Integrating Videos in Your E-commerce Business
Videos are part of all the world’s biggest brands, and many top e-commerce businesses are using videos to show a more realistic illustration of their products and how they can be beneficial for consumers.
Videos, in fact, take up 82% of all internet data (2022) – a number only expected to increase. This means videos have become the most popular and dominant online tool to market, educate, entertain, and communicate. And, with video distribution platforms being on top of the list of visited websites this is definitely where the show is happening!
Several studies have shown the benefits of using videos in e-commerce marketing, for example, 73% of people are more likely to go ahead and purchase a product online if there’s a video showing the product and how it works.
If you haven’t already tried out videos as a marketing tool it isn’t too late to start! So let’s talk about e-commerce videos and what can make them effective.
What are E-commerce Videos?
An e-commerce video is in fact just a commercial video showing a product and how it can be used. It supports its good features to show prospective consumers what the product can do for them. The video is linked to an e-commerce shop and is often also featured on the actual e-commerce site.
Online videos are meant to attract viewers, show the details of a product, and make consumers feel they might need the specific product. The aim is to convert potential consumers into actual customers and it’s an important tool for competing in our days digital market.
According to the Wyzowl State of video marketing report, 80% of businesses say they have directly improved their sales by utilizing videos in their marketing strategy. This corresponds well with 84% of people saying that watching marketing videos have convinced them to buy a product or service because seeing it “live” in a video gives a much more clear idea of its functionality and quality than just seeing a still image.
Here are Some Tips on Creating a Successful E-Commerce Video:
What’s the Effect of Your Video?
First of all, when you want to make a successful video you’ll have to consider what effect the video will have on viewers – because it has to have one or more effects to make an impression.
Whether it makes your audience laugh, impress or amaze them, makes them wonder, excites them, scares or shocks them, makes them sad, or even if it annoys them – the point is that the effects or mix of effects have to cause a strong enough impact on viewers to make them react or act. With a like, a comment, by sharing your video, or by buying your product.
How to Manage Muted Videos
The majority of videos are assisted by audio explaining the storyline or the message. Nevertheless most videos today are actually watched on mute or with the audio volume significantly decreased. Therefore, subtitles have almost become an obligatory part of videos, in order for the muted videos to be “heard” as well. You can use an auto subtitle generator to add them to your videos – saving a lot of time.
It is proven that subtitling videos improve comprehension of, attention to, and memory of videos, and increase engagement metrics by up to 80%. And, it is also worth mentioning that around 1 out of 20 people worldwide are suffering from deafness or hearing impairment making subtitles more than just a helpful feature to have, but actually a needed one.
The Good First Impression
Make a good first impression. Present video content that catches potential customers’ attention and causes curiosity. This means thumbnails and video previews have to be eye-catching! This is the first entry you need your potential viewers to go through.
When they have clicked on your video the next important step is the intro – in fact, you only have around 3 seconds to catch your audience’s attention once they start watching, so make sure the intro engages and isn’t going to be the end. Make your audience want to see more!
Also, think of how you can create a better comprehension of your video by using your title, tags, and captions to clarify it. Make sure your text is well aligned with your content and product. However, you can decide whether to be precise and concrete – or play a bit around with words to make it more fun and mysterious – it depends on your product or service and your marketing strategy.
Keep Viewers Engaged
Bouncing rates are a measure of how many viewers start watching your video, but then quickly click away from it again. High bouncing rates are not good for overall engagement metrics, as they show a lack of engagement from the audience.
That’s why it’s important to keep viewers hooked and curious about what will come next. Create anticipation and flaunt that something worth waiting for is soon about to happen. This will keep the tension and the excitement of watching, improve view duration and decrease bouncing rates.
Shorter or Longer Videos?
There is not just one clear answer to whether your videos should be short or long. However, shorter videos are easier to watch and it is easier to keep your audience engaged throughout the whole video. People love to binge on short videos nowadays just look at how popular it has become to create TikTok videos and ‘YouTube Shorts’. However, sometimes longer videos make more sense, as people might look for a more detailed guide on how to do something, or the commercial might be a part of a longer video with an interesting storyline. An influencer for example might benefit from longer videos as a result of people getting to know them better and building up more trust in them.
Make Sure Your Video Reflects Your Product Well
It’s important that your video is comprehensive, meaning that it should be pretty clear what your product or service is about. It can be great to create a video that makes people wonder because this will aid a much better memory of the video. However, if people have no memory of what your product can do then it isn’t much help. So try to make it clear to your audience what your product is about. If it’s a review even more so – nothing should be left to mystery (with few exceptions depending on what your product or service is about).
Not, surprisingly 95% of businesses who have incorporated videos into their marketing strategy say that it helps their customers to more clearly understand their product or service.
Trust before Action
Would you buy a product or a service you don’t really trust? Probably not! Trust in your brand and product is really one of the keys to success. This is why it’s beneficial to make video content that your target audience can easily identify with and relate to their own real-life situations. This in itself can motivate viewers to take the next step and try out your product.
Be transparent and true to create a trustable brand and product foundation – give a clear idea of what your product or service includes. Focus on good visibility and publication. Aim for your video or product to get good engagement rates such as views, likes, comments, shares, and positive reviews. – to help you convert your audience into actual customers. 77% of people think that online companies featuring product videos are more engaged with their customers than those who don’t.
You can also benefit from getting in touch with influencers that like your product and service. They might agree to promote your product in their videos, and this way your product can be uplifted by their influence. 67% of viewers on YouTube say they watch product reviews to get a better idea of whether a product is worth buying or not.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Videos can be a good tool to improve overall SEO strategy if used correctly.
SEO is the process of so-called search engine robots crawling all web pages and detecting factors relevant to page ranking. In today’s competitive online market, ranking well in search inquiries is crucial in order to achieve the visibility you need to succeed. Therefore, it’s important to know what factors the robots value in the ranking process so that you can add more of these and aim for improvements in the metric factors as well.
In fact, we have already come around quite a few of the factors that robots detect and value for videos, such as views, view duration, comments, shares, and other metrics.
However, one of the most critical factors for the robots to detect are keywords – relevant keywords that help them to categorize your content and match it to the right search inquiries. Unfortunately, robots can’t detect the spoken words in videos, also not the visual part of the video, and therefore they are not able to understand the video as it is. Fortunately, you can find ways to add detectable keywords to your video in order for the robots to understand what your video is about. Add them in the title, tags, subtitle files, and in video description.
Hardcoded subtitles do not directly contribute to improved SEO, as they are burned onto the video and have become one entity with the visual aspect of the video. However, they do indirectly have a positive effect on SEO, as they do create a video format with chances of better engagement metrics, and the robots reward good engagement metrics with better ranking.
International customers
As explained, video marketing opens up a new way of communicating with your customers. And even though we could go on about ways to benefit from video marketing this should give you a good idea of what it beholds. We do want to share one last tip that can make a world of difference.
Marketing videos enable you to reach an audience that doesn’t understand your original language, which can potentially give you a whole new consumer market to sell to. You can use your original video content, and translate it into your target market’s language before distributing it. One way is by adding translated subtitles to your video. However, now you can actually also have software turn text into speech for you in more than 35 different languages, and this way you can create layover voices for your videos – customized to your target audience.
