Why Make a Video?
Creating videos to boost your eCommerce sales has many advantages for your marketing strategy. Videos add a much more personal touch to your company, allowing you to connect with customers more effectively. Videos enable prospects to see and hear a company representative walk them through what they provide instead of just reading words on a website.
This builds a bridge of trust between the company and the consumer. Customers can now put a face or a voice to the brand, which creates a greater sense of intimacy that goes beyond the purely transactional nature of most purchases. Customers feel spoken to on a more “personal” level.
Videos also create a sense of authenticity, which is a natural result of seeing and hearing someone rather than just reading their words. And, with authenticity comes a feeling that the company is being transparent and open, whether they’re a new eCommerce business or an established one. You can also use video ads to promote your products and services. Think of big restaurant franchises like Burger King or KFC. They know that video marketing for restaurants is what draws customers to their food by inducing hunger and cravings.
On a more practical level, reading can be draining. It’s much easier to sit back and listen to someone explain their product to you than to engage in the more energy-intensive act of reading. This is especially true when it comes to engaging via mobile devices – it’s a lot more relaxing to listen to audio or watch a video about commercial phone systems than to scroll through chunks of texts on a screen the size of your hand. Now, with tools like AI voiceover generator, it’s easier to make these videos than ever.
These factors add up to better brand awareness, higher traffic to your website, more leads, and more conversions.
What Kind of Video Should You Make?
Videos for marketing can include all kinds of information: They can be story-based, creating a narrative around your brand that connects with viewers on an emotional level. They can be descriptive, explaining how your product is used and its various features and functions. They can focus on customer reviews. They can inform your audience about your brand’s values and mission.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all method when it comes to making videos. You might want to make a whole series covering different topics. An AI video generator can streamline the creation process, allowing for consistent and high-quality content. This will likely save a lot of time and money in the long run and address a lot of customer questions.
If you want to make a video explaining and demonstrating your VoIP phone setup process, you could consider making another video to support this discussing your company’s values and a third with customer reviews.
How Should You Approach Making Sales-boosting Videos?
Know your audience
Some market research can reveal your typical consumer profile: the average age of your audience, as well as their gender and income level. The more in-depth you go, the more you can find out: their values, interests, hobbies.
But you can go even more personal than that by asking your followers on social media to tell you what they want to learn more about from your videos. You can ask them to comment on your posts with suggestions or answer questionnaires. Then, when you make a video following some of the more popular or common suggestions, you create an even greater sense of intimacy because you listened and responded.
The great thing about the best social media marketing companies is companies’ ability to connect more directly with a large audience. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of Instagram in that way.
Set a budget
Some people will do this later on, but having an idea upfront (before knowing all of the costs) of your budget can protect you from overspending later on. You can always revisit this stage at the end, but be realistic with yourself about what you would reasonably like to spend.
Your budget should include the price of equipment, hiring actors, sets, scriptwriters, editors, paying to boost the visibility of your videos via social media or video-hosting websites, etc.
You can choose a very DIY approach and avoid expensive equipment in favor of using your own phone’s camera, with the quality of these being so high nowadays. Maybe you’re attracted to the idea of drone footage. Well, it’s very likely that you already know someone with a drone camera – ask around your techy friends and family!
And most people have hidden talents – you could easily be hiding the next Morgan Freeman in your midsts. Before outsourcing the work, check whether you can do it in-house. There are tons of free tutorials online that you can follow for video editing, too.
You will want a high-quality feel to your video, but this doesn’t have to break the bank. And don’t forget: expensive does not equate to high quality.
Consider your goals
What would you like to achieve from your video marketing strategy? Is it increased brand awareness? An increased eCommerce conversion rate? More positive impressions of your company? All of these?
Whatever you want to achieve, make sure you can put a number on it. If you aim to boost sales, decide by how much and give it a timeframe. Keep it SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound). Don’t give yourself impossible goals, and make sure they are measurable.
Keeping an eye on your Key Performance Indicators (measurable indicators of your success) will help you see what is and isn’t working.
Keep it short and sweet
You’ll want to get to the point before your audience gets bored and skips to the next video. We all have shorter attention spans nowadays, with so many things constantly vying for our attention.
43% of people spend less than 30 minutes a day, in total, watching videos, so if you want your content to make up some of those 30 minutes, make sure not to drag it out, and place your most important points as early in the video as you can.
You’ll also want to make it catchy. Spend a bit of time perfecting your script to make it interesting enough to leave viewers with a positive impression.
Don’t forget a call to action
It’s easy to get carried away in your cinematographic masterpiece in a bid to become the next Sofia Coppola, but don’t forget why you’re making this. Make sure to include a call to action early in your video to check out your video phone website, for example. Some might put this at the end of their video, but there’s no harm in featuring this both at the start and end.
Make it as easy as possible for viewers to understand how to purchase your product, visit your website, get in touch with you, or whatever else you’d like to gain from your video.
Make it look good!
This goes without saying, but you’ll want to make sure that the lighting in your video is on point, that your actors’ (if you’re using actors) makeup is perfect, that you can’t see the shadow of the camera in the video (unless you’re going for a DIY, home-made feel). A common error is to assume you have to spend a lot of money to make a good video, but if TikTok examples have shown us anything this last year, it’s that anyone can make a viral video with some creativity.
You can spend some time looking at videos that have gone viral and take notes about what you could replicate in your own video. There’s a lot of royalty-free music available that you can use (just make sure to credit the musician).
However, if you have the budget, you could just pay a professional to make the video for you. There are tons of talented film students and graduates you could contact for help.
Share that baby!
Once your video is complete, with a killer script and Wes Anderson-esque cinematography, it’s time to show your baby off. Make sure to share it across all of your retail social media marketing platforms.
You can also use stills from the video in different parts of your website or social media for additional visual content. You can endlessly repurpose content from the video, and you should keep any bloopers to use at a later date.
If you have variations of the video available, keep those too! Milk your video for all it’s worth. Your main aim is to market, so market away.
Making Videos Isn’t Hard
It just requires some vigorous research beforehand and a little bit of creativity. You’ll want to keep your marketing knowledge at the forefront while making and sharing the video, but you should prioritize the viewer’s experience. What will they connect with emotionally? What do they want to know more about? And don’t forget what your goals are, whether they involve increasing sales or brand awareness.
Time is precious, so you’ll want to keep it short, to the point, and memorable for all the right reasons.