Table of contents
Today, almost all commerce is eCommerce. The world is more ready than ever to buy products digitally, giving marketers a great opportunity to use video marketing in e-commerce to produce scalable success stories.
Here are the ten types of videos used to market products and services online:
Video Sales Letter
Video featuring product
Tutorial featuring product
Product placement
Product Comparison
Brand goodwill videos
Challenge videos
Influencer Videos
Q and A videos
Explainer videos
This resource helps you leverage the persuasive power of videos to build and boost your e-commerce brand. In it, you will learn the 10 Techniques to Supercharge E-commerce Sales through Video Marketing and the best practices to make the most of your video marketing for e-commerce. So, let's get started with the most persuasive video type.
Video Sales Letter
This is a video featuring a speaker who attempts to convince the audience to buy his product. The video is scripted like a sales letter and often touches on the pain points of the potential consumer. This type of marketing video is better suited for product categories that solve a problem that cannot be visually demonstrated.
Video Featuring Product
While abstract issue-fixing is best explained with a video sales letter, visual problem-fixing should be shown to the customer. Product demonstrations, as well as general videos with case-appropriate use of the product, can serve these purposes. If seeing your product in action will persuade potential customers to get it, you should make this type of content.
Tutorial Featuring Product
This is often relevant in the B2B space but can also be true for consumer-facing products. If you look up how to repurpose content, one of the videos you might find is a ContentFries video. By showing you how to turn one video into 36+ pieces of content in a few minutes, we help you figure out how to repurpose content and demonstrate the value of our platform in the process.
Similar "how-to" content is made by other companies, too, and not all of them are business-serving or creator-serving ones. Starbucks puts out coffeemaking tutorials, and it is one of the most prominent consumer-facing brands in its space. No matter your niche, you can figure out a way to create "how to" content with your products in it.
Product Placement
What if your product doesn't visually solve a problem and doesn't easily fit into a "how to" video? Then, you can take a page out of Bang Energy's video marketing strategy. Bang gets influencers to do random pranks, stunts, and interviews while placing a can of Bang energy in the frame.
The influencer never addresses or mentions Bang or even energy drinks in general. The can is just visible, and that alone has helped Bang Energy's brand profile. Of course, Bang could make "how to" drink recipe videos featuring its energy drinks, but it chose to take the product placement route with maximum odds of virality.
Product Comparison
Bang Energy was one of the fastest-growing beverage brands in the world until Prime Hydration appeared on the scene. Despite not being a direct competitor, Prime took Bang's product placement strategy and 10Xed it.
And it was feasible because the brand was co-owned by one of the most famous content creators in the world: Logan Paul. Often, Paul highlights the difference between Prime and other hydration drinks, comparing electrolytes, sugar, and calories. You, too, can create comparison videos if you have tangible strengths that your competitors don't.
Brand Goodwill Videos
Another influencer building major brands is MrBeast. His products don't always tie into his videos, but because he has a lot of goodwill from giving away so much money, people are attracted to his products. You might not have MrBeast's reach, but you can translate your goodwill into product purchases by simply creating content that makes you or your brand more likable.
Challenge Videos
The Dalgona Challenge is among the earliest challenges to emerge during the pandemic. People whipped instant coffee with sugar to create a foamy coffee drink. While the challenge was completely organic, Nescafe leveraged it by posting content to encourage the Dalgona trend.
Here's a marketing asset from Nescafe positioning Nescafe Gold as an essential for the Dalgona challenge. If you can create a challenge that uses your product, you, too, can get an influx of orders alongside a treasure trove of user-generated content.
Influencer Videos
One way to get a challenge going is to work with influencers. Influencer videos are not uncommon in video marketing, especially for large e-commerce brands. So, you have to be creative with the way you collaborate and pair your influencer videos with offers that are enticing enough to attract first-time buyers. We have a whole resource on influencer video marketing, so make sure to check it out.
Q And A Videos
If you already have an online community, you can host a Q and A to engage your customers. If you own a store with various products, you can invite an influencer to host a Q&A and get them to plug different products throughout the stream.
Before including Q and As into your marketing mix, make sure that you know your audience and can anticipate the kind of questions they might have.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos are best for products that are complex. They answer product-specific questions that the customers might have. ContentFries is a great example of a platform that explainer videos can help.
