Before a customer buys a product online, they want to know everything about it. In fact, they want to see the products or services in use.

After all, seeing is believing.

Sure, photos are great to give consumers an idea of what your product looks like. But some details are better explained via a video. Nothing works like an engaging video to showcase your product and tell your prospects why it is so great.

For instance, photos of a bag can showcase what it looks like.

But on video, you can see how many things it can hold, how many different pockets it has on the inside, and so on.

With video marketing, you can also boost your sales. In fact, over 60% of shoppers said that online videos inspired them to make a purchase.

If you run an ecommerce store and are looking for strategies to get ahead of your competitors, you’ve got to take note of the video marketing trend. It can be a boon to accelerate your business growth.

In this post, let’s take a look at how you can leverage videos for ecommerce marketing.

How Ecommerce Marketers Can Leverage Video Marketing

When it comes to leveraging videos for ecommerce marketing, the first thing you need to know is what kind of videos you want to produce.

Let’s take a look at some different types of videos you can create to market your online products:

1. Tutorial Videos

You can give users a demo of your product and explain each feature in detail via videos. Tutorial videos can be a great way to familiarize people with your products.

You get the opportunity to show your target audience the value your product offers and why they should buy it.

Take, for instance outdoor grill company, Weber’s YouTube videos. When they launched their new SmokeFire grill, they released a series of videos explaining to users how to start their grill, clean it, and maintain it well.

Image via YouTube

2. Influencer Ads

When people buy products, they want to make sure that they’re investing their money in a trustworthy brand. When you have a familiar face or an influencer is endorsing your brand, it can help win their trust.

It’s like piggybacking on their reputation.

What’s more?

Through influencer partnerships, you can reach a targeted audience.

Here is an example of how the adventure gear company, Sierra Designs, collaborated with professional backpacker, Andrew Skurka, to promote their products.

Image via YouTube

3. Product Close-Ups

One of the best ways to advertise your online products is to shoot product close-up videos. They can show your products from different angles to give users a feel of the product.

Want inspiration for videos of product close-ups?

Take a look at Apple’s YouTube page. For most of their new products, they have around a minute-long close-up video that showcases their products more clearly.

Image via YouTube

4. Story-Based Videos

Great storytelling can move people and bring out emotions in them.

Story-based videos can be a powerful tool to showcase your brand values and appeal to your audience. These kinds of videos are not about directly selling your product but capturing a lifestyle or a feeling.

For instance, a German supermarket corporation, Edeka, came out with an emotional ad to convey the spirit of Christmas.

Image via YouTube

In the ad, an elderly father is very disappointed when his children convey the message that they won’t be able to come home for Christmas.

In the next scene, the children are seen rushing back home when they receive his funeral invitation. However, they reach home to find out that their father is still alive. He tells them, “How else would I have been able to get you all together?”

The ad ends with everyone spending time together at the dinner table and enjoying themselves. Without selling their products or brand, Edeka manages to establish an emotional connection with the audience with this ad.

5. Explainer Videos

If you have a new service or product, explainer videos can help communicate the core concept well. For instance, Microsoft uses an explainer video with infographics to explain how their Azure Cloud solution works.

Image via YouTube

4 Tips For eCommerce Video Marketing

Now that you have an idea of the kinds of videos you can create to promote your ecommerce business, let’s move forward.

While leveraging this ecommerce trend, keep the following tips in mind:

1. Be Clear About Your Goals

Before you start making your video, ask yourself what the true purpose of creating it is. If you are clear about your key performance indicators (KPIs) from the onset, it will help you determine the kind of video you want to make. In addition to this, it will also help you measure the effectiveness of your videos.

For instance, it’s better to make an influencer ad to drive sales or make your video viral. On the other hand, an explainer ad might be more suited to drive brand awareness.

2. Highlight Your USP

Regardless of the type of video you’re creating, make it a point to highlight your USP.

After watching the video, users should know the benefits of using your product and why your product is better than those of your competitors.

3. Write a Concise Video Script

Your video script should communicate the idea for your ad in a concise manner. Typically, you have 60-90 seconds to capture your audience’s attention. So, trim out any bits that are repetitive or uninteresting.

4. Include an Effective Call-to-Action (CTA)

After viewers have seen your video, what is the next course of action that you want them to take?

Visiting your website, subscribing to your content, or buying your product — whatever it is, communicate it clearly.

