International Business and Technology Blog

Selling your products online is no longer a negotiable, it’s a must for every company that wants to continue to grow sales and reach new, untapped audiences. Yet, the struggle for many businesses is how to remain authentic to your brand and build a personalised experience for your customers online.

Businesses today are struggling to recreate that human touch that shoppers in physical stores have always loved and connected with. The solution is to humanize the online shopping experience, which means putting the interests and needs of their customers as the top priority and enhancing the customer’s personal experience with your brand.

The key to achieving this is video!

With increasingly crowded online markets, businesses need to invest in new and dynamic solutions in order to boost sales, stay top of mind to consumers and develop brand loyalty over time.

A business that leverages videos successfully on their website and social media channels gains a competitive advantage in the market. So how do businesses humanize the buying experience? Check out this video to learn more:

Video has been identified by industry experts as having increased conversion rates and allow customer to visualise the products immediately with more context and personality – in fact according to the Marketing Insider Group: “Video is preferred by 80% of people over written text and is already being used by 87% of businesses as a marketing tool. If that’s not enough to convince you, research also shows that 88% of consumers have been convinced by a marketing video to purchase products and services.”

Businesses need to create innovative and dynamic videos that match the quality and diversity of your products and showcase your brand personality. As Hansotia says, CEO of the company SWIRL: “Every consumer-facing brand is going to need an innovative video experience on their website. It’s all about getting consumers to engage with your products and converting their interest into sales.”

Leveraging videos successfully helps businesses gain competitive advantages and stand out in crowded markets. So how does a business create compelling video content which nurtures the buyer to connect and purchase.

Create Your Shoppertainment!

The first part of the strategy is to ramp up your video creation to entertain and delight your customer, in other words Shoppertainment. Shoppertainment is the art of mixing entertainment with shopping. You can see it with the Netflix effect, as the sales of green tracksuits and chessboards were directly linked to the launch of new shows on the platform. The lines between entertainment and commerce are becoming increasingly blurred, and this is a trend that businesses can take advantage of.

There are many ways to include entertaining video content on your website, such as having pre-recorded videos that showcase your range of products, a how-to video, videos of a product launch or covering a new trend related to your industry. These videos help to break up the formality of an online shopping experience and contextualize your company as a leader in the industry.

The principle here is that shoppers who interact with your brand by watching your video content and familiarizing themselves with your brand in this way are more likely to purchase. As Hansotia says “They will engage with your site for longer, spend more time with you, and that engagement will translate into increased sales” This is what marketers are calling the ‘video-led sales engagement model’.

Go Live!

Live shopping has been growing rapidly since 2016. This trend was pioneered in Asia, in particular by the largest online commerce company in the world: Alibaba! Alibaba has three main sites; Taobao, Tmall and Alibaba.com and these platforms handle more business than any other ecommerce company in the world (more than Amazon and eBay combined). Alibaba was the founder of live-shopping and capitalized on the growing trend of live shopping right on time! According to McKinsey the global value of the live shopping industry in 2022 is equal to $423bn, of which Chinese consumers are the most prolific as over 68% of the Chinese population shops via live shopping.

So what is live-shopping? Live shopping is the opportunity of leveraging livestreams either directly on your website or via social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Tik-Tok, Alibaba etc. to promote and sell your products. By broadcasting live video your presenter can showcase your products to prospects and existing customers simultaneously and they can ask questions in real time and make purchases throughout. This leads to a much higher level of audience engagement and ultimately sales.

Live Shopping has three major characteristics, all of which add to the credibility of your brand and humanize the online purchasing experience:

1. Shopping from or with a trusted source feels more genuine than traditional sales
2. Promotional based content drives higher impulse purchasing (using discounts, incentives, and time sensitive promotions)
3. Live demonstrations drive increased conversions.

The pivot to Live Shopping contributes to the omnichannel customer experience that businesses are searching for; an experience that is personalised, seamless and experiential across both online and offline touchpoints. From a customer’s perspective, omnichannel means increased convenience for them to shop whenever, wherever, and on their preferred device. The results are evident. According to ShopThing: “Live is an interactive form of shopping with high return on investment. Typical ecommerce rates hover between 2-3%, whereas Live Shopping conversion rates start at 10% and go to an average of 30%.”

The convergence of livestreaming and commerce has huge benefits that your business should be tapping into, as Brightcove says: “With livestreaming, geographical location is no longer a barrier to access, helping to bridge the gap between social, entertainment and commerce through a sensory, real-time experience between the shopper and the seller.”

Create Your Shoppable Videos

Shoppable videos are a key asset to capturing a wider audience, these types of videos are predominantly used for search and discovery via social media, websites or email newsletters, giving customers the ability to visually research, uncover features and benefits in a seamless way.

Shoppable videos should be leveraged on social media platforms and always include opportunities for action and purchase. Shoppable videos are videos intended for conversions, these videos can include your host, sales person or even influencer featuring or sponsoring your product. Such videos are an ideal opportunity to provide promotional based content, notably using discounts and trial periods that will allow the viewer to test out your products or services. The aim here is to allow your viewer to familiarize themselves with your brand as well as create a seamless shopping experience for them, so that they can purchase on which platforms suit them.

Videos (compared to other content) drives more impressions across social media platforms, which means that brands using this format will enhance customer trust and ultimately loyalty. On top of this, shoppers also have reported that they use social media to research new brands – so you are increasing your chances of being found and searched for by boosting your videos on social media.

Businesses that are seeking to grow their brand and boost sales must be creating great video content with the objective of offering a more personalized, omnichannel customer experience. At IBT Online we have Video Marketing programs to help your business grow their exports, sales, brand and business, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you would like to kickstart your video strategy.