Growing a business and driving its sales has always been complicated. It takes a lot of time and effort to generate sales by creating relationships, building a brand community, and creating valuable content for your customers to consume. It is very important to stay connected to your consumer base by engaging with them.
In today’s world, video marketing is one of the most engaging forms of content marketing. Videos are graphic, fun, entertaining, and a great way of representing a brand’s image and ideas. You’re surely missing out if you’re not on the Video Marketing Bandwagon yet. According to Video Marketing statistics, 86% of today’s businesses use video marketing to drive sales, while 88% of users said they were convinced to buy a brand’s product after watching their video.
There are obvious benefits to adding video marketing to your marketing campaign, but how exactly should it be done to extract the most amount of value from it? Here’s how you can use video marketing to increase sales for your E-commerce business –
Clearly Define Goals and Objectives
When starting with a new project, the all-important first step should always be to determine what it is exactly you want to achieve and at what time intervals you want to achieve them. A consumer’s purchasing journey has many phases, which means that the message you want to send them will also need to be tailored to the stage they’re in.
For example, a video introducing your brand or product will provide little to no value to a consumer who is already well versed with your brand and products. Or a video marketing new modifications and improvements on an old product will make no sense to an “awareness” stage consumer.
Therefore, it is very important to strategize how you will take the consumer through their purchasing process and then create and share videos accordingly.
Select Your Marketing Channels
The thing about online marketing channels is that they’re all different in their way. For most eCommerce businesses, the best channels to market your products/services are social media sites or entertainment/streaming sites. There are a lot of them like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, etc.
Video ads that work well on Instagram might not click with the Facebook demographic. Short Snapchat ads might not fly well with users on Youtube. This is mainly because even social media sites are categorized according to different factors such as age, culture, professionalism, etc. Different people belonging to different customer types use different social media channels.
You will have to modify and diversify your video ads according to factors like clip length and tonality and ensure you don’t add elements that may not seem offensive or vulgar to some age groups but will be for other age groups. Therefore, you have to be clear about which kind of video ad will be posted in which specific marketing channel. If all your consumers reach you through different channels, you will have to do the same.
Types Of Videos
There are different categories of marketing videos that you can use to structure your video marketing campaign. Each type of video serves a different purpose. The tonality, theme, conversation style, and editing style are different in these videos. Some videos are useful in introducing your brand to the consumer, telling them what you’re all about, your products and services, and the impact you want to make.
These are great videos to try and develop your brand’s image in your viewer’s mind. On the other hand, some video formats are great for showing off your brand’s products and all the features that make them unique and desirable. You can push these videos out to your consumers depending on which stage of the consumer purchase decision they’re currently on.
You can incorporate several types of videos into your video marketing strategy, with each type serving its purpose. Some of them are –
1. Explainer Videos
These videos are great if you’re selling software or other products that are a little complicated to use. Explainer Videos are like demo or walkthrough videos where you can show off your product’s features by showing how everything works. People are visual learners and prefer being taught by showing instead of reading.
2. Interactive Videos
These videos are a fun little way of engaging with your customers. They are a great addition to your website landing page. These videos allow customers to tap or click on certain interaction points and are then moved to a different video, infographics, location, etc.
3. Product Videos
These videos show your product in action. This can help solve some doubts and questions a consumer may have about your product, but its main purpose is to show it off with cool graphics and slick visual effects.
4. Guide Videos
Guide or “How to” videos show step-by-step guidelines with instructions on how to do something. It could be anything from “ironing your shirt” to “gardening tips.” Its purpose is first to acknowledge the problem your product is meant to solve and then show how the product solves the problem
5. Testimonials
These videos feature consumers who have used your product and enjoyed it. It can have a few consumers sharing their positive experiences with your product/services, explaining what they liked about the product, and suggesting viewers do the same.
Amateurs can easily create these kinds of videos. With simple and convenient video makers available online, it doesn’t take an expert to create and edit videos.
Make Your Videos Shareable
One of the biggest advantages of using online channels is its shareability. It’s very easy to enable viewers to share your content with a click. It’s a great way to reach consumers outside your sphere of influence and increase brand awareness. You don’t want to ruin it.
So make sure to make content that is worth sharing. Adding elements of humor, action, interesting and unique visual effects, video style, etc., is a great way to encourage your viewers to share your video. People like to show cool and funny things to their friends so take advantage of that. Do not include curse words, distasteful humor, or things normally frowned upon by society. This will be an obstruction when someone wants to share your brand video with family or official groups.
