Using videos to boost your eShop conversions
There is a common conversion challenge that most online brands face at least once.
Yes, you can produce great content for your website and social networks; and yes, you can get a lot of traction to your channels. But when it comes to turning curious visitors into valued customers, there is not always a clear path to follow to ensure success.
It's not surprising that many eShops experience this. During the conversion stage of your customers' journey, you must work on many fronts simultaneously. You need to convey confidence, explain your product clearly, as well as address questions that remain in your prospects' minds.
This is not a task that can be accomplished with a generic strategy. However, having the right promotional video for the right job can help you engage in a closer conversation with your customers, motivating them to take that extra step you want.
To help you with that, we bring you six types of videos to use in your marketing strategy and convert more consistently. We will tell you all about why to use each and get the most out of these pieces.
Showcasing Brand Values and Building Confidence
A crucial challenge facing all eShops when trying to boost conversions is how to stand out from the competition. As a brand, what can you do to convey your unique values and build a special relationship with your customers?
This is the main problem that many companies struggle with in terms of getting their message across. But by creating persuasive company story videos and testimonials, you will be in the best position to give customers that final little push they need to convert.
Company Story Videos
Conveying credibility not simply a matter of how innovative your product is, but of trust. For customers to be willing to give you a vote of confidence, you need to establish yourself as a reliable and professional provider that’s personally invested in meeting the customers’ needs.
This is precisely what a company story video helps you project. These pieces focus on how your brand was conceived as an idea and the efforts that you and your colleagues take to bring creative solutions to your clients.
By featuring commentaries from the human faces behind your company—the staff, managers, CEO, and so on—you can better transmit the mission that drives your work every day.
Brainy tip: Curious prospects don't just want to hear about your company's backstage operations. They want to get a real sense of what it's like to be there on a day-to-day basis.
To convey your work environment’s atmosphere more effectively, feature footage from your company’s various offices, rooms, and open areas. Like a museum exhibit presentation, having people talking about the individual exhibits is great—but you also want to recreate a tour experience!
Testimonial Videos
You should always remember that prospects also want to get other customers' perspectives; people like them who have already tried your products. Nothing like a customer testimonial video can better showcase how happy clients benefited from your brand.
Producing this type of video is not only useful to communicate how others have used your product. Crucially, these pieces feature the story of how people came to your brand in the first place—what problems, challenges, and needs your solution came to address.
By having these authentic insights from other people, curious prospects can empathize with their journey and appreciate your brand's potential to meet their own needs.
Brainy tip: When you set out to create a video testimonial for your eShop, make sure you don't tie yourself to a too-tight script. On the contrary, you want to leave your interviewees enough freedom to express themselves freely and openly.
How to do it? When planning the interview and discussing it with the featured speaker, agree only on basic conversation topics—not on a list of pre-formulated questions. That way, the respondent will be able to respond on the spot, without bringing in previously rehearsed answers.
Effectively Communicating a Product’s Features
Customers in the conversion process are curious to discover what makes your product unique—and you should have material ready to show them! To do this, you want to use the full power of video to explain your solution unambiguously and in detail.
For that purpose, we bring you two different options that, implemented in your marketing strategy, can cause wonders to your eShop. They are product videos and explainers.
Product Videos
Your product deserves to be shown in all its glory. For this, you have invested a lot in landing pages, professional photo sessions, and compelling marketing copies. Now it's time to create a product video.
Two extremely important aspects go into crafting an awesome product video:
- The visuals. You want to show a full picture of your product that leaves no doubt in your customers' eyes. To do this, it's crucial not only to show all its angles—have actors wear the product, grab and weigh it in their hands.
- The test. Beyond offering a list of your product's parts and functionalities, showcase how people can use it in their day-to-day lives. Create scenes to give evidence of the activities in which your solution is useful and even pass it through extreme tests that reveal its quality.
Brainy tip: Sometimes, you don’t need to say anything about your product to demonstrate its features. It’s all about the script!
