Unless you live under a rock, you already know that video marketing is a must if you want to grow and increase ROI.  But it’s one thing to know video marketing is important; it’s another to actually execute a flawless campaign. While video marketing is one of the most effective content strategies around that meets customers at every journey of the buying stage, creating content is almost always a challenge.

Here’s a list of common mistakes marketers make with video content. See if you’ve been lured into any of these video marketing traps.

Not using metrics to discover customer preferences

Marketing has become an art form. In essence, smart marketers know how to deliver the right content to the right people at just the right time. But if you’re not analyzing metrics for your campaigns, it’s impossible to fulfill video marketing’s promise. How else will you know your customer’s needs or interests?

Consider that value of tracking metrics beyond a simple download. So you know that a customer downloaded your free ebook, but what else can you tell about this person? Did he open the ebook? How much of the ebook did he read? Did the download lead to another action? It’s helpful to know basic metrics about the video, such as the total number of views, drop-off rates, the type of device used, location of the viewer, and the total video time viewed.

With this information in hand, you can adjust your marketing tactics. For example, if users are dropping off of viewing the video after 60 seconds, and the video is 2 minutes long, you’ll know  to shorten the video to appeal to a wider audience or break it up into several smaller bite-sized chunks.

Not integrating the content with all of your assets

As a standalone deliverable, your video may not get great results. However, deploy the video as part of a larger campaign, and it will get a higher ROI. Work with your team to integrate videos into your marketing automation system, which will allow you to easily deploy the material, personalize leads, and track individual viewers. In this way, your video will aptly serve your overall marketing strategy, and further drive return on investment.

Not taking viewer action into account

Even if you’re video is killing it, you can’t count on it to take every potential buyer through the entire customer journey. Know where your videos fit into the larger buying path, so you know exactly what you’ll use to entice new prospects, keep them interested, and get them to buy and then return for future sales.

This kind of prescriptive journey helps your organization deliver the content customers want and will help them make a purchasing decision. Be sure to create a specific call to action within the video. That way, if a viewer has seen a video (a product demo, for example), she can move onto the next video (a free trial offer) by clicking through. This kind of system not only helps the customer, but it assists your organization in knowing what kinds of content is driving action.

Are you making any of these mistakes? If you’re not tracking and measuring metrics, creating videos as part of a larger marketing plan, and generating a prescriptive journey, then your video marketing efforts could be sabotaging your organization’s ROI and growth. Missteps like these can put your business at a serious disadvantage. Don’t be dismayed, however, as attention to best video marketing practices will put your business back in the zone and help it soar. Just be sure to track the right metrics to inform future video content, create a logical series of progression for content and strategically design videos to fit in with your overall marketing campaign.