Optimize for Mobile
It’s no secret that most of today’s population own a smartphone and use it to surf the internet, use social media sites or stream their favorite shows. Over 4.18 billion people are mobile internet users.
The average screen time for an adult living in the United States is around 3 hours and 43 mins per day. Mobile phones are the prime tool of content consumption preferred by more than half the world. So it seems pretty reasonable to believe that most of the shared videos will be viewed by people on their phones. Your marketing videos on Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, etc., will probably reach people on their phones. So, make sure you optimize your content for mobile phone viewing.
What do we mean by that?
Update the dimensions – you don’t want your video to be cropped and messed up because it was not optimized for mobile screen viewing. Make videos with dimensions that are suitable for the mobile screen.
Add subtitles (for those sneaking about with their phones at work or in public places). A lot of people view stuff on their phones without sound. So if your video has no subtitles, they will probably skip it. Also, they are more likely to pay attention to what’s being said when there are subtitles on.
Include CTAs
Make sure to always mention links and hyperlinks to your website in the description under every video content. A customer may want to check you out after watching the video but might be dissuaded from doing so if there is no quick access or if they do not know what to do next. You need to tell your customers what to do and where to go next once the video is over. You can do that by adding text at the end or pasting links and hyperlinks to your website somewhere in the video description. This is extremely important because if the consumers did not visit your page, the video would not have served its purpose.
Follow the Trends
A huge part of gaining exposure and followership in online marketing channels is keeping up with relevant trends. There are several moment marketing content pieces you can put out by including a reference to a hot topic going on. What’s great about this is that you don’t even need a dedicated crew set to make these videos.
An online video maker can help you create quick videos to capitalize on a big moment in pop culture and upload a video that gets a lot of engagement. Video making is extremely easy with video makers. It’s also very cost-effective and saves a lot of time and effort.
Embed Videos to Your Website
Embedding videos on your websites is one of the biggest favors you’ll do for yourself and your business. First of all, Google loves video content. Web Pages with videos are extremely SEO friendly and will help you gain some organic traffic. Google also gauges how long users visit and stay at a website.
So, if you add many videos and your consumers watch them, they will inevitably spend a lot of time browsing your website, which is again another important SEO metric fulfilled. Because of a large number of time users spend on your website, Google will deem it relevant to their search query and improve your google ranking score.
You can add explainer videos, product videos, testimonials, introductory videos about your brand, its mission, vision, etc. This will boost engagement and lead to higher customer experience satisfaction.
Keep Experimenting
Life would be easier if marketers could upload a single video, and everything turned out fine. Unfortunately, that does not happen. Videos are rarely going to meet your targets and expectations in one attempt. You will have to edit them, make changes, add new elements, remove elements, and many other things before reaching your final product.
The only way to truly understand what works and what doesn’t is by experimenting constantly. Keep churning out content, posting videos, and keeping an eye on the statistics. If possible, attempt to get customer reviews, viewer reviews, etc., on your content and figure out what parts are good and missing. Take the feedback in, make the required changes, re-upload them, and repeat the process.
Be Patient
You have to be extremely patient in gaining a decent viewership. Your first few videos will probably never reach the kind of numbers you’d like. It may take your business over hundreds of videos to gain a sizable community on youtube. On the flip side, it may also take 10 or 15 videos for you to click with your audience and boost sales.
The point is that nobody can accurately predict how your consumers will react to the videos. You have to remain patient, stay on the grind, gain useful feedback, and react accordingly. Many successful video creators say that you should try and have fun with your videos and not pay too much attention to the analysis numbers. If you have fun with the content, you’re putting out, and it will probably be just as fun for your viewers. The important thing is not to give up too quickly and keep creating and uploading videos.
Conclusion
Video Marketing is no longer a new concept, and more and more businesses are readily accepting and implementing it in the best possible way. There have been many innovations and unique ideas in this segment, and the video marketing world has constantly changed. To stay on top of your game, you will have to be always updated with all the latest developments in trends, filters, editors, style of videos, etc. You have to constantly see what your competitors and top players are putting out as content to make sure you never lag.
This is a field that requires creativity and vision. It does not necessarily need a huge film development crew stacked with sets, actors, directors, camera professionals, and shebang. You can easily create and edit videos for your E-commerce business. With the tips on Video Marketing, you can easily kick your new video marketing campaign and kick up those sales numbers.