Even the most engaging videos need a prominent CTA.

It may seem obvious, but if your ecommerce videos don’t have a CTA, you might not get drive engagement or sales.

Ready to Create Videos to Promote Your Ecommerce Business?

Videos are a dynamic medium. They allow you to see a product in action and even view it from different angles.

What’s more, you can get a feel of the product along with all the details before you buy it. If you are an ecommerce marketer, you need to leverage video marketing. Use the tips mentioned above to create interesting content to promote your ecommerce business.

Do you have any questions regarding ecommerce video marketing? Please feel free to ask them in the comments section below.

Captivating, original content drives site engagement. Video content continues to rise in popularity, with viewers watching over 500 million hours of videos on YouTube each day. Today, web users are embracing video content — and content creators are catching onto video’s viral potential and ability to relay information in an engaging format.

Websites looking to boost their site engagement with videos must decide on several things, such as what types of videos they should publish, in addition to when and where they should post the videos. If you’re interested in learning how to boost your site engagement with videos, consider the following eight tips:

1. Show Your Expertise

It’s simple enough to produce written content.

A video, however, provides more convincing evidence of a site or speaker’s expertise, especially since your tone and confidence comes across as more persuasive than text. Typically, it’s easy to tell whether someone is well-informed or just reading off a teleprompter in a video. For informative videos, a confident presence combined with useful information can lead to a convincing result.

Home staging expert Tori Toth uses video to highlight her expertise, fitting the footage in between informative and relevant text. The video also features “Shark Tank” star Barbara Corcoran, further cementing Toth’s legitimacy.

The page also mentions that Toth is a best-selling author and lifestyle expert, with the video and celebrity addition making it even more than apparent that Toth’s credentials are legitimate, which can help drive engagement and trust.

2. Provide a Transcript

Including a transcript of your video offers multiple benefits. For one, website visitors unable to watch the video have an immediate way to explore the content. If they’re on public transit, for example, and forgot their headphones, watching a video isn’t an option — unless they’re that person. In any case, a transcript can prove beyond useful.

Additionally, a transcript of the video — with placement below it — can have a positive impact on viewers searching for relevant topics. For example, someone searching for how low engagement produces high bounce rates may come across the above video from Denamico because the website includes the video’s transcript.

By listing the content within the video, Denamico caters to everyone, whether they’re partial to video or text, without excluding either audience. Plus, the site offers support for viewers with hearing impairment, making their content even more accessible.

3. Embrace Live Video

A surefire way to showcase expertise and drive engagement is to host live video events, particularly in the form of a tutorial or Q&A session. Facebook Live is an ideal platform if you have an established customer base. It also offers a familiar interface for users, plus provides the chance to connect with and engage site followers, while also cementing your website’s expertise.

Martha Stewart excels at championing her brand with live video. In this example, Stewart and Kevin Sharkey explore her favorite outdoor decorating ideas. During the video, they answer questions from commenting viewers.

So far, the video has thousands of likes and over a half-million views, driving engagement for the Martha Stewart brand and its online presence. Although this live video example is on Facebook, you can link to the video event via your site and embed it within your site’s content.

4. Post the Video During Peak Hours

It’s ideal to post your video content during peak hours, which is evenings on the weekdays. If you’re uploading the video to YouTube, it’s a good idea to upload during weekday afternoons to give the platform time to index the videos and deliver them to subscriber feeds.

Ideally, between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday tend to work well. If posting on the weekend, stick to between 9 p.m. and 11 a.m., or risk getting distracted with other weekend responsibilities.

5. Think About Your End Goal

What’s the purpose of the video? Is it to gain new followers? Inspire discussion among readers of the site? Gear your presentation, content and tone to the type of audience and content you have in mind, whether it’s introducing yourself to new viewers or continuing a weekly video series for members already familiar with the format.

6. Keep Production Time in Mind

If you’re new to video content, it’s vital not to tease upcoming content too far in advance. Video production times can vary and include project delays, so it’s best to avoid a specific date for a video release until you’re confident that production’s wrapped — or have a sense of humor to deflect comments about your procrastination, like YouTuber Natalie Tran.

7. Tag the Video

Tags are an excellent way to gain visibility for your social media and website content. On Facebook and Twitter, they can inspire people to find your video. Seek out your competition’s videos to determine which hashtags they’re using to get a feel for smart tagging. Make sure to incorporate some tags outside of what your competitors use, though.

