By Richard Tiland, President, New Evolution Video & dk3studios

The digital landscape is brutal and highly competitive. It enabled everyone to get online and have global reach exponentially faster than was thought possible. This means that to gain that target market or engage your audience, it requires a constant reminder you exist. 

This translates into always having that consistent stream of content, pun intended, delivered to the masses, to grow your digital village. 

Your community quietly demands fresh and high-quality content and is always looking at what is available. The community can also shift their interests and brands quickly due to the overwhelming amount of possibilities available to them. This means that quality in everything that you do to promote your brand should be at the top of your mind.

Poor Quality Video equals poor quality product

If your video production team creates video content that you aren’t proud of, it will be a reflection of what your brand is all about. After all, video content is just the latest popular medium for digital marketing. 

In fact, online video is estimated to take over 82.5% of all web traffic this year, meaning it will be your main form of communication to your audience. That makes it even more important to focus on a proper budget and ensure that every single content video, advertisement, or explainer video goes out with the best quality possible, and is ready to shine. 

You want to be perceived with authenticity and quality in your brand. Everything, from your website to social media look and feel needs to be in sync and make sense. You want to be able to deliver a consistent message about your brand, and your message going through video content. 

If this isn’t handled properly, it can go viral in a bad way, and end up hurting your brand to the point that it starts to cost actual lost revenue.

What is a bad video? 

As just mentioned, this negative virality will end up painting a bad picture of your overall image. It will have people simply disregard your brand, and subconsciously they will look elsewhere for the product. A poorly done video is not simply just bad quality or a lack of editing, it is several factors not syncing up properly. 

First, you need to ensure that your message goes to your target audience. That message is crafted with what your brand is. Are you selling survival gear while doing a video inside of a mansion? 

Or are you looking to offer organic healthy foods, but end up deep-frying them in lard? These may sound like obvious mistakes, but that’s the point. The message needs to connect to whatever your brand is about, every single time. 

Then it comes back to the quality of the video. You need to bleed authenticity to be able to connect with your audience. That word is used a lot because it seems to be the best representation of what type of content people are looking for. In fact, 86% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support. 

That’s why it keeps coming up because the digital landscape allows for everyone’s voice to be heard when the previous generation had only controlled media and marketing as their voice. That media and marketing were completely focused on the selling of products and services. Whereas now people look for informational content with that authenticity, instead of the hard sell. 

With the quality itself, it’s always best to consider building an in-house production company or hiring professional video content creators. This way you won’t have to worry about your videos coming across as sloppy or improperly edited. 

You also want to have some quality production value equipment on hand, since you’re going to be producing a lot of content and with the investment into the right equipment, you’ll be able to maintain that consistency. Without this, you may end up with grainy videos, poor lighting, inconsistent editing, and even poor sound quality. That will quickly turn off your audience away from your brand. 

A study was done on how long it takes for someone to make an impression from looking at a website. It came down to 50ms was how long it took for someone to form a positive or negative opinion about a website, which equals 0.05 seconds. 

Now imagine how much video content there is, and how much time you have before someone makes an opinion on your specific video, and subsequently on the image of your brand.

Make sure your distribution strategy has a big reach

Remember, even if you make a decent video, you can lose it all with poor distribution of it. Get your content out to as many channels as possible. You are constantly competing with all these other businesses that understand these strategies and are using similar tactics to yours. 

A poorly done distribution can lead to a failure of epic proportions as your content is lost in the digital world without gaining any traction, and simply adding to the overall marketing costs. 

You also want to make sure that you have the right content going out to the right channels, so that your brand, and thus your products and services, are hitting a wide potential target audience, and this doesn’t become a wasted opportunity. Video content marketing can start to add up quickly, especially depending on the type and amount of content you are producing. 

Be careful of how you make your advertisement videos

Poorly done videos come in all shapes and sizes, but you need to be especially careful with your advertisements. People are used to advertisements, and they appreciate a quality video that interrupts their regular viewing if it’s straight and to the point. 

Quality video production goes a long way here as well. If you end up producing a poorly made video as an advertisement, it may actually affect your potential target audience even more. The ad is expected, but to have to go through such a bad one can have your brand ruined even further, as they may go from passively ignoring your brand to going on social media channels to express their discontent with your video. 

This may happen with any of your content, but remember, your advertisement content will go to people that may be interested in what your brand has to offer, versus other content such as an informational video on the state of a particular market or industry. 

Advertisements can sometimes come across as a bit intrusive and you don’t want to give any additional reason for someone to pour negative opinions about your brand. 

Don’t make bad videos

In the end, it’s all about making sure that you work with a quality production company and create video content you yourself want to see when you spend all that time looking at other video content. That’s also a good gauge to ensure that any video content that goes out to represent your business is something you want to see yourself. 

You may even want to do some sampling with those that are close to you to get an opinion if the video quality is good enough for the larger masses.