Our videos help creators see how they can navigate the "potatoes" to "fries" workflow. If you want to turn long videos into small, viral-friendly reels or turn your YouTube video into an audio podcast, you have questions that our explainers answer.
But if you want to drink water, you don't really have questions that Fiji or Evian can answer with an explainer. Yet, Fiji has an explainer on how its water is bottled at its finest. So, don't underestimate the need or the value of an explainer, even if your product seems simple to you.
Best Practices For Ecommerce Video Marketing
Now that you know the top ten video types to use for e-commerce marketing, it is time to start coming up with a content calendar. In this section, you'll figure out the best practices to get the most out of your content as an e-commerce marketer.
Maintain Brand Identity Across Your Videos
The number one way to look like an amateur is to have your videos look random and different from each other. There's a reason why ContentFries allows you to upload your logo and fonts so you can use them across all types of content. You need to have a consistent visual language (big words for vibe) so that your customers can associate your content with you.
Know Where You Are In Your Business Journey
Amazon doesn't need to put out as many brand awareness ads as a new e-commerce store. And a new ecom business cannot afford to offer the kinds of prices Amazon offers. Both businesses are in different phases of their respective journeys and have different strengths.
Their content must play to these strengths. Know where you are in your business journey so you can create content that generates awareness, consideration, or conversion.
Have An Overarching Story
Each video should tell a story. And then, your brand journey should be the overarching story within which every customer can find herself. The overarching story can be about how you plan to make a change or how your business came into existence. It helps to create a narrative that people can identify with.
Do Not Frontload Your Video Marketing Efforts
Do not spend too much on your initial videos. Remember, as Seth Godin says, the one who fails the most wins. But if you fail too big, you don't get to play anymore. Experiment with lower-budget content that still looks professional.
Try all the content types covered above and see what your audience prefers. Once you're sure about your viewers' tastes, you can increase your content budget and volume.
Embrace User-Generated Content
If your e-commerce business sells products with obvious visual ties to you, then reposting content from users is a good strategy. This is especially effective in food and beverage (F&B) and fashion, where customers are likely to show off their purchases.
By reposting their content, you encourage more customers to post pictures and videos in the hopes of getting a repost. This strategy works like magic if you have a huge brand.
Balance Visibility With Relevance
At one point in marketing, brand visibility was the most important ingredient for success. However, we're past that mass-market era, and visibility is the easiest thing to get. Today, relevance matters a lot more than visibility.
You can easily get a million eyeballs without making a single sale. You can also just as easily appear in front of a hyper relevant audience of ten individuals and make five sales.
Make The Content Itself Valuable
Marketers can get lazy and take viewer attention for granted. Just because you can pay to push your content in front of an audience doesn't mean that people will watch it. When brands make boring videos to push their products, their potential customers begrudgingly sit through the ads and vow never to buy from them.
One way to circumvent this resistance is to make content that is genuinely valuable. Valuable and informative isn't the same thing, though. In some cases, viewers want information so information can be valuable. But in other instances, viewers want to be entertained, in which case a funny video is more valuable than a data-packed one.
Double-Down On Relatability
Making your brand relatable seems like a herculean task because just by trying to be relatable, you come off as a tryhard outsider. The trick to achieving relatability is to not focus on the audience and focus instead on their values.
This indirection is quite powerful. Using testimonials from people who look like your audience builds trust, as does mirroring their decision-making instincts. MrBeast's content embodies what every child thinks he would do if he had a million dollars.
Why would you not give money for free? Well, that relatability is responsible for selling 1 million of MrBeast's chocolate bars within 72 hours of the brand launch.
Pick Your Influencers Carefully
Influencers cost a pretty penny, so you have to be cautious with the way you leverage them for your brand. Do not simply pick the biggest influencer and give them the most generic script. Influencer marketing is an art, and our post on using influencers for video marketing will help you avoid the common pitfalls of working with these creators as a video marketer.
Analyze, Experiment, Repeat
The practice to trump all practices is the one that lets you constantly learn and improve. Having an experimental mindset will help you tweak and optimize your video marketing efforts to get the most ROI. Without openness to change, you might get complacent in the first strategy that generates enough revenue and miss out on ones that can make more than "enough".
