A marked increase in sales is the clearest benefit of video marketing for e-commerce brands. With video marketing’s proven effectiveness at producing results — 49% faster revenue growth for video users — it has become the standard across industries, and online retailers are leading the way. But why does video help sell products?
Video provides online users with an in-person experience. Without the ability to pick an item up, customers seek other ways to build a connection with the product they’re considering buying. From ad campaigns and landing pages, to social media and product pages, 86% of companies use video marketing to promote their brand across mediums. Here’s how to gain these benefits for your e-commerce business.
Benefits of Video Marketing for E-Commerce Businesses
Video has a unique ability to engender trust and connection, as well as consistently deliver positive ROI for 87% of businesses — up from 33% in 2016. Users now expect multimedia content from large and small businesses alike. When an e-commerce brand demonstrates the use, details, or features of a product in a video, the business immediately feels modern, reliable, and sincere. Here are seven more benefits of video for e-commerce:
1. Build Connection with Storytelling
The vast majority of purchases are emotional. Even when we need to buy an item, how we decide what item to buy, and from which brand, is often influenced by our own perspective and interests. Therefore, one of the most powerful ways to connect with your target audience is through storytelling — and it doesn’t require a plot or even dialogue.
Take this pearl-beaded dress, the Maya, for example. The static image is stunning: it highlights the quality of the materials, the sheerness of the sleeves, and detailed embellishments. The video, however, elicits its elegance. The viewer is able to imagine themself feeling like a million dollars as they walk into the event wearing the sparkliest number in the building.
The online buying experience is one we can all relate to; a product image inspires interest and creates awareness. But a product video provides immersion, highlights why a product exists, and has the ability to generate emotion within the viewer.
2. Increase Search Engine Visibility and Traffic
Videos encourage website visitors to explore. This is especially significant when you consider that the average user spends 88% more time on a webpage with video.
Capturing visitors’ attention is beneficial to generating leads and conversions. However, it also signals to search engines that users are receiving the information they were looking for, thereby improving your website’s overall authority and ranking.
In general, videos strengthen a website’s SEO strategy; pages with rich content (such as videos and images) rank more easily with search engines. The video metadata increases keyword density, further verifying to Google that the webpage has high relevance to the search query. In fact, a website using video is 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google.
3. Improve Lead Generation Across Channels and Devices
Video has the power to attract customers at every stage of the buying journey. Over half of social media users engage with a brand after viewing a video on Instagram, Twitter, and similar platforms. More important still, 75% of engagement with an e-commerce brand happens on mobile devices. Videos are easy to watch and passively understand. To put it simply, video marketing is a lead generation powerhouse.
4. Deliver A Satisfying User Experience
E-commerce brands consistently use different tools and applications to improve the buying experience and encourage larger sales. For online retailers, it’s especially important that users are able to gather a complete picture of what they’re buying.
Magic Zoom Plus, for example, is a powerful product image and video preview module for e-commerce sites. Not only does it support zoom-on-hover and 360-view options, users can also quickly and easily add videos to their product image galleries when it’s integrated with SproutVideo. This provides buyers with everything they need to investigate the quality and see every detail of the products you’re selling.
With the addition of video, a business is able to create a complete online retail experience, setting the customer up for a successful purchase and overall satisfaction with the product.
5. Produce Higher Sales Conversions
Landing pages that include video increase conversions up to 86%. Therefore, video alone has immense potential to connect with the interests of your audience, lending to increased sales.
6. Build Trust and Brand Authority
50% of online consumers will search for a product video before making an online purchase. There’s no reason to rely on online reviewers to set the tone for how your products are featured.
Companies continuously find new ways to stand out from the noise. It’s no longer uncommon for a particularly creative advertisement to go viral, pushing a small brand into the spotlight.
High-quality videos are easier and more cost effective to produce than ever before. But they still elevate brands and encourage a sense of familiarity and loyalty with consumers.
Video allows a company to showcase professionalism and transparency while stoking the consumer’s interest and desire in the purchase. The more a brand exudes authority, the less visitors will feel the need to seek out resources to affirm its reputation.
7. Meet Expectations and Increase Retention
Implementing video decreases product support claims for nearly half of businesses. In other words, video helps customers use products without additional help and increases their satisfaction with the items they receive. Businesses have also credited video with improving their customer return rate, with some able to produce rates three times the industry standard.
Regardless of the message, marketers turn to video to reach wide audiences and engage target consumers. For e-commerce brands in particular, video marketing has the ability to garner trust and inspire a sense of belonging, generating the loyal connection all brands aspire to create.
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