Why do product videos matter?
In today’s world, online shopping has changed the entire dynamics of the shoppinglandscape. Where attention spans are short and competition is fierce, finding effective ways to engage your potential online customers is paramount.
Product videos have emerged as a powerful and popular tool in recent years. These short, visually appealing videos can capture attention, boost conversions, and enhance the overall shopping experience.
In this blog post, we’ll explore reasons for incorporating product videos into your e-commerce page, tips to create effective product videos, and the types and styles that work best to enhance the look of your online store.
The Power of Product Videos
What is a product video?
A product video is a video that displays your product and highlights its features and benefits. It is mainly informational to help customers make their buying decisions. Product videos have rapidly become an essential component of successful e-commerce strategies. They offer several advantages that can significantly impact your business.
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Improved Engagement: Videos are inherently more engaging, quick, and easily digestible than static images or text. A well-crafted 30-second video can say a lot, grab a visitor’s attention, and keep them on your product page for a longer duration.
Enhanced Understanding: During online shopping, the greatest disadvantage a shopper has is the inability to see and gauge the product physically.
Product videos help to bridge this gap to some extent by showcasing your products from different angles, demonstrating how they work, and highlighting their key features and benefits. This clarity gives customers a better idea of your product, its quality, and its uses to make informed purchasing decisions.
Increased Conversions: Product videos work wonders at simulating an in-store experience for the viewers and convincing them. They get to see your product in action and its various features before deciding to buy. Short and crisp product videos outshine even the most detailed product description.
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According to a HubSpot survey, 90% of marketers reported that video has generated more leads, and 87% say video has helped drive sales. Online retail company, Zappos witnessed an increase in sales for items that had product demo videos.
Preventing e-commerce returns: Product videos help viewers understand the product more thoroughly. Incorporating high-quality product videos that display your product properly will reduce your number of returns post-purchase.
Tips for Creating Effective Product Videos
Now that we understand the importance of product videos, let’s delve into some practical tips to create product videos that truly captivate your audience:
Keep It Short
Keeping in mind the average attention span of individuals, the shorter the video, the better the results. Ideally, your video should be within 2 minutes, focusing on the product’s key features and benefits.
Highlight Unique Features
Showcase what makes your product special. Whether it’s a unique design, innovative functionality, or exceptional quality, make sure to emphasize these features in your video. Display how it fits into your customers’ lives. What problems will it solve? Will it improve the life of the user?
Show the Product in Use
People like seeing videos to get a better understanding of your product. Make sure that you show the product from all angles in your product videos. If possible, demonstrate how the product is used in real-life scenarios. For example, if you’re selling apparel, create a video showing its design, colour, texture, fit, and how a person looks wearing it.
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Embed the videos on your product pages
Your product videos must be easily found on your product page. Don’t make customers click a link to visit YouTube in the middle of shopping — instead, insert them on the product page only. Upload videos right in the gallery on the product page, where they’re least likely to be missed.
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Optimize for Mobile
With the rise of mobile shopping, ensure that your videos are optimised for mobile viewing. Use high-resolution clips and readable text to accommodate smaller screens.
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High-Quality Production
Make sure your video has good lighting, clear audio, and stable visuals. A shaky or poorly lit video can put off your potential clients and increase bounce rates.
Add a Call-to-Action (CTA)
Always add a clear and concise call-to-action at the end of your video. This is to guide your viewers on the next steps, whether it’s making a purchase, exploring more products, or subscribing to your newsletter.
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Types of Product Videos
Product videos are a powerful tool for showcasing your products and engaging potential customers in an e-commerce business. Here are several types of product videos you can use to enhance your online store.
Product Demos:
These videos provide a detailed overview of your product’s features, functionality, and benefits. They show the product in action, highlighting it’s key selling points.
These videos are one of the most popular eCommerce video types that are primarily incorporated by almost every brand in their online store. They help the audience to understand the product, its utility, and how to use it.