Examples Of Successful Video Marketing In E-Commerce
Having covered the ten types of videos used in e-commerce marketing alongside ten ways to improve campaign performance, let's look at some case studies to drive these points home. In this section, we'll look at e-commerce brands built on strong video marketing and the insights their stories offer.
Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club was a startup marketed entirely with humorous videos. The brand was launched in 2011 when memes and viral humor were a thing, but corporations had not embraced it.
By moving first and adapting to the tastes of their audience, the founders of Dollar Shave Club built a massive brand of online customers. The brand was eventually sold for 1 billion dollars.
Tai Lopez
Tai Lopez is the pioneer of the modern self-improvement wave. Having earned money from a string of applications and startups, Lopez put a decent chunk of change behind YouTube ads. Back then, YouTube ads were dirt cheap, and funneling all the attention he received into a digital product let him build his empire.
While Lopez's ads are great video sales letters, what's actually worth learning from Lopez is his approach to online platforms. Back when he was a financial planner, he used Google ads in a similar fashion. Lopez is a master at leveraging underpriced advertising opportunities.
Masterclass
Masterclass is a digital native brand with pretty much zero physical product footprint. It has a $2 billion+ valuation, which comes from its library of Celebrity-driven educational content. From Gordon Ramsay teaching you how to cook to Garry Kasparov teaching you how to play chess, Masterclass has it all.
And how does Masterclass attract customers? By using the socials of its celebrity teachers. If you're a Gordon Ramsay fan, you won't see an ad from Masterclass's Facebook page. You'll see one from Ramsay's IG page. If there's one thing you can learn from Masterclass, it is that familiarity goes a long way in breaking your potential customers' resistance.
Monday.Com
Monday.com is a software as service (SaaS) business that built its initial customer base via hyper-targeted video ads. Because Monday.com solves a tangible problem for a specific group, its marketing department knows who to appeal to and what angle to use.
It used explained videos with some humor peppered in to get its message across. And it resonated with enough people to turn Monday.com into a multibillion-dollar company.
Amazon.Com
Amazon.com is the number one e-commerce business in the world. And while it owes its success to the overall strategic brilliance of its founder (and former CEO Jeff Bezos), its Prime service owes much of its success to video marketing.
Prime Video is a streaming service that comes with Amazon Prime, a premium subscription that lets Amazon customers get quicker deliveries. By bundling Prime video with Amazon Prime, Amazon has made every video streamed on Prime a piece of marketing for Amazon.
This speaks to the "value" point covered in the earlier section. If your audience wants to be entertained, then entertaining them will build more goodwill than informing them about your products. And nothing demonstrates this better than the Amazon Prime subscription bundle.
Bang Energy
As mentioned earlier, Bang Energy's marketing is a masterclass in the 'video featuring product' technique. By combining strategic product placement and influencer video marketing, Bang Energy became synonymous with entertainment. And thanks to the mere exposure effect, the drink is among the top three energy drinks in the world.
Bang Energy leverages brick-and-mortar store distribution alongside e-commerce, proving that its strategy works for traditional as well as digital businesses. If you want to leverage this technique for your business, you must start by scouting for influencers who have the audience you want to sell to.
Then, you can give them a relatively loose brief so that their content resonates with the people who watch it. As long as your product is featured in their videos, your brand will benefit from the exposure.
If you go the strict marketing route and give your influencers "shout-out" briefs where they have to read an ad, their content will not be as engaging. The Bang strategy is to allow creators the maximum freedom to engage their audience and strategically place the energy drink in the frame to take advantage of the organic reach that highly engaging content gets.
Final Thoughts
Video marketing for e-commerce businesses should drive relevant traffic to your website and persuade a portion of its audience to buy from you. This can be done using Video Sales Letters, Video featuring products, Tutorials featuring the product, Product placement videos, and Product Comparison videos. You can also use a little indirection with Brand goodwill videos, Challenge videos, Influencer Videos, Q and A videos, and Explainer videos. Read the article above for ways to maximize reach, traffic, and conversion with these types of video marketing campaigns.