Everyone agrees to the fact that online videos will have a key role in all marketing and brand building activities.Videos are a great tool for customer engagement and brand building but many marketers are upset on that fact that many such videos does not trigger an action or it does not convert viewers to customers. Shoppable videos will be great for marketers and brands who are expecting direct sales and conversion through videos. It can be very effective to millennials also, who have very little tolerance for video advertisements, though they have an ever growing desire to digest quality video content.
With arrival of 3G and 4g users have access to internet with a considerably higher bandwidth even on mobile devices. This enables users to seamlessly stream video content. By making videos shoppable, marketers can take advantage of these hours spent watching videos without disrupting the content by inserting shoppable ads. With shoppable video, the products featured in the clip get more emphasis; whether your company video is an overview of your products/services, a catalog of your inventory, a tutorial video, etc. You can make your clip more useful to audiences by making it shoppable.
Making videos ‘shoppable’ means adding the interactive ability to click on a video featuring a product and then being routed to the site where you can buy that product straightaway.
Shoppable content is changing our expectations of retail and meeting the demands of consumers, needing instant satisfaction. Shoppable video can optimise the user’s shopping transaction, shortening the route from ad to basket and checkout, creating the ability to see, click and buy.
The shoppable capability of video was initially implemented in basic form in 2008 using YouTube Annotations, where customisable boxes can direct users to other videos, playlists or websites. However, now there are a number of platforms that can allow brands to optimise the video shopping experience, seamlessly converging media channels. YouTube is leaning more heavily into e-commerce with a new tool called Shopping ads. The feature will allow consumers to shop products referenced in a video. In the past several months it started fiddling with buyable ads on YouTube and announced a new buy button to help consumers directly purchase search results.
Already, YouTube has made in-stream ads shoppable with its TrueView technology. Within an ad, TrueView will surface product cards along the side of the screen as a video ad plays. Consumers can then click the product cards to explore the item further or make a purchase.
The shoppable videos make use of in-video menus dubbed Shopping ads that are reminiscent of YouTube current annotations feature, except slicker and seemingly automagic. As products are presented on screen, viewers can click a small icon in the upper-right corner of the player to see which items appear in that particular video. Viewers can then click on those items to travel to external webpages, where they can obtain more information and purchase the featured products.
The new feature, called TrueView for shopping, will allow users to shop an ad by clicking on a banner in the video ad. It will also serve up a list of individual product cards beneath the video ad, which will direct viewers to a place where they can buy the item. The new feature integrates with existing ad products, according to a blog post from Google.
Google blog post http://adwords.blogspot.in/2015/05/introducing-trueview-for-shopping-new.html
Consumer appetite
56% would consider using ‘shopable videos’ to make purchases directly from an online video
One in five men said they would shop via online video if possible, research carried out by Wesee has found. The research from the advertising and visual classification company found that 56 per cent would consider using ‘shopable videos’ to make purchases directly from an online video.
“Our research indicates that there is consumer appetite for new ways of shopping – as content consumption and e-commerce become increasingly intertwined, consumers want to be able to buy the things they see online. This is particularly pertinent to online video as visual stimulation is a mood-enhancing medium and mood is a strong driver of e-commerce. This opens up a massive opportunity for marketers to target consumers alongside relevant visual content online.”
Shoppable video on your marketing strategy
The concept is new and the technologies behind it are also not matured enough to consider it as primary shopping experience but it can be a great add on to your current strategy. Even though there are so many new platforms coming up with shoppable video experience, which includes from major players like adobe. Google's Trueview will be a good starting point for marketers. It is good idea initially to repurpose the old content to introduce and familiarise shoppable experience. Try to be as subtle as possible overdoing can really spoil the video experience, if you are working on a existing content or repurposing content made for user engagement. Once your users are comfortable with idea of shoppable videos you can consider creating content solely for shoppable experience. As to everything the common rule applies, be patient with the technology. as the idea is new and customers are not very familiar with experience yet,it will take some time for them to get used to it.
Here are some examples on youtube
Using old school YouTube annotations