Sep 29, 2017

Using Video to Market your Shopify Store

What is Video Marketing?

Simply put, video marketing is the use of videos in your various marketing campaigns to market or promote your brand, service or product. A successful video marketing campaign should include different kinds of videos such as customer testimonials, how-to-videos, corporate training videos, explainer videos – the list simply goes on. Ecommerce companies can leverage this marketing method a lot by just incorporating one video into all of their marketing channels – from landing pages and search to email and much more. According to studies, videos can enhance your conversions, click through rates, open rates and Google ranking, among others.

Types of Videos used in Video Marketing

In the present digital landscape, everything is changing rapidly with time. E-commerce companies have overpowered physical outlets, and traditional ways of shopping and marketing have almost come to a partial end. Since video marketing has emerged as one of the most powerful tools in this digital spectrum today, it pays to understand different kinds of videos used for marketing of ecommerce stores. Here’re the most common ones in use:

• Product videos: Different kinds of product videos are used by ecommerce marketers to promote their products to the audience.
• Demo videos: Demo videos help consumers know about the launch of new products and services. It becomes especially helpful when it comes to retargeting consumers online.
• Tutorials: These videos help the audience to understand your products/services in details.
• Process videos: These videos help the audience understand the entire work done to develop a product.
• Unboxing videos: These videos capture the process of unpacking of new products, particularly the top-notch consumer products.

Benefits of Video Marketing

1. Rank higher on Google

Websites that use a mix of content and videos instead of using only written content are getting rewarded by major search engines. Videos can help create additional traffic and attention as they are shared via various websites and networks. According to a study conducted by Forrester Research, a web page that contains video is 50 times more likely to get an appearance on Google’s first page. As a growing amount of video content is getting incorporated in Google’s organic search results, using them would greatly help you enhance your exposure to the world.

2. Effective communication tool

A video is capable of conveying a message in a more powerful manner compared to purely written content. Learning by demonstration often proves to be more effective than learning by reading lots of instructions. Additionally, a significant number of people find it convenient to understand things compared to writing down the steps. Use of the right blend of images, narration and music can create a convincing piece together, which can become more useful to the audience. Videos also provide more than a whopping 70% increase in your audience’s understandings of your services or products compared to pictures.

3. Convert more users

Whether you use a video in your landing page, webinars or email marketing, it will help you to boost conversions. According to Zappos, product pages containing video convert 6 to 30% more compared to the ones that don’t. In case you’re yet to start video marketing, you should ideally start with a video that explains about your company, products and services and then start incorporating it throughout your other marketing channels. Remember that increased online visibility is equivalent to more leads and more traffic. Seeing video presentations of your products and services and customer testimonials can help you build trust among prospective customers.

4. Easy to produce

Unlike the cumbersome process of traditional print media marketing, video marketing is quite hassle-free and fast. With the advent of economical video cameras as well as camera phones, it has become easier for almost everyone to create a video on his/her own. Additionally, the wide availability of low-cost video making software empowers you to create, edit and finally produce pro-quality videos in minimal amount of time. These professional videos help you to stand out from the competitors when it comes to boosting your conversion rates.

5. Videos build trust

Trust is the cardinal factor of sales and conversions and the entire concept of ecommerce marketing is based on it and developing long-term relationships. Ideally, you shouldn’t concentrate only on selling. Instead, you should be partially focused on providing useful and interesting information to your audience to make them visit your store over and over again. Video content is more likely to engage people and ignite emotions. Though some customers are still skeptical about purchasing products or services on the web, effective promotional videos that talk about your products/services in a conversational tone can bridge this gap of trust.

6. Encourages social shares

The emergence of social networking platforms has taken video marketing to the next level. With newly added features, social networks also advocate video content. For instance, Twitter has Periscope, Instagram has Instagram Stories & 60-Second Videos, and Facebook has launched Live Video, 3600 Video and Lifestage (A Video-centric App targeted for teenagers). However, while doing video marketing on social media platforms, you must remember that people want to share emotions and not facts. Ideally, you should create entertaining videos to increase social shares. Though this isn’t directly related to ROI, social shares can help increase traffic to your store, and you can take it forward from there.

