How Video-Lead Marketing Can Help Shape Your eCommerce

Over the last few years, the cultural landscape, the internet, and by extension, people’s viewing habits and digital marketing have changed dramatically. That upwards trend is only going to continue—by 2022, 83% of the internet’s traffic will be video (Biteable, 2020).

Online marketing videos aren’t just a trend anymore but an integral part of a successful marketing campaign. To have a successful video eCommerce platform, you need to be on top of trends. You also need to make consistently stellar video content that performs on all of the major video platforms while understanding how to get the most out of the eCommerce side of things.

The most exciting thing about this new and ever-changing age of hyper-focused video content on the internet is how ubiquitous video content is and how easy it is to be a content creator. With the rise of so many platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and before its demise, Vine, we’ve seen the rise of an incredible new way to bring entertainment and retail to customers as well as the rise of a video eCommerce platform.

With the new short-form, unedited, DIY-style videos and so many ambitious, young content creators, the competition pool is deeper than ever. You have to do a lot to stand out among an ocean full of content—your eCommerce video marketing has to be among the best in the business; eye-catching, dramatic, dynamic, and fun.

With this guide, Explainify will show you how to get ahead and how video-lead marketing can help take your approach to eCommerce to the next level.

Brand Videos

Brand videos are an integral part of any eCommerce cycle, as brand videos are a great way to help build hype up for—well, your brand.

Brands, products, services, and people do not exist in a vacuum, and people refer to marketing as a “cycle” for a reason. You don’t win people over with one simple product demonstration video or a call-to-action. You need to build trust over time, and everything has to have a sequential order. It can be a long, long process that takes a lot of time, a lot of planning, a lot of work, and many videos. But in the end, it will be worth it.

Generally speaking, you start with a brand video to get people intrigued and hyped up about your brand(s), get word-of-mouth out there and get the idea in people’s heads. You aren’t trying to make a sale immediately when it comes to eCommerce brand videos. People are often doing a lot of research and considering many different options, rather than thinking impulsively, so you have to be patient and gain their trust.

Reel them in with a bit of intrigue and get people excited, and promise more: a good brand video always alludes to more, which then feeds into subsequent brand videos, hype videos, product videos, and other types of videos.

Remember, too, that you are selling your brand in brand videos, and that is important. That can mean you’re selling a lifestyle, or you’re selling an aesthetic or ethos, or you’re possibly even re-launching a brand, and that means you’re re-establishing it. With brand videos, remember that you’re telling a story, and consider the story you want to tell; how do you want to connect with your audience?

Do you want to tug at their heartstrings? Do you want to excite them with flash and dynamism? Do you want to appeal to a particular lifestyle that could make them feel better? Do you want to sell yourself as luxurious, or high-class, or exclusive? Do you want to sell your brand as eco-friendly or ethically responsible? These are all critical things to consider.

Look at this ad from Hendrick’s Gin.

What this ad does so well is sell a lifestyle and set itself apart from other gins. It can obviously be hard to sell a product like gin because that’s something someone needs to taste, and gin is in and of itself already an acquired taste.

What Hendrick’s so brilliantly does is embrace the fact that gin is an acquired taste, then go even further by saying that they are an acquired taste. They do this not only by having more daring flavours, but they then almost dare their prospective audience to try their gin. They sell a lifestyle of people who like Hendrick’s being “out there,” so to speak. They position their product as “undeniably peculiar; undeniably delicious.” Not only is that a fantastic tagline, but it’s a tagline that challenges people and sets Hendrick’s apart, also setting its audience apart, and does so using fun, unique animation, all within only 30 seconds.

It’s also part product video as well without ever showing a product, describing the product brilliantly. This is an amazingly well-done brand video that sells the brand so well and sets it apart from its competitors; it sells a narrative to its audience, knows its intended narrative, and executes the narrative perfectly.

Check out this in-depth how-to guide here for a more comprehensive guide on brand videos and how promo videos can help be a turning point in catapulting your brand to fantastic success.

Product Videos

So, let’s talk about product videos, not only why they’re so important, but what kind of product videos you’ll want to use for your eCommerce video marketing, the platforms to use them on, and how to use them.

Why Product Videos?

Well, simply put: product videos have been proven to increase purchases by an incredible 144% (per NeilPatel.com)

More than that, though, product videos are a great way to show your potential customers tangible things about your products or services that the rest of a digital marketing sales cycle doesn’t cover.

We’ve covered how digital marketing cycles or funnels work before in this video marketing funnel article, which you can read again for a more in-depth review.

To keep it simple, though, it’s about awareness, engrossing your audience, conversion, and then, finally, advocacy and loyalty.

