Any business looking to sell a product, needs to have an irresistible way to pull customers in. In the ecommerce space, that means having a strong website that customers can use to get the answers they’re looking for. In an ideal world, this process would simply need an ecommerce storefront with a menu of product graphics and descriptions customers could select from before making their purchase.
On its face, it’s a pretty simple process, right? However, there are countless other businesses that may be offering a similar solution to your customer’s problem. Standing out as the solution they’re looking for can be difficult when everyone’s making the same claims you are. It’s not impossible, though, and one way to separate yourself from other businesses can be to leverage videos to cultivate a stronger digital footprint.
Video has become more popular among marketing professionals across industries, and with good reason. According to a survey, 96 percent of adults find videos helpful, and almost 75 percent are more likely to buy a product if there’s a video explaining how it works. How can businesses with an ecommerce storefront put this insight into action?
What’s the Benefit of Video in Ecommerce?
When thinking about how to get people to an ecommerce storefront, there are only a few options to draw them in: through a search engine like Google, a social media platform, or a paid advertisement. Videos are helpful across all of these areas, but particularly on the search engine and social media fronts, because it boosts SEO in a way other content doesn’t. Using videos can also help improve your storefront’s customer experience, ultimately increasing the likelihood that customers buy.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how each can improve an ecommerce storefront (and your business in the process):
Video Gives an SEO Boost to Your Ecommerce Store
When talking about SEO, many marketing professionals are talking about Google in part because of its dominance in the search engine market, making it the standard SEO professionals try to follow. The rules that Google follows to rank websites for SEO aren’t written down anywhere, because Google wants to ensure that people aren’t gaming the algorithm, but that doesn’t mean SEO specialists haven’t developed a few rules of thumb that have worked for the majority of businesses. One of those is prioritizing higher engagement.
When a website visitor spends significant time on a site, it’s seen as more helpful in Google’s algorithm, so it gets prioritized for the search query that led the visitor there. For example, let’s say a customer is searching for “How to improve my ecommerce website.” Google will attempt to show pages that have proved helpful to people with similar search criteria, and one way it measures this is measuring how long someone’s spent on the page. Pages people spend longer on ranking more highly in search results because the algorithm thinks they’re getting the help they need.
Videos can help with this significantly because if it’s related to the user’s inquiry, then it keeps them on the page for a set period of time, implying to Google that valuable information is on the page for possible customers.
Video Can Be Useful on Social Media
Once you have a piece of content, it’s necessary to maximize the value of that asset. Sharing videos or short clips of a longer video can be a great way of gaining attention and engaging with potential customers by reusing video content. Additionally, the link used in the social media post or in your profile can direct traffic to your storefront, making it possible to expand your potential customer base relatively easily.
Boosting Your Customer Experience with Video
Aside from building your SEO, using videos to explain how your products work can be a way for your customers to get a better experience from visiting your ecommerce site. Shopping online may be a common occurrence, but customers still prefer to have access to as much information as possible. Creating videos that showcase your products in a way that clarifies the value to your customers can help them in their buying decision.
The key to utilizing video effectively in an ecommerce store is to ensure that every video is adding value to your customer’s experience, as it’s what will keep them coming back for more.
What Kinds of Video Should I Use?
If you’re ready to invest in videos for your ecommerce site, the next stage of the process should focus on choosing which videos would have the most impact on your target audience.
There are a wide variety of videos that people will respond to depending on where they’re at in the buyer’s journey. Further, there’s no one recommendation that can be made that could be used by every business universal rewards.
However, there are three kinds of videos that are valuable for most businesses, which include:
- Unboxing: Unboxing videos for physical products have been used to invite audiences into the experience of opening a product for the first time. It can set the stage for what a customer can expect, but it can serve to boost excitement around the product if presented with that in mind.
- Product Demo: Product demonstration videos offer the audience insight into how the product works. It offers an opportunity for potential customers to see the main value proposition and how it would solve their own problems.
- Product Feature: A product feature video gives a potential customer the chance to see the product in action. By providing a snapshot of how the product is used in every day life, a product feature video can further cement the idea of how a product could bring value to the user.
The Growing Need for Video
Boosting the visibility of an ecommerce storefront on the internet can be a daunting task, but there are a variety of marketing tools that can be used to achieve it. Videos have been growing in popularity, and just like any other piece of content, boost the chances of being found online by people searching for your products. As discussed before, they can be a great tool for getting attention and holding it. They can also offer a way for you to communicate the emotional value of buying your product, which is often a big part of the decision-making process. However, video isn’t going to be a silver bullet to boost sales. Instead it should be a part of your portfolio of strategies your business uses to drive traffic to your ecommerce website.
Check out some of our clients who are successfully using video:
Gertrude Hawk: Product Reels
HoverTech: Product Demo
