Video is one of the most effective, yet underutilized tools to increase traffic for e-commerce businesses. There are a lot of different ways to incorporate video into your marketing strategy, and it makes developing and sharing content easier.

Traffic is the most important metric for an e-commerce business. It leads to more sales, awareness of your brand, and better web optimization. You want to be doing everything in your power and utilize as many different sources possible to increase traffic to your site.

Particularly for E-commerce, video blogs can be more effective than traditional written blogs, because you can actually show your product to the consumer, instead of just writing about it.

Here are some ideas for video blogs for your e-commerce business:

• Product videos. Develop a set of videos that displays your products, showing how they are made, what materials go into them, explain the products uses, and other general details about your products.
• Company videos. Talk about how your company started, how you came up with certain products, and your company’s philosophy. Provide customers with a face and a voice for your business.

• Promotional videos. You can announce sales, giveaways, and promotions on video blogs in an engaging and fun way. Post them on your social media profiles or send them in an email, and be sure to get creative with the video

• Fun videos. It sounds silly, but by creating a series of entertaining, funny, or interesting videos you can build a following. If you release a video that people think is funny or entertaining they are likely to either share that video with others, or look forward to watching more of them in the future, which just keeps traffic coming back.

Video can build trust with your customers in a lot of different ways. By showing that your products are made out of quality materials, it might convince those on-the-fence customers to purchase your product. By providing your customers with a friendly face and voice for your company in a video blog series, it shows customers that you are a trustworthy business owner that cares about their customers.

Live video on social media helps built a one-to-one relationship with your customer. They can see you, comment in real time (and wait for your reply.) One-to-one marketing is the best part about using live video on social media.

By creating consistent, engaging, and interesting video blogs you can keep your customers informed, intrigued, and interested in your company and your products.

Here are some of the following ways to get more views on your video blogs:

• Social media. This is easily the number one tool for e-commerce. Sharing videos on Instagram and Facebook can attract new customers and having a YouTube page can build a following of viewers. Be sure you are active on all relevent networks (that appeal to your group of customers) and that you are sharing content regularly.

• Continue to post your videos on your regular blog on your website. One trick to help with SEO is to transcribe your video blogs, so search engines can ‘read’ the content (for optimization purposes) but have a video (for the humans watching it.)

• By emailing your leads and customer base notification both before and after your live video, you are kindly informing your customers about a certain product or promotion. You can send them bi-weekly and it provides customers with a little reminder or update about your business and keeps your business top of mind.

 

We have been implementing a strong video strategy for one of our e-commerce clients in 2017, and we have seen what works and what doesn’t work so well in terms of gaining traffic.

We have done some experimenting with different things like, testing the timing of the video, content types, and location of the video. One test surprised us. In July, we switched from posting live Facebook videos on the client’s public page to their “private” group page, the traffic to their site dipped significantly.. We assumed that by targeting those followers on the private page, we would get more traction, but actually the opposite happened and in turn less people were viewing the videos. You can see in the image below how our traffic dropped.

Another secondary contribution to this dip in traffic was the fact that we lowered our email marketing output after June. We slowed the rate we  were promoting our video blogs via email to a monthly email, from a bi-weekly email and this contributed to our loss in traffic. To truly test our theories, we will ramp up email and test and then move video to the Facebook page and test.

This client’s video strategy gave us some insight on what makes a successful video blog strategy. You need to present your videos to as large an audience as possible,.be consistent in your live video publishing and keep on an aggressive promotion schedule. In addition, be sure to share your video via all possible social networks as well as on your company blog

 

If you want to learn more about video blogging and its benefits, check out our latest case study on how video blogs outperform written blogs. Download for free today!