Product videos are about conversion. You’ve done your job beforehand in making people aware of your brand and your product and hyping them up. What comes next is that conversion, and that needs to be done with tangible proof.

A great example of innovation in product videos can be seen in how small businesses engage via social media by showing their processes.

For example, take your local neighbourhood coffee shop. If they roast their own beans, they build a sense of loyalty and trust with their customers by showing them how the beans are actually roasted. It also becomes a great point of fascination for people to learn more about the process. This can be taken a step even further in-store by offering people lessons about coffee roasting and coffee tasting, to help with further engagement.

Think of local farmers: it’s incredibly cheap and easy to shoot a video of yourself picking apples in your orchard, showing off the incredible, amazing, fresh produce that you have available for people. You could even take it a step further by showing the process of making your apples into apple cider and end the video by linking to a website that allows people to order your product online, as well as a CTA for people to buy the product in person at select locations.

A Moving Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words

A staggering 70% of Amazon shoppers (per Search Engine Journal) never bother clicking past the first page when on the lookout for products, and that’s because of the way the platform works, focusing on SEO-driven results.

But what do you do when you have a product that seems to be beyond SEO-driven results or can’t be described well with words, and pictures, and ratings? It simply works, or it doesn’t?

You use video. As we alluded to before, video is amazingly popular and only getting that much more popular.

You can go on and on and on and on, for example, about how safe a car is, but what better way to show how safe a car is than simply showing a video of it crashing into a wall and showing the impact on crash test dummies? Or if you’re trying to sell your phone screen protector, show it protecting a phone? The acronym of KISS really does work, and sometimes a simple video showing off exactly what a product can do not only saves you and your consumer a lot of time but can say so much more than words can.

Explainer Videos

Explainer videos are another step in the eCommerce video process that you can approach in a handful of ways.

Explainer videos can help break down what your service or product does and what sets it apart, often using vibrant, fun, dynamic animation and straightforward, easy-to-follow dialogue.

This explainer video from Freighty does a great job explaining a service to people easily. Explainer videos are great to show people services that may be a bit hard or abstract to explain.

Another type of explainer video that is especially prevalent on YouTube is tutorial videos, which can be especially great when you’re releasing a new product. If you keep on top of things, you can recruit brand ambassadors and influencers to record content that showcases how to use your products in fun, engaging, and entertaining ways to their potential audiences of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subscribers. You can easily integrate links to purchase your product into their content and even incentivize purchases of your product with discount codes for their loyal fans.

The Advantages of YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram

YouTube

Each of these social media platforms come with their own distinct demographics, intricacies, and advantages, and you can utilize each of them to help unlock their full potential eCommerce video marketing potential.

With YouTube, you have a broader, more general audience, and it can be tough to find a space for word to get out about your product because there are just so many YouTube channels. YouTube can be great for niche products, though, because YouTube has many devout fans and passionate communities.

Take, for example, makeup influencers or tech companies. You can reach these niche audiences directly through YouTube via influencers who know your product and the industry.

YouTubers build careers off longer-form content and built-in trust, so it can be very hard for eCommerce to work on YouTube, as many people may see sponsoring or advertising products on YouTube as “selling out.” On the other hand, many fans of YouTubers know that influencers work with companies and see it as part of the job.

YouTube also has an option for ads to occur during videos that influencers do not have control over, and these play out like much more traditional marketing ads. These are short ads, and you often do not work with influencers at all.

This is all to say that YouTube can be a great avenue to go down, but it can be a bit tricky to work with, and you need to think carefully about the type of product you are selling and the type of influencers you’re working with. Think hard about your demographic and if they would use YouTube.

Instagram

Instagram is an excellent tool for video eCommerce: you get to be short and to the point with stories, highlights, and even regular posts. You also don’t need to do a whole lot of work beyond simply providing products to influencers and a general outline of what you’d like them to say, and let them go to work. Their outreach will do wonders for your brand and get the word out about your product just as effectively as a marketing video, without all of the over-bloated hassle that could take weeks, if not months, of production.

TikTok

TikTok is very similar to Instagram in the sense that you’re reaching out to a very specific, young demographic, and you’re reaching out to them via influencers, generally, by providing them with a product or service and letting them speak for you.

Your job is to make sure you treat those influencers well, and foster a solid relationship with them, and foster an engaged community. Be active on social media like TikTok and Instagram, be on top of social media trends, and don’t be afraid to listen to younger generations. Don’t be scared to take wild chances and swing for the fences because eCommerce video marketing is constantly evolving, and you can never rest on your laurels.

Hopefully, after reading this guide, you’ve learned a few things about video eCommerce and how you can help shape your marketing for the future with video eCommerce.

To dive deeper into how eCommerce video marketing can help you boost sales, get in touch today, and Explainify will work with you to create a strategy you love.