7. Appeals to mobile users

Videos and mobile phones go almost hand in hand. According to statistics, mobile video views have experienced an increase of almost 400% from 2012 to 2014. As people like to watch videos while on the move and the number of smartphone users is growing rapidly, your video audience would be getting bigger and bigger over the coming days. According to Google, smartphone users are 1.4 times more likely than desktop viewers and twice as likely compared to TV viewers to watch mobile videos. Thus, you need to be extremely careful while creating personal experiences through your video content that more and more people would want to enjoy and get involved with.

Video Marketing Strategies

Unlike earlier times when most people spent hours in front of the TVs, people today want to stay updated and entertained even when on the move without being shackled to their desktops or TVs. Today, no written word can compete with the videos when it comes to amusement. Similarly, when you plan to buy something from an e-commerce store, what kind of product description would you prefer? Reading a dry and lengthy description or watching a short and crisp 5-minutes video clip? Most people would go for the latter option. Thus, as an ecommerce store owner, you should incorporate video content on your website. Let’s have a look at the key video marketing strategies.

1. Create quality video

If you want to leave a good impression on people watching your video to encourage them to return to your store, you’ve to have quality videos that need enough time, resources and effort to be made. First, you need to plan on what you wish to exhibit in the video. Then rent or buy a decent camera and the related equipments. Do some online research to learn how to make a video appear convincing. Add enticing effects to hold the viewers’ attention for over eight seconds because duration of views below that timeframe don’t count for among your video’s total number of views.

2. Be original 

Before you start diving into the creative facet of video marketing, it’s important to note that nothing can beat the original. Developing your own videos is perhaps the most fundamental resource-demanding aspect of your video marketing strategy but it’s also the most rewarding at the same time in terms of advertising your own brand. In case you plan to sell products/services under your own brand, it’s of great importance to create your own videos because that way, you would be able to promote your own label together with your vision and values.

3. Find the right place

If you place the videos in a place where your audience doesn’t see it easily, all your video marketing efforts would go in vain. So, place the videos on your homepage and the product pages that people visit the most. Usually, a standard amount of traffic is always drawn to these pages and thus, you’ll be able to identify the changes in your conversion/traffic rate as well as measure the efficacy of your video. Also, you should post the videos on different free channels and websites. Some of the bigger platforms you can consider include Facebook, YouTube and Google Video.

4. Know the rules

It’s crucial to thoroughly understand the video posting rules of the websites where you plan to upload your video. Or else, you may have the video banned or simply thrown out for uploading illegal content. Thus, it’s always advisable to meticulously go through the guidelines of each website. For some websites, you can put a link on or beneath the video to direct viewers to check your company website. This can aid to generate additional traffic and attention towards your ecommerce website.

5. Source from Brands, Experts and Users

You may not have the zeal to create your own videos, or you may lack the time and resources required to prepare a video, or simply may not feel comfortable with shooting the video. Here, various video-sharing platforms including YouTube become greatly useful as they’re overflowing with different kinds of videos by experts, brands and users. Most of them allow re-sharing on various e-commerce sites for free. This empowers you to test the consumers’ reaction to videos on your website without taking up the hassles of video production.

6. Social sharing

Your videos may seem absolutely trusted but to your consumers, you’re still a business owner who thinks just about profitability. As a matter of fact, people don’t trust ecommerce companies but they do care about what their fellow shoppers opine. So, get in touch with your happy customers and gently ask them to record their happy video reviews and post those on your website. When you’ve a number of such clips – collate them into one video to increase the popularity and trust of your brand. Also, include sharing buttons on various social media platforms and allow other users to embed your video on their site.

7. SEO

Videos with description and tags can help you boost your website’s SEO too. If you can have a lively discussion underneath the video clip – a highly crowded comments box, your video would be more appealing to Google. Some other ways you can consider to increase the popularity of your video include:

• Large number of views
• High rating
• Significant number of backlinks to the videos from other websites

Remember that videos that matter the most are entertaining, informational and cool at the same time. Otherwise, none of these factors would be able to facilitate your marketing effort.

Conclusion

In today’s competitive ecommerce landscape, attaining success is never a sure thing. But strategic use of great videos can help increase your conversion rate as well as your website’s overall exposure. The above tips will definitely help you develop a video marketing strategy for your ecommerce store. If you’ve not started using videos yet or haven’t enhanced the quality of your existing videos, it’s time to focus on them now as these will make sure that you haven’t left your success merely to chance.