Regardless of your company’s niche, ecommerce product videos have proven to be exceptionally reliable assets to get your target audience on board with what you have to offer.
Whether you need to communicate key features, showcase important differentiators, or make people smile when thinking about your brand, optimized product videos are game changers to most marketing pushes.
Or at least they _can _be when you take the time to truly understand how they fit into your overall strategy and learn to deploy them in ways that maximize their potential.
Luckily, that’s what this piece is all about 😎
Keep reading, and not only will you get a better sense of how these videos can fit into your next video marketing push, but you’ll also get a solid blueprint for making product videos that lead to sales—examples and all!
Why use video for ecommerce?
As practical contributions to your strategy go, video content tends to outperform all other mediums in four areas that are essential to generate conversions in digital marketing:
- Engagement and general appeal.
- Effective communication.
- Generating responses.
- SEO and discoverability.
It’s no coincidence that the average person spends 1.4 times more time on websites with videos than those without; or that adding videos to your marketing emails consistently leads to increased open rates.
Maybe more importantly, few can deny the tangible and widespread impact an excellent ecommerce product video can have on potential customers.
After all, 85% of people who use the popular video-centric platform YouTube in their shopping journey say they have purchased or plan to purchase from a brand more than once.
And in terms of discoverability? Well, it surprises no one that more than half of the world’s largest generation, 59% of Gen Zers, to be precise, use short-form videos to discover things they then watch even longer videos about.
Moreover, 86% of marketers using video content in their strategy state it’s effective for lead generation.
All in all, these stats present but a brief snapshot of the overall scope and reach that optimized video content can bring to bear on most marketing strategies across the board. But what about product videos, specifically?
Well, let’s take a closer look at the channels you should focus on when using these types of videos and how they synergize and improve performance in each.
The best places to leverage ecommerce product videos
Any effective marketing funnel nowadays involves a variety of channels, content, and mediums working together to help potential customers navigate their purchase journey.
To make the most out of your product videos, you want to understand how this specific kind of marketing video synergizes with these popular channels and get a sense of what they bring to the table in each particular instance.
That way, you can better understand which approach would work best for your strategy and choose the ones that will benefit you the most!
Product pages
As their name suggests, product videos and product pages go hand-in-hand. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a respectable online store or ecommerce platform today that doesn’t feature video content on its product pages in some way.
Now, not two products are ever the same. So, the best way to enhance your product pages with an ecommerce product video varies significantly from situation to situation.
But when it’s all said and done, the truth is that a high-quality video can showcase your offerings in ways that no glamour shot or in-depth text description or white paper ever could.
Just keep in mind, we are not talking about a one-size-fits-all situation here.
We’ll revisit this when we talk about the different types of product videos at your disposal. But by and large, just consider that every product page tied to your company’s ecommerce activity should feature some form of video content, just to avoid being behind the curve.
Landing pages
Although they share some core similarities with a product page, dedicated landing pages are a beast of their own in terms of practical implementation and product video integrations.
While a product video on a product page is primarily there as a piece of content that showcases the product and highlights its features, you’ll want to optimize both your landing page and ecommerce product video to synergize with each other.
This includes practices like choosing a type of product video that meshes well with your landing’s conversion objectives and using custom CTAs in the footage that reference elements of the landing page itself.
On the other side of that equation, you want to design your landing in a way that features your product video as a centerpiece while polishing all other design and UX elements around it.
Handling things like this requires much more planning and forethought than just sticking a random product video to a hastily put-together landing page. But do it right, and you can end up with a thoroughly reliable conversion generation engine that consistently adds to your funnel.
Online ad placements
While not ever-present, online and PPC ad campaigns form a significant part of many digital marketing strategies. Understandably so, as a well-timed ad strategy can provide that initial momentum most digital campaigns need to get rolling.
Needless to say, in an environment that is all about quickly capturing a passing viewer’s attention and getting them to click, videos tend to outperform other forms of content for ads.
That’s why you see the most prominent ad platforms on the market—like Facebook and Google Ads—constantly enhancing and improving their video integration features.
It’s important to mention here that not all product videos are designed in a way that would work well as online ad placements. So, you may want to go for a different type of video for these.
