You may surprise if you know 9 reasons your videos fail

You are confident before your video is released, but the effect isn’t as good as you expected.

You get frustrated when you see the view flattened, the bounce rate goes up. You don’t understand where the problem is. Sometimes, you even want to give up.

You are incompetent, and you can absolutely create engaging videos. However, you might need to review a bit of your implementation.

Perhaps, you are making mistakes that you haven’t seen, or can’t yet imagine its impact.

During the 2018 Super Bowl, Dodge ran a newsletter with images of their Ram camera, featuring snippets of the famous “Drum Major Instinct” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dogge’s decision to utilize Dr. King’s speech to sell Ram trucks was the source of online outrage. Since then, it has become famous as one of the most misled ads in history.

Such was the aim of Dodge to get more people buying their Ram trucks.

The failure of Dodge is serving as a tale of caution. If you want your viewers to do the desired thing, such as buying or subscribing to a newsletter, your video must be thoughtful.

A successful video speaking to the audience’s interests and values is visible and encourages a clear next step.

That’s why this blog post is here to help you to improve conversion rates for your landing pages, generate webinars subscribers or boost sales for your product videos.

Here are 9 common reasons why your videos don’t work, and how you can solve each problem to improve conversions.

1. Your Thumbnails is so dumb

When you upload a video on the sidebar or search results, the first thing that potential viewers see is your video thumbnail.

If your thumbnail can’t reveal what your video is about, it can’t capture the audience’s attention, and viewers will immediately skip your video.

Dumb thumbnail might ruin your video

No matter how incredible your video is or how well you named it. It’s not attractive to anyone if your thumbnail doesn’t match people’s interests.

And there are some other common mistakes. They’re low-quality and low-resolution images. Or a boring, bold picture taken from the actual video as a screenshot.

An image of good contrasts is nearly similar to flat designs because the flat thumbnails are not noticed.

So, no one will give it a second thought if your video thumbnails dumb. Of course, you won’t have any views.

Solution: 

Create relevant thumbnails that are eye-catching and interesting.

You should use custom-made thumbnails (not a screenshot from the video), and don’t fear over-saturate and turn the contrast up.

It may look over-processed slightly in a bigger format, but this doesn’t matter when people watch your video on a smartphone, PC or tablet as a regular thumbnail.

2. Your video is not consistent

By not showing consistency in your videos, your viewers and subscribers have no idea what your video is about or what your channel means.

So, if you confuse them, why would they subscribe?

This is also a drawback for your YouTube videos. Because the algorithm values consistency, so your channel and view count will grow if you deliver consistent value.

And consistency is not just about uploading a number of videos weekly or monthly. It also means making videos with a similar topic, visually recognizable and having a similar message like beauty, fashion, food, DIY tutorials, etc.

Consistency is a key to converting viewers to subscribers, and you can realize it when you see a video goes viral on social media. The creator posts a video, shares it with others, and doesn’t have much same content on his channel.

Solution:

Be clear about what and when you post. Create and try to stick to an upload schedule.

Well-focus on your niche and find out what kind of videos you want to create, whether they are tutorials, reviews, entertainment, or information videos, etc.

Remember, thanks to being consistent, you give the YouTube algorithm more information about your channel topic. It helps the algorithm suggest your channel to the right audience you want to target.

If you can remain consistent in your videos, each will increase your chances of getting picked up from the algorithm.

3. You don’t care about any other platform but Youtube

Do you promote your videos on other platforms or YouTube only?

With the variety of powerful social networks, it’s a huge waste if you don’t benefit from the free resources.

It may be hard to get your YouTube popular at first, but if you already have a small following on Instagram or friends on Facebook, you should use them to collect more views on your videos.

You should use other social platforms to collect more views on your videos

Even if you don’t have a big following on social networks or communities, your ideal audience may laugh and pin away your video on Pinterest.

Or they lurk somewhere in the subreddit and are willing to talk about your exciting video if you make it entertaining and spread it widely.

Don’t only think about Youtube and underestimate Facebook, Reddit, social networks, blogs, etc. YouTube is perhaps the platform for creating main content; you can and should be in the wild.

Go find your audience if they don’t come to you.

Solution:

Be active and participate in other platforms. Be mindful and professional to promote your videos on other sites like subreddits, Quora, Facebook, etc.

However, don’t over-promote anything. You might want everyone to see your video, but it doesn’t mean you paste it everywhere.

Just do it enough, focus on providing value and interacting with your communities to achieve long-term success.

Furthermore, try to stick to at least 3 platforms in the first place so that it doesn’t spread too thinly.

Moreover, don’t feel shy to join Q&A forum like Quora, as it may be more difficult for large platforms to get the ball rolling.

4. Your videos are weakly actionable

Have you ever seen a compelling documentary, and then you went to find the rest of that story online?

You end up on Google for hours, screening and puzzling about the material, just like a spy. And after you finished watching the whole documentary, you got up and went down a deep search hole.

Great videos move people. It stimulates them. That means you must create a clear and deliberate call to action.

Finally, how will your videos help drive your business if viewers don’t know what to do after watching them?

In short, you need to ensure that your video is actionable enough if generating leads is a part of your content marketing strategy.

Solution:

A clear and concise CTA is the easiest way to make your video more actionable. In most cases, the CTA appears at the end of a video after showing viewers all highlighted values.

At the beginning or the middle of a video, you can also add a CTA. However, you must ensure that visitors understand why they should click the CTA before they receive it.

Your CTA should make sense to your visitors.

With businesses, the action that you want viewers to take should always match your marketing funnel stage.

