'Net Features : treepodia

5 Video Strategies for Merchants

Allison Howen — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 20:40:00 GMT

A strong video strategy can provide merchants with many benefits – from an increase in engagement and conversion rates to better placement within the SERPs.

The biggest challenge with video, however, is creating content that will engage consumers and entice them to hit the play button. While many merchants implement video on their sites, often times their video strategies are limited to product videos and demonstrations for specific items. Although these types of videos are definitely helpful, they aren’t very engaging and are rarely available for every product on an e-commerce website.

In order to harness the true power of video, merchants need to create a more robust and innovative strategy that not only showcases their products, but is also interactive and makes consumers want to hit play. Luckily, Website Magazine has compiled a list of five tactics that can help merchants revamp their current video strategy to get better results, check them out below:

Go Live

Brands that want to stay a step ahead of the competition should consider implementing a live video strategy. One way this can be done is with the Your BrandLive platform, which is a video communication software that uses live video and chat to create a unique customer to brand experience. In fact, brands can use the service to broadcast live video from any location and participate in real-time interactions with customers. Moreover, merchants can sell products during video sessions by uploading items into the Brandlive dashboard. By doing this, products are displayed across the bottom of the live video with titles, descriptions, images, prices and a call-to-action button for making a purchase.

That being said, merchants can also go live on Google+ with Google Hangouts. This feature can be used to video conference with up to ten people at a time, as well as live-stream a broadcast publicly onto Google+, YouTube and websites. This could come in handy when revealing a highly-anticipated product for the first time.

Start Advertising

According to comScore, U.S. consumers watched 11.3 billion online videos in December 2012, which proves that video advertising is a big business. Furthermore, video ads tend to be successful because consumers typically either have to choose to hit play in order to view the advertisement or have already decided to watch a video (meaning they are alert) when the advertisement is shown. Merchants can launch video advertisements through Google, as well as on video ad networks like BrightRoll, Live Rail or Adap.TV. Additionally, LinkedIn recently announced video ads on its self-serve platform, which could be a good place for B2B merchants to display their advertisements.

Promote User-Generated Reviews

Most merchants know how influential consumer reviews can be, so why not feature them in a unique way? Yes, we are talking about video reviews. In fact, there are a variety of platforms available that allow merchants to include user-generated video content on their site, including Bravo, Authntk and EXPO TV. These videos could even prove to be more valuable than written reviews, because it is easier to tell someone’s sentiment when you can watch them speak, which makes this type of user-generated content more personable, relatable and believable.

Get Social

It is important to use a multi-channel approach when implementing a video strategy. By maintaining a YouTube channel and cross-promoting that content on other social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest, merchants have the ability to show their products to a wider audience. Moreover, merchants can use their social videos to create a variety of content outside of tutorials and demonstrations, such as entertaining spoofs or a behind the scenes look at a company.

Videos for Every Item

Just because you have updated your current video strategy to include some of the aforementioned tactics, doesn’t mean you should neglect adding or updating product videos/demonstrations on your site. After all, product videos are helpful to consumers who are on the verge of making a purchasing decision, which means having a video on every product page could potentially have a dramatic influence on conversion rates. That being said, creating videos is time consuming, which is why platforms like Treepodia can be very helpful to merchants. This is because Treepodia can be used to turn entire product catalogs into product videos. The platform does this with Image Reviving Technology, which brings still photos to life. Moreover, the videos are always kept up-to-date as the platform automatically generates new video versions to reflect changes in inventory and all videos are based on existing product images, descriptions, prices, user reviews and merchandising rules.

Video for Magento Merchants

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:15:00 GMT

E-commerce video platform Treepodia is bringing its services to Ebay owned Magento deployments.

Treepodia provides a sort of all-in-one video management solution, enabling users to create, host, stream, distribute and optimize video delivery. It's new downloadable extension, which it is distributing on Magento Connect (the platform's app store) brings these capabilities inside Magento installation. With built-in social sharing features and mobile capabilities, and combined with performance optimization features through built-in A/B testing mechanisms and learning algorithms, the extension is one that should definitely catch the attention of Internet retailers.

