service in front of everybody else’s attention. However, getting to that one “viral” video could mean putting out countless videos and improving your work over and over again. For most first-time video content producers, they believe video is the end all and be all. But like anything, this isn’t the case. Even if you are lucky enough to get your business video viral, you still need to transform those views into leads and potential customers.
2. You create one video and expect to never update it again for years and years.
This is also another common practice for many video content producers and businesses. Thinking you only need one video, or worse, thinking you only need one video to last you for years is a bad idea. This is true especially if that one video isn’t even working for you or generating views at all. This old school thinking could bring your business to a halt or stall its growth, especially in this video marketing world. It’s good practice for businesses to release a steady number of videos, maybe put up a YouTube Channel or use Instagram Stories for consistent video updates. Remember, people consume media differently. Chances are, even if you might think your business won’t benefit from video, there might be potential customers who don’t know you exist yet because you don’t put out content they would consume.
3. You believe that as long as you upload the video somewhere, it will do all the work and generate an audience for you.
Viewer count may be exciting, but it doesn’t do anything if after watching the video your viewers don’t act – that is engage, buy your product, subscribe to your mailing list or whatever call to action you’re asking them to do. In fact, video production companies or content producers even forget to include a call to action in their videos.
What you want is engagement, viewership is secondary. You have to find a way for your audience to engage with you, otherwise, your video is just another piece floating on the Internet.
4. You don’t cater to mobile phone users when creating or shooting your video.
Old school practices of shooting video and releasing it in a traditional screen format similar to a commercial or film is good but you’re leaving out a lot when you don’t cater to the fact that 90% of people consume videos on their smart phones. This means small screens. And traditional format videos don’t always look good on a tiny screen. To combat this, next time, make sure your video is formatted to be viewed in both the big screen and small screen.
If you don’t have the time or resources to do both, go for the format that accommodates smartphone viewing best.
5. You don’t add video descriptions because “nobody reads them.”
This is one belief you need to get rid of fast! While you don’t need to write a novella in your descriptions, adding annotations and video descriptions provide context to your video. It’s also where engagement happens. Adding a link to your description or providing a call to action gives viewers a chance to immediately act on what they just saw. It can offer great click-through rates which ultimately leads to conversion.
Regardless of whether you’re a video production company service in New York or a simple, bedroom video content maker or business, dropping these mindsets about video is a good step to helping improve your content creation practices.
