How to Waste $50,000 On A Video: Lesson 1

A couple years ago, a new client in the healthcare industry approached us with a serious problem…

She’d just spent $50,000 on a video that wasn’t working!  

Yikes, can you even imagine?

The worst part: she thought she’d done everything right.

She hired an experienced television producer, who shot a beautiful video featuring a high-end voice actor. The script seemed both emotional and creative. It even had a strong brand message.

But her viewers didn’t care about any of that...only 15% stuck around long enough to see the call-to-action. Not great when you’re creating a video ad...

When she approached us, her goal was to save the video (and her job). Fortunately, it didn’t take us long to find out why it wasn’t performing…

The video was all wrong for online viewers:

• Took too long to get to the point (or say anything, really)
• The voiceover was slow and melodramatic, with several long pauses
• Shots were left on-screen for too long
• The video dragged on after delivering the main point (note the huge drop-off starting at the 2min mark)

So while this video was beautifully shot, it didn’t work for online viewers. And there’s an important lesson in that...

But first, let’s wrap up this story — after re-editing the final video, we were able to dramatically improve the ad’s performance, with a 267% increase in call-to-action views.

Not only did we resuscitate the video, but our client was able to present the entire campaign as a success to her board!

That’s not the real story here, though...the point I hope you take away from this is that there’s a lot more to video marketing than production quality.

Yes, people do care about quality, but that’s not the only thing that matters. Effective video marketing comes down to relevance, sequence, value, and context.

In our client’s case, the video producer she worked with had a film background and approached the video as if his audience was captive...not surrounded by shiny objects on Facebook and YouTube. His mistake was not understanding the role of context.

But in all fairness, it’s asking an awful lot for a quality video producer to also be a marketing expert.

Which is what makes my company unique...

Our in-house team includes copywriters, marketing strategists, advertisers, sales optimization experts, AND an award-winning production crew.

This ensures your videos perform even better than they look (and that’s saying something!)

So if you’re considering video as a tool for improving your sales or marketing results, just let me know and I’ll hook you up with a free video strategy based on your business problems and goals.