8. Push the Video

Great video content isn’t worth much if nobody can find it. When uploading a video, promote it on social media, newsletters and general word-of-mouth. Provide a screen capture of the video, along with a link, in emails to website subscribers to pique their interest. Connect with online communities as well, like Reddit, to share your video.

No matter your website’s focus, you can use video to boost site engagement. Keep in mind your expertise, audience, end goal and approach to promotion, though, because it’ll help your web content reach new heights in visitor engagement.

Author

Lexie Lu is a designer and writer. She loves researching trends in the web and graphic design industry. She writes weekly on Design Roast and can be followed on Twitter @lexieludesigner.

A Few Actionable Insights For Online Marketing Conversions

Actionable insights about marketing for your business are quite important as each one will give you more ways to convert sales. You must ensure that you have taken steps to convert as many sales as possible. You may follow the steps in this article to ensure that you have the most sales converted through your site. The site you have built will sell to your customers quite easily when you have built it for the purpose of selling efficiently.

#1: The Site Must Be Fresh

No one will find your site or visit it if you have not kept it updated. The greatest sales technique you will ever use is updating your site in a way that will help you customers believe that you’re still in business. The business will improve over time when you are using a number of different things to keep the site modern. You may change the artwork, add new pages and alter the home page to ensure that your guests see something new every time they visit you.

#2: The Site Must Have An Ecommerce Section

You must have an eCommerce section that your customers may go to, and you may direct them there every time they come to the site. The ads that you have created may take customers directly to the place where you sell your wares, and they may have a look at the things they believe they should buy from. Imagine that you have a number of products to sell that your customers are unaware of. They will come to your site because the ecommerce site is easier to manage.

#3: The Site Must Help With Many Problems

The site must solve problems for customers, and each of them will be solved when your customers come to see you. They are shopping with you because the ecommerce site you have sells all the right items at the right times. The sales of useful items to your customers will convert them more quickly. You are helping your customers take a look at their lives to solve problems that they have had for some time, and each person who is making a change to their live will buy from you because they trust you. Setting yourself up as an expert in the field is important for your overall perception.

#4: The Site Must Have Information

The information the you share with customers on your site is quite important as it helps them make decisions about each purchase they should make. There are many people who are shopping on your site because you have told them what they need to know about buying from you. Informed consumers will buy from you more often, and they will feel much better about their purchases. You are cutting down on returns, and you will have customers coming into your site who believe that they may help themselves once they have read your literature.

#5: The Site Must Be Easy To Navigate

The site must be easy to navigate, and you will find that setting up the site with help from an expert programmer will give your customers a simpler way to move about the site. They are shopping with you because they believe that you have given them the finest choices for each problem they have, and they will move from one page to another without any problem. You will find that there are a number of people who will come to your site because they know precisely where to go. They will make their purchases faster, and they will feel more comfortable with each purchase.

#6: How Often Do You Change Products?

You must ensure that your product catalog is updated often, and you will find it quite simple to keep your catalog fresh. The catalog will be easier for everyone to use because they will see new items that they are not familiar with. The products that you sell will be simpler for your customers to understand when you are adding new items. There are quite a few people who will comparison shop because they believe that the comparison shopping is better for than anything. They will buy from you because your selection is quite large, and they will learn quite a lot about your business in the process.

#7: The Products Must Be Varied

You must carry as many different products as possible, and you will find it simple that to partner with more people to sell. You may speak to someone who sells products that you should carry, and they will help you ensure that you have products that your customers want. You may take input from your customers because they will help you learn what you must carry. They know what they want to buy from you, and you will build a large catalog that everyone wishes to shop with. Your life will improve, and you will feel as though you have a large client base that has options they did not have before.

#8: What Is The Purpose Of Your Advertising

The advertising you are creating for your business must include the newest products that you are selling. The ads must feature anything that you have recently added to the catalog, and you will notice that each new ad is an easier item to use than what you carried before. Your customers will be intrigued by these new items, and they will want the products you have added because they are perceived as the best in the industry.

Your website will convert a number of sales every day using the tips above. You must take action as soon as possible, and you will find that your site may improve in seconds. You will prevent your customers from missing out on the items you sell, and you will make a site that is easy to navigate. Navigation is a large part of your plan, and you may take customer input to ensure that everyone on your site finds what they need easily.