However, _some _types of product videos make for shockingly compelling ads or can be edited to make ad placements far more eye-catching than they would otherwise have been.
Social media posts and uploads
Over the past five years or so, we’ve seen all the major players in the social media landscape evolve to either feature video content more prominently on their platforms or outright make it their focal point.
Even on wildly popular social platforms that initially had nothing to do with videos—like Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter—video content is now a key feature, if not the mainstay.
This, again, is no accident. It’s just a function of the market adapting to users’ demand for video content and companies evolving to focus on what works best.
By that same logic, you should always look and seize every opportunity to distribute your ecommerce product videos on the social platform of your brand’s choice.
With the understanding that not all product videos work the same, and some might need to be produced, shaped, or explicitly edited to perform better under the particular limitations and requirements of said social channel.
Meaning that a product video you intend to upload to your company’s YouTube channel should never be exactly the same as one you intend to share as a Story on your company’s Instagram.
Email campaigns
To this day, email remains one of the most consistently reliable channels of engagement that established businesses have to reach out and connect with their target audience.
And, as we mentioned at the beginning, plenty of evidence showcases how powerful the synergy between email campaigns and marketing videos can be.
The long and short of it is that video-powered emails tend to outperform those without video content in all areas of relevance: open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
Use that synergy to get your optimized ecommerce product video into the inboxes of potential customers sitting at the latter stages of their purchasing journey, and the results will speak for themselves.
Blog posts
Last, but certainly not least, it’s worth mentioning that your product videos can make significant contributions to your regular blog content uploads.
It’s a well-known fact that including any video content on your pages improves their performance—and your blog posts are no different in this regard.
Beyond the obvious opportunities to generate some extra conversions, embedding product videos followed by a banner with a compelling CTA in the right blog post can be very effective).
Just adding these videos to blogs tends to improve dwell times, which are crucial for search engine rankings.
Moreover, when you optimize these videos’ metadata, they can even rank themselves on SERPs and drive more visits to your content and site, adding to your overall discoverability and digital footprint.
Six effective types of ecommerce product videos you can use to engage your audience
Just as it happens with the products themselves, ecommerce product videos come in all shapes and sizes. This means some types will be better than others, depending on your marketing strategy’s specific needs and goals.
To help you choose the right tool for each job, we’ll be taking a closer look at some of the most effective types of ecommerce product videos most DTC brands use today. Break down some real-world examples, and provide insight into the best practices for each style.
Product Videos
Probably the most recognizable type of ecommerce video around, traditional product videos—a.k.a. Product Demos and Product Showcases—are precisely what they sound like; video content that puts your product in the spotlight.
Now, you can think of this category as a stage where products are the protagonists; and just like with theater, there are as many types of plays and genres as you can think of.
This is why a 3D render showcase of Samsung’s latest phone and a GoPro-branded and sponsored skydiving maneuver video can both fit into this category. What that means is that product videos will look dramatically different, hinging on the product in question, its audience, and the company’s overall branding.
Yet, as diverse as they can be, some core elements and design principles separate highly effective ecommerce product videos from other forms of video content. Here are some of the key ones:
- They all revolve around showcasing your product’s key value proposition and/or features in ways that will strike a chord with your audience.
- They make an effort to underline or illustrate the positive impact and potential benefits that using the product can have in the target audience’s lives.
- They underline the context in which your product is meant to be relevant; to reinforce their need and potential impact in your viewer’s (and potential customer’s) eyes.
Here’s a great example of those elements in play:
Best practices & implementation tips for Product Videos:
No online sales platform or optimized product page should be without a top-shelf product video of some kind. The more traditional style of product videos—like showcases—makes for great additions to landing pages as well. Product videos that share particularly striking visual components can also be edited down to make for genuinely eye-catching ad campaign pieces.
Some additional production considerations to improve these videos’ performance:
- Showing your products in action—or otherwise illustrating the real-world context where your products shine—is essential to effective product videos.
- Your products have features you want to highlight, but customers care most about results and outcomes. Never address one without the other.
- Avoid reducing your product videos to just a list of their characteristics; always look for opportunities and unique approaches to showcase your product in a way your audience will find compelling, appealing, novel, and memorable.
