While it’s easy to get started on Shopify, running a successful ecommerce business is more challenging than before, in part because the market is saturated. With more ecom businesses and increasingly savvy online shoppers, people understand how to evaluate a Shopify vendor better than ever before.
This means that in order to stay ahead of your competition you need to utilise every marketing advantage. One way you can elevate it is with cutting-edge video content automation. Here are some tips for how you can implement video content into your Shopify store’s marketing strategy.
1. Make Product Demos
A product demo is more of a promotional tool than a product. Here, you want to highlight the features you believe your customers will want to spend money on as well as showcase the benefits of your product.
The key to making this seamless is picking the right automation tool to integrate with Shopify. It’s important to remember that you’re using an automation tool because this is a process you intend to repeat. There will be many products and demos, so you want something with customisable templates that will be easy to edit later.
Another crucial thing you want to do is make the demo as inclusive as possible. With tools like Audio Joiner, you can quickly produce transcriptions and subtitles, making the video accessible to those who are hard of hearing or those who prefer to watch videos without sound. The latter represents about 80% of all users. Many people will just leave the demo if the video can’t be watched without a sound.
Finally, make sure you prepare a script. A demo video is still a piece of media that needs to have a structure. What order do you want to present the features of the product? What do you want to accentuate? While this may seem spontaneous in a video, producing content that looks effortless will take a lot of careful planning and staging.
2. Create Dynamic Product Ads
The simplest way to make the ad more effective is to serve it to a willing participant. Your conversion rates and revenue will skyrocket if you serve the ads to the right people.
There are two ways to approach this. The first one is superior direct targeting:
The first ad the person receives is of the product they’re interested in. The second one includes personalised recommendations. You need to focus on similar items, items they might also like (many upselling and cross-selling opportunities), and items based on their customer profile.
Another way to enhance how dynamic your ads are is to create a sense of urgency. You want to let your potential customers know that the offer is amazing, but expiring. If you make it hint at the fact that there are a lot of people out there who are about to seize this opportunity, you can double down with a strong FOMO effect and help nudge people towards making a purchase.
The key thing to remember is that there are so many ways to make the delivery of these ads dynamic. It’s possible to use software that, for example, tracks weather reports and adjusts content to customers in different geographical locations based on real-time weather changes. People are more open to buying umbrellas when it’s raining, and more likely to buy shorts and t-shirts when the weather is warmer.
Cross-channel consistency is one of the most important things for you to take into consideration. Having different messages delivered on different channels is counter-productive and may cause confusion in your audience - make sure your messaging is consistent across different videos, ads and platforms.
3. Experiment with Interactive Videos
The biggest problem with the conversion rates of traditional videos is that they are one-sided and viewers consume the content passively. What does this mean? Well, they can just play the ad or the video in the background without ever needing to pay attention to it.
Interactive videos are different. Not only do they stop progressing without a return action from the viewer, but they also may take different paths depending on the actions and interactions of the viewer. They require user input and, in many ways, work on a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ principle.
Now, you also want to make your videos interesting and immersive enough for people to want to interact with them in the first place. This is particularly hard with text-based content, so you might want to do a voiceover. Here, you can hire a voice actor or pick an AI voice generation tool. The latter is probably quicker, simpler, and much easier to replicate in the future, which leads to greater brand consistency.
Still, what interactive elements could you use in your content? Well, some of them are clickable buttons, but others have traditional forms like polls and quizzes. Sometimes, you may be required to find a hotspot, which is a particularly clever way to make your user pay attention to a larger portion of your content.
Another thing you can do is create a storyboard. This way, you can ask your clients to put together a story from various elements, which helps them become invested in the content without even realising it.
4. Collect and Edit UGC (User Generated Content)
One of the strongest sales drivers for Shopify stores is testimonials from customers and different forms of social proof. The thing is that people want to hear less from the marketers and more from ‘people like them.’
First, you need to collect all these testimonials and incorporate them into your video. You could use text taken directly from customer reviews and maybe add a voiceover, or even ask customers to leave video reviews that you can repurpose in your own marketing material.
The thing to remember is that even the most interested customers won’t scroll too much through the reviews or comments section. They’ll just read a few to get a general sense of customer sentiment.
Also keep in mind that these reviews need to be fresh. It will be more difficult to convert people with old reviews, especially if you’re getting new products or your old products are getting new features.
One of the best tips for writing great ecommerce product descriptions is to use sensory language, and with the help of videos, this will be a lot easier. This way, you can take a simple two-sentence review and turn it into something much more engaging.
5. Create Automated Video Templates
Previously, we looked at the importance of templates in demonstration videos; however, this is not exclusive to demos. Video templates will help you produce content much more quickly and make them more consistent.
On platforms like Shopify, where you, as a retailer, have so many products, it’s far better for your brand to have all of these videos follow the same structure.
In an ideal world, your visitors would consume the entirety of your content, but in reality, they’ll probably skip through it. A uniform and segmented video will be easier to ‘skim through’. While this may seem like you’re helping them get around actually watching your content, this is not always the case. They’ll consume your content like they always do (perhaps even more faithfully due to you making it easier). So, the net benefit is you’ll raise viewer satisfaction.
Now, this is the part where you can incorporate everything we’ve talked about so far. You can make dynamic and interactive content, incorporate UGC, and more. The key thing is that when you make templates to support these formats and concepts, you’re actually making this integration much easier.
Video Marketing Helps Create Successful Ecommerce
Video content is likely to be a preferred format for the majority of your potential buyers, which means that it should be an important component of your online marketing.
When handled well, video automation can improve everything from making your videos more dynamic, to incorporating UGC to increase conversions.
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