It’s the end of the year, and now is the time that marketers take a look at our work from the last 12 months, and figure out what we did right, and where we went wrong. We congratulate ourselves on our marketing successes- blog posts which increased our web traffic, email campaigns which increased our revenue, products which received great coverage- on and offline.
But the end of the year is also about analyzing our failures. Nothing hurts more than a marketing campaign that flops, but understanding what went wrong means that we are less likely to make the same mistakes in 2014. Here are 5 questions you should be asking yourself when your video marketing campaign fails:
1. Did I pick an interesting and relevant topic?
If your video bombed, and just didn’t get the amount of views you were expecting, the first question you need to ask yourself is if your video content was interesting. Was your team interested in it? Were your family and friends interested in it? It might be a good idea to check out other popular videos in the same field that have succeeded, but beware of copying directly from previous video campaigns, both your own and from competitors. Highly successful video campaigns are original, nobody likes seeing the same thing over and over again. However interesting your video is, if it isn’t relevant for your audience then it was be a candidate for failure. Yes, everybody loved cats and babies doing funny things on videos, but if you are a serious tech company your “viral video” might not make the rounds as quickly as you expected it to. Knowing your audience, including their taste, increases your chances of a successful video marketing campaign.
2. Did I use the right meta-tags for my video?
You’ve created a great video. The content is interesting, and relevant for your audience, but you’ve not tagged it correctly, and not as many people saw it as you’d hoped. Learn your lesson for 2014, and make sure all video content is correctly optimized for SEO. It’s also important to keep up to date with SEO best practice, so your marketing efforts aren’t penalized for spammy SEO practices.
3. Did I time the launch correctly?
Launching a company flash-mob dance 5 minutes after the first one came out is cool. Launching a company flash-mob dance in 2013 is not. You also need to get the timing right with seasonal video promotions, eg- timing your New Year’s promotion too late and everyone will have used up their marketing budget on something else. 
Think about launching your B2B video marketing campaign during a work day, and during work hours in your main market.
4. Did I promote my video content through the right channels?
If your video marketing campaign flopped it could be simply a case of not promoting it across the right channels. Once you’ve figured out who your audience is, make sure you are showcasing your video content where your audience are. There’s a crazy choice of social channels, so picking the right ones for your content could be the difference between viral video and video death. You also need to understand which channels are relevant to your content. Your audience may use Pinterest, but may not be interested in sharing a sales video there.
5. Were your expectations realistic?
When planning a video marketing campaign it’s important to map out your expectations at the beginning. Define what success will look like for your campaign, but keep it realistic. Most videos are unlikely to go “viral”, especially in the B2B world, so define a number of views or leads that a good business video can achieve with the marketing tools available to you. Don’t let a successful marketing campaign be defined as a failure because you didn’t set out your targets correctly when you started.
Which questions do you ask yourself after a failed video campaign? We’d love to hear your thoughts.