The content of these videos is kept straightforward. They don’t involve any storytelling. You can display your product from all angles giving a 360-degree view, giving customers a comprehensive view of the product – so that they can make an informed purchase decision.
These are relatively easier to shoot with minimal equipment.
How-to-Use Videos:
These videos demonstrate how to properly use and operate the product. They’re particularly useful for complex or technical items that may require guidance. A how-to video goes much deeper beyond just giving an overview of the product like a product video.
These videos show how an item works, how to use them, their features in detail, their composition, and the look and feel of the same.
Potential buyers can emulate themselves using the product and its benefits by seeing these videos. In these videos, often the highlights of the product are also explained.
Product Comparison videos:
Though the name suggests comparison videos, it’s not about badmouthing your competitor and establishing the superiority of your product.
Instead, focus on the stellar features of your product, how unique is your product, what pain points will it address, how the customers’ lives will improve using your product, and the price points in comparison to other similar products in the market.
Often, shoppers are confused between similar items, so these kinds of videos can help resolve that dilemma.
Lifestyle Videos:
These videos show the product being used in real-life scenarios that resonate with your target audience.
These videos show the product highlights, the benefits, and the problems the products will likely solve for the customers based on use cases. The use cases are tactfully aligned with the interests of the target audience so that they can imagine themselves vicariously enjoying the benefits.
This in turn would urge them to purchase the product.
Testimonials and Reviews:
Customer testimonial videos, user-generated content, and product reviews work wonders for the e-commerce product pages. Any word of mouth is amazing for your potential buyers.
These videos generally showcase how they use the product, the benefits of the product, and the exact advantages and disadvantages of the product.
Generally, people are a bit skeptical about buying anything online without seeing it in real. Testimonials and reviews from similar people who have purchased the product bring authenticity and instil confidence to go ahead and buy the product.
Video Styles:
Video ads come in a variety of styles, each designed to convey a particular message or evoke a specific emotional response. Here are some different styles of video ads that can work successfully to display your product on your e-commerce page.
Stop-Motion videos:
Stop-motion videos are a unique and eye-catching style of videos to capture the audience’s attention.
Stop-motion videos are the ones where you perceive motion in still photographs. A series of photographs are captured and presented sequentially to create the illusion of movement.
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Minor changes in the position or configuration of objects or characters being photographed are done. The sequence of photographs is played back at a standard frame rate (e.g., 24 frames per second) to create smooth and continuous motion.
These videos are ideal for showcasing products on your e-commerce page. They don’t require voice-over or background sound. So, users prefer to watch them, as most people don’t use audio while watching video content on product pages.
Interactive Videos:
An interactive video allows viewers to engage and interact with the content in some way. It combines elements of traditional product videos with interactive features, enabling the audience to actively participate or manipulate the content during playback.
Viewers can click, hover, or perform other actions within the video to trigger various responses or actions. They can choose different product options, customize colours, explore features, and view the products from different angles by dragging or swiping within the video.
Certain areas or objects within the video can be designated as hotspots that viewers can click on to access additional information, related products, or other interactive features.
Text Overlay Videos:
A text overlay video is a type of video in which text or graphics are superimposed or overlaid onto the video frames.
These overlays can convey various types of information like key features of the product, its benefits, price, etc.
Generally, product videos are viewed by people mostly on mute. So, when the visuals are paired with overlaid text, it is easier for people to understand the product comprehensively, using both eyes and ears.
Remember to align the type of product video with your brand, target audience, and the nature of the product itself. Don’t limit yourself to one specific style and type rather go in for a mix of these video formats to hook viewers and convert them to customers.
There are tons of merchants selling products online. However, the best strategy to stand taller than the rest is to make differentiation to engage your online shoppers.
The keyword-rich and SEO-optimised titles and descriptions coupled with high-quality images may be enough to draw a certain percentage of customers. But, inserting a video can provide those extra brownie points to scale up your business by attracting more customers and boosting conversions.