Explainer Videos
Explainers have become a widely used tool to promote products and services across most niches but are particularly prominent in the IT, Healthcare, and Fintech industries.
These videos are all about using a simple-to-grasp, three-act narrative to convey a lot of information quickly and effectively. It’s this format that makes them ideal for presenting particularly complex products to an audience in a way that’s not only understandable but also memorable.
In practical terms, product-centric video explainers offer some unique advantages in three key areas: customer engagement, understanding, and conversion generation. Here’s how they do it:
- By tying your product to a story or narrative that starts by outlining your audience’s pain points, explainers can generate instant appeal from a viewer that struggles with the same problem as your video’s protagonist.
- Their structure then ties that shared paint point into efficient descriptions of your product’s main features or key value proposition—using visual communication elements to fully illustrate concepts that would otherwise be difficult to grasp. This cuts down runtimes dramatically, making them viable in a marketing setup.
- The narrative then naturally progresses to a call to action that reflects the goals and results you expect from your explainer, as illustrated by the video’s story and visuals, prompting viewers to take action.
Here’s a great example of those elements in play:
Best practices & implementation tips for product-centric Explainer Videos:
Due to their unique ability to convey lots of relevant information quickly and effectively, explainers make perfect additions to your conversion-oriented product landing pages and blog posts. They also make for great uploads to video-centric social platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
Some additional production considerations to improve these videos’ performance:
- Each act of your explainer’s narrative should address the “what,” “how,” and “why” of your product.
- Refine your script and visual communication elements to help you keep the runtime as low as possible. Ideally, you want your explainers to last 120 seconds or less.
- To speed up the production process, you can use customized animations and live-action stock footage to form a compelling and entertaining explainer video.
- Effective explainers are always highly targeted. This includes practices like modeling your characters to mirror your audience’s preferences, style, and even the way they talk.
- Always include a clear Call to Action at the end, and synergize it with the UX design of any landing page you upload them to.
How-to Videos
Are you aware that How-to Videos earn the most attention out of every content category on YouTube? Outperforming even music clips and gaming content?
Let that sink in for a moment.
Here’s a video content format that, in terms of generating interest, sits at the top of the second-largest search engine and largest video content platform in the world.
At their core, How-to videos are a particular kind of educational video content that follows a very distinctive structure and language, which earns them a category of their own.
These videos are all about illustrating how to carry out a process that addresses a need by following a simple step-by-step approach.
And it is that focus on addressing viewers’ needs that makes this style so effective when promoting your products. Here’s how they do it:
- By developing a How-to around your audience’s pain point, you get to showcase your products as providers of the solution, allowing you to highlight core features and effectively put your products front and center but in a much subtler way.
- Due to their procedural nature, these pieces tend to be very easy to engage with and can appeal to a broad portion of your audience—hence, their popularity.
- If done right, your How-to will provide an immediate and tangible benefit to viewers’ lives, painting your product and brand in an undeniably positive light.
Here’s a great example of those elements in play:
Best practices & implementation tips for product-centric How-to Videos:
How-tos can be an awareness-generation goldmine when uploaded to the right social media platforms whose communities have already shown to love the format—like Instagram and YouTube.
They can also serve as both top and bottom-of-the-funnel content when paired with a suitably optimized email campaign that targets one or the other type of audience.
Some additional production considerations to improve these videos’ performance:
- As ecommerce product videos, your How-tos will live or die by your ability to identify the bulk of your audience’s core problem or need and quickly show how to solve it using your product.
- Forget about narrative flourishes. Visual quality is important, but the audience for this content is interested in efficiency and practicality. Get to the point quickly and clearly.
- Test mockups of your video before wrapping up production. You want to develop a piece of content that most of your audience will find useful from a practical standpoint, so some testing will go a long way.
Third-party Product Videos
We are using this category to group up two types of mostly third-party, product-centric videos your brand can nurture—or even sponsor—to help it build buzz and awareness around your offerings; Unboxing Videos and Product Reviews.
Unboxing Videos started as informal, user-generated content where people showcased the details of the content of a product they’d bought. Today, it is a highly-popular style of product videos you can either make yourself or partner with influencers to produce for you.
