Treepodia – The leading Product Video solution for e-commerce

Once upon a time in the 50s, when TV was in its infancy and advertising was a slide at the beginning of the show, a show was aired called “Father Knows Best“.

Although the show achieved icon status, and is rumored to be undergoing a Hollywood adaptation these days, we all know that it’s in fact it’s Moms who know best…

Moms – the Online Product Super Sleuths

With the economy being what it is, and increasing amounts of product information coming online daily, moms are making it their business to find out everything there is to know about the products their families intend to purchase.

In the super-competitive baby business recent years have seen a proliferation of sites dedicated to this very “pastime”, including a plethora of mommy-perspective blogs and review sites that share insights about new products, second hand products, and everything in between.

Consumer Reviews are Purchasing Catalysts

Product ratings and consumer reviews are extremely popular, and seen as a reliable source of information across the spectrum of consumers. Mothers of young children often see them as the definitive catalyst for making a purchasing decision. Today’s parents want answers not only regarding the product’s features and price, but also about its quality, safety, and overall customer satisfaction.

Or, as a recent eMarketer article put it “Moms Place Trust in Other Consumers.” So much so that the article states:

“[o]nline moms doing product research put their faith in descriptions from consumers nearly 12 times more.”

Most Moms Are Already Watching Product Review Videos

According to eMarketer’s article video has come to take a dominant position in swaying mothers’ decision making processes:

“Nearly 64% of respondents had watched a user-generated video review, and more than three-quarters of that group said it helped them make a purchase decision—either for or against a product or brand.”

There are two important points to note here:

1. It reiterates our recent post regarding the Treepodia Video Distributor and the need to have your products available everywhere customers are searching. In other words, for full coverage, you need to make sure your products come up in a search on any one of the major video portals.
2. It reinforces the reliability factor that video helps you attain. For example, one of our clients, BedBathStore.com, recognizing the fact that today’s parents conduct their research online, decided to add product videos to their entire line of children’s products. The results speak for themselves, with a 69% increase in sales of products that include video, an increase in product page engagement, and an overall growth in organic search traffic.

You don’t need mama to explain this one any further – product videos are another great way to reach today’s purchasing parents.

For some time now our development team has been hard at work on perfecting a system that enables etailers to capitalize on the advantages presented by mass distribution of videos to dedicated video sites. Earlier this week we finally launched our new Video Distributor service which we feel makes an important addition to our offering of low effort, high return, automated ecommerce video solutions.

What is it?

Video Distributor is an automated, scalable and inexpensive service for ecommerce vendors that’s capable of rapidly uploading all a vendor’s product videos to YouTube, Google Video, Metacafe, Dailymotion and other video sites. One of Video Distributor’s mot important features is that it allows vendors to link to specific product pages on their site from the videos uploaded thus generating “deep links” to the vendor’s site.

How can it be used?

We’re offering Video Distributor both as a stand-alone service package and as an add-on service for our Smart Video Platform.

Video Distributor increases visibility and improves search rankings

Video Distributor ensures product videos are viewed by as many customers as possible across multiple video distribution sites and improves search rankings for our customers’ products. Here’s how it works:

People watch videos primarily on video sites

The past few years have seen video emerge as the most popular online medium. So much so that Youtube is today the world’s second most popular search engine! Google and Yahoo have been aware of this trend for years and actively promote it by offering video search explicitly.

The huge availability of video content encourages us to search for video content for all our queries, including any pre-purchase product research we’re engaged in. The thing is that we all tend to watch video primarily on the major dedicated video sites. This means that vendors neglecting to make their videos available on these sites are missing out on an increasingly popular exposure opportunity.

Here at Treepodia we were eager to find a way to help our customers capitalize on this traffic and Video Distributor is how we did it. Because it automatically uploads vendors’ videos to all the major sites the vendors needn’t worry they’re missing out on the action any longer.

Using video linkage to boost SEO

Search Engine Optimization has always been, and still remains to a great extent, dependent on link building – the creation of high quality relevant off-site links leading back to the site’s pages. From an SEO perspective well ranked videos located off-site on dedicated video sites (those that don’t classify their outgoing links as “no follow“) and deep-linked back to a particular page on the vendor’s website, are a very desirable proposition. Our new Video Distributor provides this as a service for every video on your site and the SEO results have already been tested and proven:

Video Distributor secured a top Google ranking for ElectronicShopping.com for its “Morphy Richards smoothie maker” while for WellPack.fr the platform secured a top Youtube result for the query “Kenwood Robot Chef“. Our longtime client Mr. Shmuel Gniwisch, the CEO of top jewelry sites Ice.com and Diamond.com, was kind enough to particiapte in the pilot phase of Video Distributor and has provided us with the following testimonial:

“We’re thrilled with the results we’ve seen using Video Distributor…Our organic search rankings are much higher now that our product videos are available on the major video sharing sites, and we’re experiencing an increase in traffic to our site in part due to customers linking directly to product pages from YouTube.com and other video sharing sites. Searching for white gold solitaire earrings already brings up our video (Ice.com) first”

For more details about Video Distributor, the Smart Video Platform, or any of our other services please feel free to contact us. We’re always happy to help…

Words That Make Money*

The great thing about videos, as we’re always saying, is that they give customers an opportunity to see any given product in action, from multiple angles.

