What are Product Videos, and Why are They Essential for Your eCommerce Website.

eCommerce is a growing industry that is quickly becoming more saturated than ever before.

Whilst there is still plenty of opportunities for everyone to have a slice of the financial pie, you need to be doing a lot of hard grafting in order to get traffic onto your site.

Once they’re on your site, there’s no guarantee that they’ll buy. So you need to create a buyer’s experience that’s unique.

Customer experience is an important focus for online businesses, with 73% of customers agreeing that it’s integral to helping drive their buying decision.

Product videos are one type of media that seems to be used a lot more nowadays.

Many platforms are making use of it to showcase the product in a way that shows the customer how it should be worn or used.

In this guide, we’ll explore what product videos are and how they benefit your eCommerce website.

With this knowledge, you’ll hopefully be able to convert more window shoppers to leads.

A product video is considered an advertising tool that highlights the product’s features in question.

It shows it in action, which is helpful when you’re showcasing something that needs more than just a static photograph.

Videos are extremely helpful in cases where the product has multiple functions that would be best explained through video.

For example, if you’re selling coffee machines, a video showcases a 360 view of the machine.

Not only that, it shows how the user operates the machine, highlighting its key features.

It’s been proven already through statistics that video content does a lot better than most media.

That is also apparent with the rise in video-based platforms and the popularity that they have with the general public.

Zenith Media is one that found video content to be particularly influential.

As such, it predicted that the average person would end up spending 100 minutes per day watching online videos.

Product videos help to boost consumer confidence in what they’re buying and are ultimately more engaging.

Product videos go beyond just helping customers decide on whether they want a product or not.

In fact, they help benefit the business in a multitude of ways.

Let’s look at the benefits that come from using videos for your eCommerce platform.

They Make Your Content More Accessible

With product videos, it makes your content more accessible than it was before. This is particularly the case where you have voice-over and subtitles added to the video itself.

Accessibility is a big problem on the internet. There aren’t enough websites making the necessary changes to cater to audiences who have access needs.

However, by not putting in the effort to do so, you automatically cut yourself off from a percentage of paying customers. Text-to-video AI technology can help to create accessible content by automatically generating videos with voice-over and subtitles.

How to Add Subtitles to a Video

Making your videos accessible is a lot easier than you think. Luckily, we have plenty of software and tools nowadays that help with this, including HappyScribe as an example.

If you’re looking at how to add subtitles to a video, this is one of the best platforms to do it.

Helps Improve Your SEO

Search engine optimization is a crucial aid to your website garnering more traffic and attention.

It must be part of your marketing strategy when it comes to building your brand awareness and presence online.

According to Moz, SEO has 20x more traffic opportunities than PPC has on both mobile and desktop devices.

Google also adores video content and it directly benefits your web page ranking by implementing a video where applicable.

The challenge that all businesses face online nowadays is hitting those top search engine pages.

You need to be focusing on unique content that’s relevant to what your customers need. A product video is a great way to do that.

Delivers a Positive Boost to Your Brand

By creating a product video, it helps improve the awareness of your brand to your target audience and potential customers.

What do your customers think about when it comes to the mention of your brand name? How are you standing out against the growing pool of competition?

With product videos, it might not be something that every eCommerce business is doing and that’s a good thing. You’re standing out from the crowd and providing your customers with more.

Video marketing is just another way of helping bolster the customer’s experience of your brand via the creation of entertaining and informative videos.

You need to ask yourself, what reason do your customers have to choose you as a business to buy from?

Brand awareness takes time to build up. It’s about generating trust in what you’re selling. It’s also about encouraging your customers to come back again and again.

Customer loyalty is a great benefit for your business. When you satisfy existing customers with media like videos, it has a ripple effect.

In fact, a study found that satisfied US customers will share their positive experiences with 11 different people. That’s a free form of advertising that could skyrocket your eCommerce, especially if all your customers did it.

Connects with Customers Successfully

Connecting with your customers is a lot harder, especially as you’re competing for their attention.

By creating product videos, it is an engaging way of capturing a customer’s attention.

They’re more likely to stay on your site for longer as a result – which is great for your site’s SEO.

Rather than boring your customers with the same old styled pictures or a large amount of written copy, video content is always well received.

It means that even the laziest of customers will engage with your product pages a lot more than usual.

Consider how you will make your product videos longer. Not just for the reason of keeping your customers on the page but to explain the product’s use in full.

Find ways to showcase how this product is a solution to that user’s pain points in life.

By creating this connection through video content, it helps build brand trust and loyalty.

Helps Explain the Most Complex Products

There may be some products you sell that require more explanation than others.

A video is really helpful in answering questions that the customer may have about the product.

With an engaging video, it helps to show the customer something that is otherwise difficult to grasp.

There are many ways in which this is done, whether it’s animation or voiceover.

A person could also be in the video, showing the user how to operate the product successfully.

This will help to draw your customer’s attention in, in order to get them to buy.

Without that product video, the customer may find enough to convince them not to make a purchase.

Appeals Greatly to Mobile Users

Mobile users benefit greatly from product videos.

With most people nowadays owning a smartphone, eCommerce is directly accessible to those customers who may shop on the go.

From their morning commute to their lunch break at work, mobile shopping is growing in popularity.

Mobile eCommerce sales for retail hit $359.32 billion in 2021. By 2025, a study predicts it should more than double to reach $728.28 billion.

As a result, businesses should be making that extra effort to cater to their mobile audience in particular.

After all, they could end up catering to 44.2% of all retail eCommerce sales in the US.

Living in a society where customers want things quickly and easily, product videos are a great feature to implement on your product pages.

Benefits Your Social Media Feeds

Social media continues to be extremely important for businesses online.

With social media moving in a video-centric direction, it’s beneficial to utilize product videos. Instagram as an example, started off as a photo platform.

Since then, it’s added live streaming, IGTV, IG Reels, and Stories as part of its features.

Videos are very easy to share and can be a great way of making use of this content in a variety of other ways.

Consumers are more likely to share videos on their platforms than they would photos.

As a result, it means you’ll reach a larger audience and perhaps improve conversion rates as a result.

Improves Your ROI

Videos aren’t expensive to make and as such, they can be a great benefit to your retail’s ROI.

Most can be turned around on a basic camera or smartphone and therefore, there’s really no excuse to not use them.

Even with high-quality videos, they don’t take a lot of time to record, edit and publish. If anything, you could probably do it all on the same day.

Product videos are a great addition to your eCommerce product pages.

If you haven’t already considered using them, then now is the right time to introduce them to your platform.

They have many benefits that outweigh the little time, money, and effort it would take to create them.