Similarly, Product Reviews work as offshoots of Testimonial Videos, where a third party does a deep dive into your product’s features while providing commentary and comparisons with similar products.
They both represent a unique approach to promoting your offerings that has the advantage of feeling more impartial and approachable. Here’s how they do it:
- By involving third parties in the process, claims and insights around your product’s features tend to come across as more transparent, impartial, and potentially vetted by the ones working on the content.
- As you reach out to partner with or sponsor influencers in your niche to work on these types of ecommerce product videos, you get to benefit from increased exposure and reach through their established audiences.
- Last but not least, having originated as exclusively user-generated content, these formats are incredibly popular among users at the latter stages of their buying journey. Particularly those looking for third-party opinions and insights to overcome last-minute resistance.
Here’s a great example of those elements in play:
Best practices & implementation tips for Third-party Ecommerce Product Videos:
Both Unboxing Videos and Product Reviews were born on social media, so it’s not surprising that they both provide a great way to promote your products in your company’s social channel of choice.
They can also make for fantastic supporting content added to your product and landing pages whenever design allows without it feeling too crowded.
Some additional production considerations to improve these videos’ performance:
- Reach out to industry-relevant influencers with an already established audience in your niche for maximum effect.
- These videos should always involve people genuinely interested in your product. Trying to force on-camera presence or portray investment where there is none will hardly ever result in a good piece of content.
- While it is perfectly fine to partner with (or sponsor) third parties to work on this content for you, always disclose these relationships to viewers upfront.
Product-oriented Behind-the-scenes Videos
We all like to take a quick peek behind the curtains and see how the wizard is doing what they are doing—it’s human nature. And it’s precisely because of that innate curiosity that Behind-the-scenes marketing videos tend to be so popular across the board.
Now, depending on their content and the angle you take, these videos can belong to different “genres.”
They first became popular mostly thanks to behind-the-scenes looks at big events and live presentations.
But today, you can leverage the same core principle and style by developing personalized content that provides your audience a peek into the many processes involved in the production of your products.
A tour of your production line, a day in the life of your programming team, or simply a showcase of “coffee time in the office” that happens to involve your product. These are all ideal opportunities to capture your audience’s interest and drive it to what you offer.
Done right, these videos can provide meaningful contributions to your product marketing efforts and generate new opportunities to capture your audience’s attention. Here’s how they do it:
- They showcase your products from a unique perspective that wouldn’t be readily accessible through other types of content.
- They convey a tone of authenticity and spontaneity that most audiences find compelling and help build trust toward your product and brand.
- They provide a sense of exclusivity or unusual access that makes the content feel fresh and interesting in terms of opportunity.
Here’s a great example of those elements in play:
Best practices & implementation tips for product-oriented Behind-the-scenes Videos:
These videos represent another fantastic addition to your brand’s social media content strategy.
In terms of production, they aren’t as resource-intensive as the other types of videos we’ve discussed so far, so they can complement and round out your social content strategy quite nicely.
However, this type of content usually follows an intensive schedule, so effective time management during production is vital.
They can also be a great source of footage you can repurpose for ad campaigns or used as-is in a dedicated email campaign geared toward customer delight.
Some additional production considerations to improve these videos’ performance:
- While providing a peek behind the curtains is the main goal here, make sure you find ways to tie that peek to your product or service.
- Be relevant. Just rolling cameras on your production floor can be a boring affair if you don’t have some on-camera talent or hook that keeps viewers engaged.
- Use these videos as an opportunity to showcase all the hard work, creativity, innovation, and passion that goes into making your products possible.
Wrapping up
As a marketing tool, Product Videos come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and that means there’s no simple approach from a one-size-fits-all perspective.
However, by understanding the different ways in which these different styles of ecommerce product videos can contribute to your overall marketing efforts—and how to deploy them effectively—you can build a synergistic strategy that helps your video generate the results you look for.
Luckily, by reading thus far, you are much better prepared to do just that and can now start thinking about which of these tools and implementations you should focus on for your next marketing push.
Time to get to the planning board and start working on that unique ecommerce product video that will make your offerings shine!