Watch this piece by Solo Stove as an illustration. To communicate the range of activities one can do with their backpacking stove, they simply show you clips of a guy carrying it, using it, and overall making his trip easier with the product. All without uttering a word!
Explainer Videos
In their efforts to generate more conversions for their eShops, more and more brands are turning to animated explainer videos to engage audiences on the various social channels.
This type of content has the advantage of being very versatile, so you can take many different approaches. For example, you can use them for:
- Introducing the product.
- Explaining its parts and features.
- Framing it within a story.
And just as you can serve all these purposes and many more, you also have different styles to choose from.
Through hand-drawn animations, whiteboard videos perfectly illustrate multi-layered products and processes. Motion graphics are best used to represent data and colorful shapes. If you want to show by example, a character video is your choice to put viewers in the shoes of people who think and act like them.
Brainy tip: Although we’ve focused primarily on the different styles of animation, there is no single formula in stone on how to create an ideal explainer video for you.
Take this video by BetterUp, for instance. Here, the motion graphics style is perfectly blended with live-action footage. The result gives us a picture of how the service looks and works and how people like you and I can expect to use it in real life.
Dealing with Consumer Concerns
Sometimes, what prevents a prospect from passing from visitor to customer is that they lack important information to make a confident purchase. Will this product serve their needs? How is it different from other solutions? Is it practical to use?
These are some questions that hang in their heads, but that you can deal with them through FAQ videos and educational pieces.
FAQs Videos
To anticipate questions from customers, you’ve likely created landing and description pages, and written FAQ sections. But why not transform that material into engaging videos?
A good video headlined with a specific question is of huge help for visitors who are looking for all kinds of information. You can dedicate clips to different themes, such as:
- How to properly use the product (e.g., times of day, quantities).
- Ways to take advantage of its features.
- How to store it or clean it so that it lasts.
- Best ways to use it with what the audience already has at home (say, tea suppliers can offer recipes of their own).
Whether as embeds on your website or as YouTube playlists, customers will appreciate this content.
Brainy tip: The mark of a good FAQ video is in its usefulness to customers. Therefore, you must devise any resources you can use to address the question at hand. In some cases, that may mean performing a live demonstration to exemplify the point you are making.
For example, if the question is about how to maintain or install your product, it would be great to have the speaker also take the role of performing the process on his own. By showing the step-by-step to viewers, they will leave with a very good idea of what your solution is all about.
Educational Videos
Many times, your prospects’ questions go beyond technicalities. They concern broader issues about why this product line can bring benefits to their lives; how they do it; and whether there is a history or research that supports it.
For active-minded clients, an educational video is a must. With this type of content, you can take on any topic related to your product - relevant to your audience - allowing you to showcase your expertise in the field through your informed insights and practical solutions.
Brainy tip: A good educational video should not be a passive spectacle. You need to involve your viewers in the learning process and motivate them to pursue more. To do this, it’s useful to break away from the lecture format and instead encourage critical thinking with appropriate CTAs.
When writing your script or showing data, be sure to introduce questions to let your audience ruminate on the issue's relevance or inviting them to take action. Prospects interested in learning more will most likely leave hungry for more.
Conclusion
Crafting an awesome video for your online brand can be the solution to the mystery of converting prospects into happy customers. As they're versatile, videos can be used for many kinds of purposes—whether it's to demonstrate your solution, build a stronger bond with your customers, or set yourself as a reliable thought leader.
Once you've taken on the task of producing pieces for your company, be sure to repurpose them for distribution on all your social channels.
Many brands out there (as well as users) are living their success story as a result of exploring with video. What are you waiting for to write yours?
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Victor Blasco is the founder and CEO of Yum Yum Videos (animated explainer video company), audiovisual designer and video marketing expert. Aside from running the business, he loves studying Chinese philosophy and is a real geek for science fiction films and comics! The force is strong...
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