Why Businesses Fail on YouTube: Mistakes to Avoid

If you’re looking to expand your business, YouTube can be a highly effective platform. However, it’s possible that you’re making some critical errors without even realizing it. In this video, we’ll explore some of the most common mistakes that businesses make on YouTube and provide you with tips on how to avoid them.

Video Transcript

YouTube is one of the most powerful marketing platforms out there to grow your business. However, many businesses are making mistakes that hinder their ability to effectively utilize the platform.

To help you avoid these mistakes and get more traction with your content, I’m gonna share with you the biggest mistakes that I see businesses making on YouTube.

Number one, focusing too much on sales. Businesses often make the mistake of constantly pushing promotions, products, and services on their YouTube videos, which can turn viewers off and make them feel like they are just being sold to.

Instead, businesses should focus on creating valuable content that educates, entertains, and engages their audience. Now, that’s not to say that you can’t talk about products, but you want to do so in a way that provides value to your audience.

Now, I’m an avid fly fisherman, so let’s use that as an example.

There is a company called Fly Fish Food that creates YouTube videos on how to make specific fly patterns that fly fishermen can go and then just make it home. So what they end up doing is a list out all the materials that you need to make the pattern, which they then carry in their store.

It’s a really helpful way to engage the customers without being too salesy, also giving them a reason to go to their store and buy their products online. Now, I’m not saying that you should never mention or sell your products or services, it just shouldn’t be the predominant focus or take up so much of the video that it hurts viewer retention.

Now I wanna talk about optimizing your video content on YouTube.

Next, before I do, here’s my shameless plug. If you don’t know who I am, my name is Steven Records. I’m the founder of contentthunder.com, where we help businesses and full-time content creators make the most of their content by helping them with their content strategy, optimization, and website.

Now, let’s get back into it.

The second mistake that I see is when people are not producing optimized content, many businesses fail to optimize their videos for viewer retention and for search. Now, for viewer retention, it’s important to get straight to the point. Just cut out that 30-60 second brand intro that you had planned. Believe me, it hurts your viewer retention.

Just keep those intros super, super short. Make sure that you cut out the boring parts of your videos and don’t make your videos any longer than they have to be. Now, the click-through rate on your videos is also an important thing to consider here, but to keep this video concise, let’s talk about optimizing for search.

It’s important to know that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. So many of the same principles behind SEO for your website apply to the videos that you post on YouTube.

Google owns both. It’s the same company, okay? So your video title, the description, and your meta information such as tags and transcript, are all used as a way for YouTube’s algorithm to better understand your video and to rank it in search results and in the discovery feed.

Now, if you put all of this time and effort into creating a video, don’t stop at 90%.

Take the extra time to take it all the way to the end. By writing good titles, detailed in organized descriptions and uploading a transcript, it will greatly help your views and ensure that is being seen by a relevant audience.

Number three, a lack of consistency. More than half of businesses with a YouTube channel don’t regularly post new videos, but consistency is crucial to being successful on YouTube. You want to regularly show up in people’s feeds, and the way you do that is by regularly coming up with new content for them to enjoy.

It’s like building a relationship. If you just show up once or twice, nothing meaningful really ever happens from that interaction, but if you show up on a regular basis, a meaningful relationship is likely to blossom.

Now, to clarify what I mean by consistency, I’m not saying that you have to religiously post a video the same day every week. Doing that really isn’t all that important, but what is important is posting on a regular basis.

Again, it’s about sticking with it, not necessarily sticking to a schedule. Now, the reason that this is so important is because it’s very easy in a busy business to ghost your audience for three to six months, but it’s hard to succeed on YouTube if you do that.

Make things easy, get outside help if you need to, and really consider creating a content strategy for every quarter so you always know what you need to create next. Speaking of creating content, the next mistake people make is creating the wrong content. A video can only go as far as the idea behind it.

Now you can have superb production quality in editing, but if the idea itself isn’t interesting or helpful, it’s not gonna do well. Businesses are notorious for creating content that no one really cares about, and this often happens because businesses tend to focus more on achieving an internal goal or a request from their boss rather than serving their audience.

Many businesses could easily double, triple their average views simply by putting more thought into what videos they’re going to create and always asking the question, will my audience find this video interesting and useful?

To give you some insight into how I select content ideas, I like to start off with some research, and then I’ll list out a bunch of descriptive video titles in a spreadsheet. Uh, these are my content ideas, and then I will score them based on how well I think the video will do and how difficult I think it will be for me to make them.

And then I’ll use this as a ranking factor in order for me to then pick out the top 10% or so of those videos that I’ll actually run with to create content from.

Now, the next mistake that I see is not giving honest and transparent reviews.

Now, if your company does product reviews or comparisons of products that you carry in your store and you never have any critique about any of them, you lose credibility. Now, this is kind of like when you go to a restaurant and you ask the waiter what’s good here, and they say, everything is good here, and they will know that not everything on that menu is good, and so you instantly hesitate to believe them and they lose all credibility and trust with you.

The same is even more true when you talk about the products that you carry. I know you have relationships with those brands and you don’t want to tarnish it, and you also kind of wanna sell those products that you have in your store, but most products are not perfect, and by pointing out their deficiencies, your review carries a lot more weight behind it.

The last mistake that I see is forgetting about the entire journey. In the context of using YouTube to grow your business, getting views on your videos is just the starting point. You ultimately need to lead them to your website, capture their information, and then convert them into a customer.

All the while keeping fewer retention up, building trust, and not coming across as a product pusher. That’s your goal. Most businesses don’t really think about the entire journey and how they’re going to maximize moving their audience through at every step.

You’re creating a content system that should be fine-tuned to attract an audience, then convert that audience into sales. To get people on your website, use links in your video descriptions, and if you qualify for the Google Partner program, do so because that will enable you to be able to use info cards in your videos.

To capture their information ensure that you have an easy to find opt-in form with a compelling reason to subscribe via email. Lastly, to convert your audience into customers, create an automated email campaign that introduces your products or services over time and have a good offer, preferably one with an authentic source of urgency and scarcity behind it.

I hope that these tips help your business experience more success on YouTube than ever, and if you want to get better at YouTube for business, then you definitely want to check out this next video.

If you like this video, be sure to like and subscribe so you get more content from me and your feed.

Thanks for watching.