Why Is Video the Most Powerful Form of Content in eCommerce?

12/06/2018 By appnova Reading Time: 4 minutes

Anyone you ask, whether it’s a luxury branding agency or your average digital agency, knows that content is king. As the lifeblood of marketing and what eCommerce brands need if they hope to be found, content is absolutely indispensable to attract, engage and convert online consumers. It can all be summed up to the simple fact that more content equals more engagement, and more engagement leads to more conversions.

The Rise of Video Content Marketing

While content may be king, the real crown belongs to video. As TV view time goes down, online video view time is going up. In fact, by 2025, half of viewers under the age of 32 will not subscribe to a pay TV service, and today, six out of ten people prefer online video platforms to live TV. If that doesn’t convince you to add video to your eCommerce content strategy, consider the fact that in an average month, eight out of ten 18- to 49-year-olds watch YouTube. Additionally, on mobile alone, YouTube reaches more 18- to 49-year-olds than any broadcast or cable TV network.

The gist being that if you want to find the most powerful form of content, video’s where it’s at. For example, consider images. We’ve all heard that the right image can push consumers to convert, now consider a video that can deliver the closest experience to seeing a product in person — if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. For this fact, it’s no longer a question of whether or not your brand should dip its toe into video, but rather how to strategically leverage it to increase sales and grow.

That’s a topic we’ll tackle on another day. For today, we’ll answer the the question of ‘why use video marketing?’ with three perks you’ll experience if you add it to your eCommerce content strategy.

1: Everyone Loves Video

From marketers to consumers and yes, even Google, everyone loves video. As a matter of fact, people love video so much that 43% of them admitted they want marketers to use video even more in the future, and four times as many would actually prefer to watch a video about a product than read about it (talk about fodder for your eCommerce product content strategy). There’s just something about a video that we all can’t seem to get enough of. They’re entertaining, they’re informative, and best of all, they’re everywhere.

On the consumer’s side, more and more are turning to social platforms like Facebook and Instagram for product discovery rather than as a means of entertainment. When it comes to social videos, an astounding 86% of consumers watch them a few times a week or more — a number that increases to 96% for consumers between the ages of 18 and 34, with 75% of millennials saying they watch social videos at least once a day. The best part is that after seeing a product featured in a video, consumers are 46% more likely to search for it online.

That’s the social side of video. When they’re featured on a website, it’s a ticket to increased traffic and higher search engine rankings. For starters, search engines like Google favour websites with videos, especially if you’re focusing on Google and those videos are hosted by YouTube, a company owned by them. Second, when you include keywords and similar phrases in your video titles, descriptions and transcriptions, you’re making them even more SEO-friendly by increasing their likelihood of being found online.

2: Information in Video Is Easier to Retain

Our love for video comes, in part, from the fact that information in videos is easier to retain than other content types. As a matter of fact, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, which is processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. And when we view information via video, we retain about 95% of it. This, compounded with the reality that we’re all too busy and have no time to read long product descriptions, makes video the best medium for disseminating information.

This is especially true when you consider that following along with a video requires a single thing: attention. As long as the viewer is engaged enough, they’ll retain some of what they saw and heard — something that CANNOT be said about reading. Adding to this is the immersive nature of video. When a video comes on, our curiosity is piqued and our attention is, at least for a couple of seconds, devoted entirely to what we’re watching.

3: Video Drives Organic Traffic and Conversions

Finally, video presents the perfect opportunity for brands to increase conversions by first driving traffic to their websites. For one, it gives consumers an opportunity to see a product in action. And if they’re invested enough in a video to watch 30 seconds of it, the chances that they’ll visit the site afterward increases dramatically, especially if there’s a clear CTA guiding their actions.

Second, on average, video generates 3 times as many monthly visitors to a website than any other form of content, and organic traffic from search engines actually increases by 157% with it. As for conversions, 57% of consumers claim that videos boost their confidence in the products they purchase, and companies that use videos in their marketing efforts see a 27% higher CTR and 34% higher conversion rates than those who don’t.

Final Thoughts

Any eCommerce agency knows that your audience has a small attention span that gets even smaller when they’re presented with text. In other words, if you want them to remember anything of what you’re telling them, you better put it in a video that can be ingested and digested with minimal effort. In doing so, you’ll benefit from the three perks video can bring to your content strategy: