MARKETING
How to Create Effective Videos for Your E-commerce Business
What’s the best way to create effective videos for your e-commerce business?
This is the biggest question we’ll answer through this post.
Creating effective e-commerce videos can greatly benefit your business in many ways.
A recent survey reveals that 89% of customers have purchased a product or service after watching a video featuring it:
Further, according to the same survey:
- 87% of marketers say video helps them drive more sales
- 90% of them say video helps with lead generation
- 92% say video helps them generate good ROI
But here’s the thing — even though video offers great benefits to businesses and customers, creating effective e-commerce videos can be challenging.
In fact, 66% of marketers say creating videos for their business is a complex task.
So in this article, you’re going to learn how to create effective videos for your e-commerce business like a pro.
Let’s get started.
1. Start With a Solid E-commerce Video Strategy
If you want to create effective videos for your e-commerce business, the first and most important step is to begin with a strategy.
According to a recent survey, 59% of organizations say that having a video strategy helps them get better results with video:
Since almost everyone is using video for e-commerce marketing, having a clear video marketing strategy can help you stand out from the crowd and deliver a great customer experience.
While this might slow you down, thinking about the strategy before you start creating videos will help you big time.
Here, you’ll need to determine what you want to achieve with your e-commerce videos. And then determine the metrics related to those goals to identify what you need to monitor to track your progress.
Some of the reasons you would want to create effective videos for your e-commerce business include the following:
Once you establish the main objectives of creating e-commerce videos, it will be easier to determine what type of videos to create, where to post them, etc.
2. Keep the Videos Short and Sweet
If you want to create effective videos for your e-commerce business, make them short and enticing.
Why?
Because the modern customer tends to get bored with long product videos.
It’s no wonder platforms like TikTok that allow people to create short videos are becoming increasingly popular among e-commerce marketers.
Short-form videos are proven to generate high ROI and are dubbed the best format for lead generation and engagement.
Pro tip: To supercharge your e-commerce video marketing strategy and generate high-quality leads, leverage reliable lead generation solutions with your videos. Here is a lead generation software list by Attrock to help you choose a suitable solution for your business.
3. Keep Your Target Audience in Mind
No matter how beautiful and professional your e-commerce videos are, viewers won’t care to watch them if they don’t help them solve the specific problems they’re facing.
Essentially, your target audience is the group or category of people who are interested in buying your products or services.
They are probably looking to learn how to use your products or get a better understanding of your brand.
So, you need to understand what issues your target audience is facing so that you can address them in your videos.
Understanding your target viewers will help you determine the tone and message to convey through your videos.
It’ll help you take a value-driven approach to outsmart the competition.
Furthermore, keeping your target audience in mind when creating videos for your e-commerce store helps you tailor your message to them.
4. Leverage Shoppable Videos
In the e-commerce world, the buyer’s journey from awareness to purchase is full of potential pitfalls.
Sending potential customers to your home pages or product pages and leaving it to them to find the products they watched in your video can make them drop off without completing the transaction.
You need to get your audience to checkout quicker, easier, and with fewer clicks. And this is where shoppable videos become helpful.
Shoppable videos are a great strategy for advertising your products in an entertaining and informative way on social media.
By creating these kinds of videos, you give your customers the chance to interact with your video and purchase what they are looking for right away.
Shoppable videos deliver an immersive and personalized shopping experience which helps to improve customer engagement.
The good news about shoppable videos is that they are easy to create. You can shoot them as normal videos and upload them to Instagram and add your products in. It’s also a great way to reduce business expenses as you don’t necessarily need to have a website to sell your products.
5. Focus on Benefits, not Features
When customers come to your e-commerce store, they want to buy products that will help them solve a problem they’re facing. In this case, you need to talk about the benefits users can get from your product rather than the features it has.
For instance, assuming you’re promoting video ad networks in your videos you need to talk about the features the network offers alongside its use case and the benefits it offers to your viewers.
6. Determine the Right Type of Video to Create
For a beginner, it’s easy to think that your focus should be the product video category.
Nevertheless, that’s not always the case. You can feature the product in different types of videos, including:
- Unboxing videos: These are videos that feature the unboxing of the product for the first time. It gives viewers the experience of what it’d be like to open the product when they receive it.
- How-to videos: These are videos explaining how to use your product or service in a way that can help to solve your customers’ problems. For instance, you could create a video explaining how people can use AI text-to-video generators in the best possible way.
- Product introduction videos: These are videos that focus on introducing a new product to the market by explaining its benefits and useful features.
- Testimonial videos: These types of videos work pretty similar to unboxing videos in that they feature real people doing unboxing or providing their experience about using a product or service.
You could work with influencers in your videos to increase the credibility of these testimonials.
- Video ads: These are short videos promoting your product or service directly to customers. For better results, avoid being pushy or salesy with your videos. Instead, focus on the value your product or service delivers to customers.
Here are the types of videos marketers are planning to create in 2023 according to the Wistia survey mentioned above:
To choose the right type of video to create for your e-commerce business, be guided by your strategy, goals, and target audience.
7. Hook Viewers From the Start
The modern consumer is exposed to a host of videos and information on the internet.
Apart from being engaging, your videos should be attention-grabbing the moment someone clicks to watch them.
This will help to grab the viewers’ attention and nudge them to watch the rest of the video.
So how do you hook the audience from the start?
Here are a few practical ideas to use:
- Start with product highlights or a statement that entices the viewers to continue watching
- Start with a startling fact or statistic
- Open with a thought-provoking question
- State a problem and promise to offer a solution
Conclusion
Learning how to create effective videos for your e-commerce business is a great idea to present your product in an engaging and informative way.
Remember that there are many different types of videos you can create but you need to choose those that are specific to your brand, product, or service.
So, go ahead and start creating your marketing videos to drive your sales up.
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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