In a recent post Content Marketing: Why Video Works, Shelly elaborated on the merits of video, including its power as a sales and marketing tool. Clearly, video is crucial in so many ways.
Yet, many online brands (large and small) struggle with how to get started – because traditional approaches are costly and time-intensive. And as video continues to grow in importance, the need to integrate it into your overall marketing tactics looms larger.
Great to know, but what to do?
To begin with, there are now automated solutions on the market like Treepodia that can take your data feed (product images, marketing texts, price, etc.) and automatically generate videos for each and every item you have to offer, whether it’s 100 or 100,000. Quick and inexpensive, the barrier to the world of online video is removed.
One of the great benefits of automated video solutions is that they allow for spontaneous content changes, which is important for two reasons:
First, as your product offerings change or become more robust, you’ll want the option to add new products, tweak the ones you already have (“This purse comes in brown, black and now blue”) or change the price.
Second, it’s impossible to predict what will work until you’ve given it a try and done some A/B testing, which means you actually need to create multiple video versions for each product. Factors that impact a video’s performance include the type of background music (if any at all), whether to include a voice-over or not, and whether the call-to-action is a hard sell or subtle nudge. When videos are automated, making adjustments is simple.
Interestingly, tests conducted by Treepodia on its client sites show that automated videos often outperform their costlier full-production counterparts – another point in favor of the automated approach.
Once you have your product offering covered with video, you can work with a company like Treepodia on other things – like getting your videos indexed by the search engines to improve your SEO ranking and uploading them to share sites like YouTube (these are both big efforts if you do them manually).
With a bit of effort, product videos really do work. They convert shoppers to buyers and greatly enhance your video SEO. The good news is that the effort involved with getting high-impact videos created has gotten much smaller.
This is a guest post for the V3 blog written by my friend, Lisa Diomede. Lisa is fantastic and, like so many of the friends I’m fortunate to have, she’s wicked smart. She helps clients bridge the gap between traditional communication strategies with social media integration to better communicate with their customers and elevate their brand both online and off. As the owner of LMD Communications she works with a number of B2B clients in various industries applying her 17 years of experience in public relations, advertising and marketing to develop seamless and integrated campaigns for clients that produce measurable results. Stalk her on Twitter at @ldiomede or connect with her on LinkedIn – you’ll be glad you did.
Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years’ experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging develoment, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly’s coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”