At the video beginning, the CTA may ask for viewers’s emails to send them more helpful information. At the end of the video, the CTA may inspire or motivate viewers to purchase.

When it comes to CTAs, wording is critical. You should use clear, accessible, solid, and purposeful language.

5. Your videos don’t focus on audiences’ need

Your audience wants content that can benefit them, whether it’s entertainment or helpful information, or both.

We all should create videos for a specific purpose. See this example below for entertaining purposes:

When making videos, you should focus on audiences’ need

Obviously, this video means to make people surprised and laugh, and the creator here does that quite well.

Solution:

Reflecting on what viewers’ interest to create good customized videos.

If you’re doing business, remember that not every viewer is ready to buy right after watching your videos. But, they can first increase brand awareness and educate potential clients.

After your potential clients are well down the funnel, produce more videos that push them closer to shopping, for example, case studies, testimonials, or product’s features videos.

These are all helpful videos so customers can quickly understand how your product can assist them.

6. It’s difficult to find your videos

It’s worse when you’re excited about your great video with a lot of effort, but then it’s watched by very few people.

You feel disappointed, but your video has low engagement means it has low brand awareness and very few conversions.

Is there anything that contributes to the low numbers of watches?

Maybe, your video is difficult to find. It’s not optimized for search engines; that’s why viewers can’t see it on Google searches.

Or, you might share videos on channels with no traction and miss valuable placements.

Discovery should be an essential part of your video marketing strategy, and investing in SEO is worth your effort.

Solution:

Video content needs search engine optimization to be ranked on Google like written content.

Optimizing video content helps viewers to find your videos and increases conversion chances.

If your video appears on random Google searches for terms you don’t need to rank for; you should modify your video SEO to match the right target.

Don’t forget to include the right keywords in titles and meta descriptions to let Google pick up on them.

7. Your videos don’t meet users’ expectations

Clickbait is standard practice on a platform like YouTube, whereas credibility is not always a viewers’ priority.

But if you use clickbait in B2B videos that face clients, your customers will completely discard your videos and make your business seem noncredible.

When watching your video, viewers always expect what exactly your video title says.

For example: “3 tips to make a good conversion video”. If they can’t find any helpful tip in your video, that means your video disappoints them, lets them down and they might not want to keep watching your videos anymore.

The same lack of trust can extend to your video SEO as well. If you can’t correctly represent your video content in your video’s meta descriptions and tags, Google will reverse it by criminalizing your video because it doesn’t meet user expectations.

Solution:

First, you should ask yourself a question when you create titles and video descriptions: “Do they exactly expose what viewers expect from my video?”

If your answer is yes, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re not sure, you might need to apply some adjustments.

8. Audio quality is terrible

Audio is often the most overlooked element when it comes to making quality YouTube videos. It can be challenging to understand the significance of audio when you start, but think about how many times you’ve seen a video that has horrible sound.

Did you subscribe or bounce immediately because it was annoying?

Audio quality is as important as video quality. If the audio is clear, crisp, and has good quality, people may overlook a shot on a poor camera.

But, it can’t be said the same thing about a great video with audio from an ’80s cassette player.

Solution:

Before you even think about your video quality, you should first focus on improving the sound.

The investment in a good microphone will likely be better value than a camera upgrade.

The Rode NT-USB is a high-quality USB microphone that includes a pop filter and a table stand.

A lavalier mic can also be a great value for money with a much more affordable price point.

After having a good mic, you next must remove unnecessary noise during the filming process.

Try not to film in the wind when you vlog (or use a dead cat/windscreen) and speak clearly. Try turning your airplane mode on your mobile if you find any interference to the audio.

And last but not least, when you talk/narrate/etc, don’t put loud music in your video. It might seem an obvious tip, but there are a lot of videos that are unclearly listened to by loud background music.

9. You’re not patient

You’ve been on your YouTube channel for over two weeks and have still not received a million views. You might just give up and move on, right?

It’s such a ridiculous decision of people who say that they’ve just started their YouTube channel seriously, but they can’t see any results after 1 or 2 weeks.

In such a short time, what results are you expecting to see? If things could happen so quickly and smoothly, everybody should give up on their job and start making videos.

This is also one of the biggest differences between newbies to YouTube and the successful ones who are determined and patient.

So, be patient if you want to see long-term success.

Even video creators who seem to be famous needed time to grow.

The growth level on YouTube is exponential. This means you may get only a few subs every day at first, but as your channel grows, it turns into dozens, hundreds, and then thousands, and who knows how much it can peak.

Solution:

Allow at least 4 weeks to estimate or evaluate your videos and channels’ successes, failures.

Give yourself and your videos enough time to take advantage of your work and see improvements for longer than just 24 hours.

It can seem like things are beginning to stand still if you look at minor changes every 24 hours, while the analysis and results can present a completely different picture every couple of weeks.

Remaining viewers to stay on your video channel is not easy, and every channel works in different ways because it aims at different audiences.

When experimenting with various digital marketing strategies, consider investing in a platform that allows you to analyze your videos and identify why others are doing better. Motionbear is one of the ideal choices.

No matter what topic you’re digging, you need to catch audience attention and grow conversions, and this guide can help you achieve both 2 targets. What are you waiting for but reviewing these 9 reasons to make a significant change to your video channel.

And, to level you videos’ engagement, start translating and subtitling your videos with the top-notch subtitling tool like Motionbear. 

Read more:

• How to create great content for the disabled?
• How to transcribe meeting minutes with Motionbear
• How to translate your videos to English and other languages?