If you’re a brand that sells online, you probably noticed a pandemic-related surge in e-commerce sales. With this shift to e-commerce, your brand needs to adjust to capitalize on this trend. Even as the world opens up again, online shopping is here to stay.
We know that video is key to selling almost anything online. Stats show that 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by video, and nearly half of online shoppers look for a video related to a product before making a purchase.
Maybe you’ve got some high-production, picture-perfect brand videos – these are nice to have, but they’re expensive to make and don’t reflect your real customers. Authentic experience videos are the missing piece of the puzzle to truly convey the experience of using your products and give your customers the confidence to click through to checkout?
The power of authenticity
With the shift to e-commerce, consumers lose the ability to touch or try on a product or have questions answered by staff.
In many cases, online shoppers have to rely on text reviews to make a purchase. However, text reviews are sometimes viewed as inauthentic by shoppers. ? Plus, research shows that consumers are over 50% more likely to leave a negative review (following a bad experience) than they are to leave a positive one after a good experience, so there’s a noteworthy bias to text reviews.
So, how many videos does your brand need?
To understand this, let’s dive a bit into a few elements around videos and how they’d fit into your big picture.
Longevity
As a shopper, do you trust a video that’s six years old? Neither do we! Everything from clothing to tech to tried-and-true recipes (like KFC’s) have had to change. Video longevity depends on the industry or topic, so there’s no rule of thumb, but any video over a year old risks being seen as irrelevant or stale.
Topics
What stories matter to your site visitors today? We’ll save you the guesswork. You actually don’t know. There are a variety of different stories that your shoppers may be interested in, such as how a certain piece of clothing fits or how to install a product. Given that you will need different story types, how many video stories do you need on your product pages? There’s no magic number since the answer is as many as it takes to build trust and confidence to buy.
If you’re a clothing brand ?, you may have a mix of authentic video stories that look like these below.
If you’re a company that sells cheese ?, your video stories might look like this:
But seriously, how many videos do I need?
As for how many stories from how many real people it takes to help build trust and confidence, our basic equation would look like this:
But keep in mind that personalized videos matter. We all know online shoppers come from different cities in the world, and they all have different preferences and tastes. This is where personalization comes into play – it’s a game-changer! Targeting specific audiences is key because consumers are more likely to trust reviews and opinions from people they can relate to in terms of geographic location, age, gender or lifestyle. Language is another important parameter around personalization. Taking into account all of these, the ideal equation becomes:
The more video content you have, the better your chances of that content boosting your SEO ranking and landing on top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Video is also what is performing best on social media currently (and given priority via algorithms), so it goes without saying that your video strategy is a worthwhile investment.
Bottom line
Authentic, story-first videos by real people are just the ticket to drive natural online buyer engagement for your brand.
Don’t get overwhelmed – we can help! StoryTap is a story-led video automation tool that creates authentic, engaging videos starring your own customers or staff. All videos include SEO metadata and are fully controlled by you and free to share across multiple channels (including social media) from our user-friendly platform.
Those were a lot of words, but it’s actually super simple. Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how StoryTap can turbocharge your brand growth online. Leverage our extensive experience in gathering authentic videos to drive traffic to your site. We’ll help you produce videos, ensure quality, and even track your results.
Book a demo with our team at StoryTap to learn more.
