3 Hidden Barriers that Limit Your Business' Video Content Production

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Key Takeaways

- Several tools and strategies that boast of helping you save time and money actually severely limit your video output. Multitasking during video production — taking on both filming and post-production — comes with a massive cognitive cost and lower-quality output.

- Falling into the trap of pursuing an AI-only strategy leaves you with bland, mediocre content.

- “Unlimited” video editing subscriptions actually put a real monthly cap on your video output through the fine print in their offers.

Video content is a key element in the marketing strategies of countless businesses — and for good reason.

Nearly 85% of marketers have seen it increase sales. YouTube viewership is higher than ever, with more than 2.5 billion tuning in at least monthly.

However, producing video content at scale is a major challenge for many businesses. Especially since there are hidden barriers that can significantly limit your video content production. (Spoiler alert: They masquerade as productivity-boosting strategies!)

Here are three critical pitfalls to avoid to effectively harness video for your business’s marketing.

1. Multitasking and trying to go it alone

The first major mistake countless businesses make when they get started in video production is trying to go it alone, and making their marketing team members multitask.

Doing research. Filming content. Editing it. Uploading it. Deep-diving into analytics. Rinse and repeat.

While many marketing team members are highly qualified for some of these tasks, others are highly technical and require skills that take years to hone. Principal among these is video editing, which is both time-consuming and skill-heavy. And which can make or break the success of marketing content.

Even if you have someone on your marketing team who’s moderately competent at editing video content, making them multitask and take on multiple workflows comes at a considerable cognitive cost and impairs overall productivity.

The upshot? You’ll get fewer videos and at a lower quality.

2. Falling into the AI-only trap

The obvious way out of this predicament could seem to be outsourcing to AI tools — especially given their current omnipresence.

However, AI-only edits still remain one thing above anything else: Bland.

They do not resonate with target audiences because AI, by itself, is only capable of recreating the median of the data it was trained on. As a result, it can produce an edit of your raw footage — but that edit will necessarily be mediocre. And not attuned to your unique brand voice.

That does not mean that AI does not have a role to play in video editing, though.

Professional video editing software now comes with AI and ML functionalities that allow human editors to work more effectively. These range from automated audio category tagging and morph cuts to generative extension and text-based editing to smart color grading support and auto-ducking.

In the hands of a skilled editor, these tools can significantly speed up turnaround times and help produce higher-quality edits.

3. Believing “unlimited” video editing subscription offers

Finally, if you do outsource to professional video editors, one of the cardinal mistakes you can make that ends up limiting your content production is — ironically — choosing an unlimited video editing subscription.

These subscriptions are offered by video editing companies that claim straightforward pricing and all-around service — all your video editing needs covered, for a simple, easy-to-budget, monthly fee.

Except it’s not that simple. While these “unlimited” video editing services allow you to submit as many orders as you like, they’ll only get edited one after the other. When you factor in typical turnaround times to initial drafts, as well as any additional revisions, this puts a real cap on your monthly video output. (Especially when you also consider weekends and holidays!)

Plus, these subscriptions also limit your flexibility in terms of when to produce content. In months when you have fewer videos on your schedule, you might not take full advantage of your subscription. In contrast, when you have a big marketing campaign coming up and need a larger volume of content edited, you’ll have to wait until your editor takes care of your backlog of orders.

The upshot? Not only will there be a limit on how many videos you can have edited in sequence. Unless your video production is incredibly regular and predictable, you will also end up losing money.

The alternative

So how can you overcome these hidden barriers and produce high-quality video content at scale for your business?

The golden rule is to delegate — and to delegate the right way.

Eliminate multitasking by allowing your marketing team members to focus on what they do best. Whether that is analytics, brainstorming or filming content. Han