Merging Social and Video Marketing to Better Position Your Ecommerce Brand

emand for video content is rising at a record pace. Recent polls have shown that 43% of online users would like to see more video content. The ROI of video marketing is tremendous for brands that find a clever way to incorporate it into their funnel. Nearly 52% of marketers feel video content has the highest ROI.

Martech Advisor reports that video marketing is especially useful for ecommerce brands reaching a younger base of millennial customers:

“[Gen C is] a growing sub-segment of millennial consumers who actively create and share video content on YouTube. A big portion of this content focuses on product review videos and shopping hauls. Gen C are 3.6 times more likely to buy after watching videos on YouTube and 1.8 times more likely to advise others about products and brands. This makes them an indispensable source of trend-setting insights for ecommerce.”

Tai Lopez and other social media experts have talked about the benefits of video marketing for ecommerce in substantial detail. Marketers get more out of video marketing when they combine it with their social content strategy. Here are some thoughts that ecommerce video marketers should keep in mind.

Consider Uploading Different Variations of Each Video for Different Social Media Platforms

Most ecommerce marketers use the same video for every social media platform and try to determine which platform performs the best. Once they find that one platform, they focus on scaling it and cut the campaigns on other platforms.

This often causes them to assume that the video itself doesn’t resonate with users on a particular platform. In reality, a couple of small tweaks to the title or swapping the front-page image could make a tremendous difference.

You may find that the same video will perform much better on Twitter with one headline and Facebook with another. Uploading different variations of each video can be a good way to see what gets the best ROI on each platform. This enables you to find the best performing campaigns possible.

Have a clear Marketing goal for every video and measure accordingly

Many ecommerce marketers launch video content without clear engagement goals in mind. As you can imagine, their ROI often significantly lags that of marketers with a clear purpose for their video content.

Here are some conversion strategies you can use while using social media platforms for video marketing.

Lead Generation

Both social media and video can be an excellent medium to generate leads. One very effective strategy is to use social ads to promote videos, which then leads to your lead opt-in page.

So why wouldn’t you send your social traffic directly to a lead generation page? Here are several reasons:

• A small number of carefully targeted users on Facebook can cause your video to go viral. This would generate a substantial amount of organic traffic, which will have a much higher ROI than if you relied solely on paid traffic from Facebook.
• Facebook marketing for some niches is very difficult, especially with the social media giant’s constantly evolving policies. For example, Facebook banned dating advertisers a few years ago. If you want to promote in an industry that is not clearly allowed, then you need to find a less direct approach. Referring visitors to your YouTube pages can be a good way to get around it.
• Having customers watch a detailed YouTube video can be a great way to warm them up before referring them to your opt-in page. You may notice that conversion rates are much higher if you add a video as an extra stage in your sales funnel.

Due to the benefits listed above, many ecommerce marketers depend on video for their lead generation strategy.  They will need to customize their video content to their immediate conversion goal. If you want to get people to create a free account on the following page, you need to emphasize the following:

• That the offer is free.
• You don’t plan on using their data inappropriately.
• The sign-up process is easy.
• Most importantly, you obviously need to highlight the benefits of creating the account.

Of course, you will need to test different approaches to see what leads to the best conversion rates.

Branding and Exposure

Newer ecommerce brands must deal with a challenge that more established brands and affiliates don’t face – limited brand recognition. Video marketing can be a great way to overcome it. A few strong videos can make a tremendous difference in brand recognition.

However, measuring the branding benefits of a video marketing campaign can be difficult. The most obvious place to start is by looking at your video metrics, such as the number of views and shares. However, you should look beyond the immediate data of your video marketing campaign to gauge the longer-term acquisition of brand capital.

Using social monitoring tools to see how often people talk about your brand can be a good way to observe the growth of your brand image over time. If you noticed that the brand is getting a lot more traction after a couple major video marketing campaigns, then that is a good indication that it is paying off. If your video campaigns appeared to get even more traction after you promoted them with social media, then you may want to focus on using the same social networks and targeting options in future video marketing campaigns.

Don’t neglect mobile video

It is surprising how many video marketers think it is still 2005. You can’t upload videos that are optimized solely for desktop users and call it a day. A growing number of users are watching videos on social media. On some social media platforms, video consumers are actually the majority. Take a look at the following statistics:

• Over 90% of all videos that are viewed on Twitter are seen on mobile devices.
• A whopping 92% of people that watch videos on mobile devices share them on social media.

If you intend to use social media to increase engagement with your video content, then you should strongly consider optimizing it for mobile devices.

Optimizing video headlines for social platforms

When most people share videos on social media, they will keep the existing headline intact. This means your video title will be the headline of your posts on almost all social media networks the videos get shared on.

Use this to your advantage when choosing titles for your video content. Your videos will probably receive much more traction on social media if their headlines are optimized for the platforms they are most likely to be shared on.

Using hashtags in your video titles is one of the best ways to get more exposure on Twitter and Instagram. You will also receive more organic searches through YouTube itself because the video sharing platform begins supporting them a few years ago. Using hashtags is unlikely to discourage people from watching your videos because they have become so used to seeing them anyways. But you should notice a decent uptick in your social shares.

One of my colleagues conducted a split test to see how hashtags impacted their traction on social media. They uploaded the same video to YouTube twice. Everything was kept the same, except one video had a popular niche hashtag in the title, while the other did not. They ran ads for both videos on Twitter, using the exact same targeting options. By the end of their test, the video with hashtags had 11.2% more retweets and 7.3% more views.

You also remember the character length guidelines for every social platform and research the power words that receive the most traction on them. If you plan to promote your videos primarily on Facebook, then you will want to keep the following guidelines in mind while crafting your titles:

• Keep your video title short. Most case studies have shown that headlines with between 20 and 40 characters perform the best with Facebook ads. It is a good idea to keep your video titles in that range. It isn’t a big deal if you have to go a little bit over but focus on brevity whenever possible.
• Optimize your headline for individual demographics. Facebook gives you access to a plethora of targeting options that most other social media platforms don’t even begin to match. Try creating different variations of each video and optimizing headlines for each demographic. This will help you stretch the ROI of your ads on Facebook.
• Use more attention-grabbing words. All social media marketing is a form of disruptive marketing. This is even truer for Facebook because every user’s attention is split I’m so many different elements of the site and they are under more pressure to engage with their friends in real-time. It will be impossible for your videos to stand out on Facebook without strong, attention grabbing words. Brainstorm a variety of power words that are likely to elicit attention.

It takes time to collect data on different social channels, but you will be at a significant advantage over other ecommerce marketers.