The Role of Video Marketing in Your eCommerce Strategy

If you’re not already using video marketing as part of your e-commerce marketing mix, there’s never been a better time to start. In the run-up to Christmas, consumers are switching to online sales outlets in droves. Video content can help you engage more of your target customers, close more deals, and drive more revenues, explaining how your products save customers money, make their lives easier, and put smiles on their loved ones’ faces. Read on to find out more.

Where to post video content and what to post:

Product and category pages

The product and category pages on your e-commerce website can all be enhanced by short videos that demonstrate how your products work. Host them directly if you like or link to your YouTube or Vimeo channel to drive even more traffic. These product-based videos should be short, from 40 seconds to two minutes in length, and highlight the key features of each product along with their benefits. Showing the product in action will help your customers understand its value and practicality.

YouTube

YouTube is the perfect platform for longer-form video marketing content. Customers use YouTube for entertainment, so this isn’t the platform for ‘in-your-face’ sales content. Instead, treat YouTube like a video blog or independent TV channel, and have fun with the content you produce. Some of your videos could be podcast-format lifestyle videos, showcasing your products and business in the context of your market and audience expectations. You can create reviews, news stories, interviews, and lifestyle pieces – whatever you feel will engage your customers, get them to subscribe to your channel, and head over to your ecommerce shop to make a purchase. You can also create instructional videos for existing customers that show people how to use your product. Assembly instructions and troubleshooting tips are always successful video categories on YouTube and often rank highly on Google, too. YouTube content can be a lot longer than product category videos, often 30 to 60 minutes or even longer.

User Generated Content

Your customers and supporters are your best advocates when it comes to video marketing, so encourage User Generated Content (UGC) wherever possible. ‘Unboxing videos’ are especially popular at the moment, and can create a sense of excitement and anticipation around your products – as well as potentially viral exposure at a fraction of the cost of traditional paid advertising. Encouraging unboxing videos is fairly straightforward. Research a small number of YouTubers who already unbox products like yours, and get in touch to ask if they are interested in receiving a free product in exchange for a video promotion. For small businesses, the best people to approach are micro-influencers – so not the biggest YouTubers with millions of subscribers, but content creators with a modest but engaged viewership of 5,000 to 100,000 or so. This approach works for a wide range of products but is especially effective for toys, homeware, jewellery, DIY tools, and lifestyle products. Potential customers will view these videos and may also share them with friends and family members on social media and WhatsApp, increasing your exposure.

Social media

LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook are great places to promote video content, and there are several ways you can do this. Platforms like Instagram Live and Facebook Live, for instance, are great for live-streaming Q&A sessions, product demonstrations, launches, and other virtual events, allowing you to engage your customers in real time. LinkedIn isn’t such a revenue-critical platform for B2C ecommerce businesses, but you can still use your LinkedIn account to publish customer testimonials to build trust and credibility or provide behind-the-scenes videos that depict your workshop, location, or the making of your product. These videos can humanise your products and brand and connect with customers at work who might buy your products in their own time.

Social media is also fertile ground for short-form videos or clips of less than a minute in length. These eye-catching, shareable clips are cheap to produce using a smartphone or device and a platform such as Vidyard and can increase your visibility on ‘Gen Z’ platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts.

How to maximise exposure and engagement for your marketing videos

To maximise exposure and engagement, video content is best used as part of an omni-channel marketing strategy. By this, we mean featuring your videos prominently on your blog, social platforms, and website as well as your purely video channels. Embed links on your homepage, within blog articles, and landing pages to engage your visitors and keep them on your site for longer. And like written content, it’s important to always include a clear CTA (call to action) within each video, explaining to viewers what you’d like them to do next – such as visiting your website, subscribing to your YouTube channel, or making a purchase.

The explosion in the popularity of video content means that social platforms are now well-optimised to promote video content through both organic and paid means. Using relevant hashtags will help your videos appear more prominently in search results on the social platforms themselves while optimising your video titles, descriptions, and meta tags will also improve searchability on Google. Some AI assistants and search engines, such as Perplexity, can also recognise videos from keywords within the video itself, so when writing video scripts, always have an eye on search terms and keywords associated with your brand, to maximise visibility on these next-gen platforms. Finally, paid advertising, using Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, or Instagram Sponsored Posts, is a good way of increasing exposure to niche demographics and extending the reach of your content.

Find out more

At JDR, we help businesses use video content as part of a multi-channel content marketing strategy, to drive sales and engagement. To find out more, please click here to send us a message, or feel free to call us directly on 01332 982198.

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