Choosing the words in your video is important as well

But videos are more than mere images in motion. There is also a copy side to them. Whether spoken via narration or appearing as actual type text in some sort of subtitle format, when creating quality videos, the words you choose are as important as the pictures you’re presenting.

The reasons for this are twofold:

How your video is perceived by your audience

Words, as we all know, matter. A subtle difference in word selection can make a big difference in terms of how a product is perceived, and subsequently purchased (hopefully).

How your video is perceived by search engines

As of November 2009 Google has begun using it’s proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition tools to caption videos on Youtube. The implications for this are huge in terms of their capability to properly index and categorize the videos they have access to. Simply put this means that Google is now actually listening to what you have to say for yourself, and using it to classify your videos.

Google admits freely that their capabilities in terms of Speech Recognition leave something to be desired, however they also point out, quite rightfully, that occasionally imperfect captions are better than no captions. Check out this video for more details on the feature:

What to say

There are two types of language involved in “pushing products”:

1. The actual description of the product itself, including what it looks like, how it’s used, it’s advantages, and how it will improve your life.
   More succinctly put – The product’s purpose and why you need to buy it.
2. The words that encourage customers to take action – buy now or subscribe today.
   Best known as – The call to action

Both types of copy are equally important in different ways. One does the selling. The other encourages the buying.

I came across this list recently of “200 Words That Make Money.” The list is broken down into two separate (functional) categories, similar to those mentioned above.

In terms of pushing products, most of them are the rather familiar tried-and-true such as “simple”, “proven”, “professional”, and “prestigious”.

The call to action terms on the other hand include standards such as “guaranteed”, “sale”, “bargain”, and “you”. Yep you. That’s because, more than anything, people love when they feel they are being spoken to directly.

While I can’t vouch entirely for the list’s validity (i.e. are these really the top 200 words), what I can say is that there’s a great way to test these terms.

Test what works

With the Treepodia smart video platform’s multi-version videos. The Treepodia way of creating videos, of course is to use your existing marketing texts, and then create multiple video versions per product. Then with the built-in A/B testing mechanism the smart video platform compares different video versions (including variations in text), in order to automatically identify and promote the highest performing version.

That means, with our system you not only promote your products with video, you can also improve your marketing texts, and find out for yourself which terms really do sell.

* – image created using wordle

Would you trust this person?

One of my rules of thumb in dealing with people is never trust someone who says “trust me.”
No one trust-worthy I know ever uses this turn of phrase and I’ve heard it uttered by highly untrustworthy individuals far too often. It’s like the mating call of the sleazy salesperson.

What do I trust?

I believe actions speak louder than words. If you’re trust-worthy, I’ll figure it out for myself as your actions (or lack thereof) will sooner or later prove your actual worth. Somehow I doubt that I’m the only person who feels this way.

It’s not just people I validate this way, I subject products and services to a similar acid test – don’t tell me how marvelous you are. Show me!

Don’t get me wrong, I want to trust sales people, service people, and my new MP3, but I want them to earn that trust. Prove to me you’re what you claim to be and I’m yours.

Video – the trustmaker

Video’s has be proven to be great at building trust.

As a recent article published by Mark Robertson in his ReelSEO.com blog pointed out, the mere presence of video on an ecommerce website increases sales because video increases shoppers’ trust in your store and your products.

The article outlines how the mere presence of video on your product pages has a positive effect on overall sales, regardless of whether your shoppers watch the videos or not.

This isn’t only because video is great for demonstrating a given product, but also because video has been proven to be an effective tool for establishing consumer confidence and trust. Here’s how

1. Adding videos of your products means you trust them enough to show it in full multi-dimensional format.
2. You’re committed to  giving your customers the best user experience possible.
3. It makes your site seem more reliable which in turn increases consumer confidence.

Or, as one respondent to Mark’s article succinctly commented:

“Video implies investment, of thought, time, and money. It’s a marker of how important quality of content is to your offering. That notion drives consumer response in a very profound way.”

I recently came across another article from Flumtion, a streaming software company founded by a group of open source developers and multimedia experts, that described the ways in which streaming video can increase ecommerce sales.

Number one?
Trust, of course, but with a slightly different spin:

“[S]poken statements are stronger than any written text or image, which supports product claims effectively. Video also adds a human element, creating an inviting and relaxing environment that creates trust for the customer.”

The bottom line

My conclusion from all the above is that video helps you gain your shoppers’ trust, but don’t trust my word on it, test and see for yourselves…

Epilogue

Writing this I couldn’t help remembering Monthy Python’s calssic “Dead Parrot Sketch”. I’ve always felt it epitomizes the absolute worst one could possibly encounter as far as trust in commerce goes. Enjoy…

Image credit: rick