"Product videos are proven to have a major impact on ecommerce conversion rates as well as SEO rankings," said Melody King, VP of marketing for Treepodia. "The availability of Treepodia's platform on Magento Connect will make it easy for Magento-based retailers to leverage our powerful platform used by giants such as Walmart, Dell and Office Depot, at an affordable cost and backed by our 4x ROI contractual guarantee."

Driving E-Commerce Sales with Video

Allison Howen — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:30:00 GMT

Integrating video into an e-commerce site is a great tool that will potentially increase time on site and customer engagement.

"Online Video has become an essential aspect of e-commerce and online marketing," says Stephen McCluskey, CEO of vzaar and online marketing expert. "Nothing sells better than video - online customers want to see the product in action, they want to know how it works and what it does. Nothing does that better than web video."

According to Comscore, consumers that view video on retail sites stay an average of two minutes longer on the site, and are 64 percent more likely to make a purchase.

Check out Website Magazine’s article on even more reasons why your business needs e-commerce video, and take a look at a few e-commerce video providers below:

Vzaar

This solution gives merchants the ability to customize their video player’s settings, such as size, color and playlists.

It also features tools that allow a merchant to drive and convert sales as well as measure and manage performance.

Pricing for this solution starts at $49 a month, but a free trial is also available.

Invodo

Invodo’s video solution offers an e-commerce video player that includes an “add to cart” feature, video sharing options, multiple clip navigation and HTML5 support.

Other standout features include the smart merchandising image overlay, which puts a play button over any image, as well as A/B testing and the ability to track conversions.

Contact Invodo’s sales department for information on pricing.

Treepodia

Video hosting, high quality streaming and a multi-environment video player are a few features that come with Treepodia’s solution.

Another important aspect that this solution offers is the image reviving technology, which brings still images to life— creating videos from existing product images.

Packages start at $149 a month for the essential package and exceed $400 a month for the enterprise package.

Video Distributor (and SEO) from Treepodia

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:04:00 GMT

Automated online product video technology and service provider Treepodia released its Video Distributor service today. The service enables merchants to upload their catalog of online product videos to video sharing sites like YouTube.com, Metacafe, Dailymotion and others.

It's common knowledge that video provides a powerful way to shore up search rankings. According to Forrester Research, pages with video are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google search results than plain HTML pages.

“Many consumers now use video-sharing portals as a way to research information about new products and get a close-up look at them before they buy. As such, retailers whose videos aren’t listed on these sites miss out on tremendous sales opportunities,” said Dr. Melody King, vice president of marketing for Treepodia. “Our new Video Distributor service is a fast way to generate high impact by ensuring that product videos are viewed by as many customers as possible, while also improving search rankings for our customers and their products – all of which adds up to higher conversion rates and increases in revenues.”

Automatic Video Banners, Treepodia

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:22:00 GMT

Automated video technology and services provider Treepodia announced the availability of a solution designed to enable e-commerce and information-rich web sites to automatically showcase videos in the form of a banner on any page they choose.

Treepodia’s Smart Banner videos are shown in rotating fashion each time a visitor comes to a website (or any website). Smart Banner tracks the videos that generate the most click-throughs over time and eventually determines top-performing videos to feature in the on-site banners.

“Many e-commerce companies have already discovered the value of video in enhancing the customer experience and increasing sales. We developed the smart video banner tool to take this technique to the next level by giving companies a way to drive more visibility of their best performing videos and maximize the value of their most valuable web site real estate – the home page,” said Dr. Melody King, vice president of marketing for Treepodia. “Our new Smart Banner offering works with companies’ existing videos, so it’s another way for businesses to improve the ROI of their video campaigns.”

I think the real value in Smart Banner is primarily that it generates visibility for videos, which potentially could increase the number of visitors that will view product videos. Because video has a naturally conversion rate, you can see what kind of an impact technology like this could bring to the table.

An example of Treepodia’s Smart Banner application can be seen on U.S.-based eye care retailer EyeBuyDirect.com. Another retailer using the Smart Banner application is German health and beauty retailer BeautyNet.de. Both sites are running banners with a series of videos — when the page is refreshed, a new video begins to play.

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