Treepodia – The leading Product Video solution for e-commerce

Treepodia is happy to announce that we will once again exhibit at the largest and most important trade show in the industry, IRCE in Chicago, from June 10-12.

IRCE 2014 Highlights

Treepodia to attend IRCE2014 in Chicago

Treepodia has been a proud IRCE exhibitor for these past few years, and we’re happy to be going back there again. Among others presenting at the show will be industry leaders like Jimmy Wales, founder and CEO of Wikipedia, and John Donahoe, CEO and president of eBay Inc. In other words, Treepodia will be in very good company.

With booths, presentations, and other events, IRCE has a lot to offer. The Treepodia team, led by Dr. Melody King, is most excited to hear one speech in particular. The co-founder of Retail Connection (parent company of Knife Depot), Warren Sager, will go into depth about Knife Depot’s video strategy, touching on ways that online retailers can use video to increase sales and brand loyalty. Knife Depot’s approach mirrors our strong belief in the use of automated product videos and a variegated social media strategy to significantly increase sales, exposure, and subsequently ROI.

IRCE has been a key event for Treepodia in the past, and we believe that this year’s show will be even bigger and better. It will be a wonderful opportunity to meet forward-thinking entrepreneurs, swap ideas, and chat with any of the over 10,000 expected attendees.

If you plan on attending, please stop by the Treepodia booth and talk with us—we would love to hear from you!

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Image Credit : intelligrated.com

One of the misconceptions about product videos is that online marketers should create them primarily for awareness or branding. Unfortunately too many marketeers still adhere to this trend: In a survey run by eMarketer.com, 94.6% of US media agencies named “Awareness” as a key objective for their video campaigns, but incredibly only 38% spoke of “Purchase Intent” and a paltry 11% mentioned “Customer Loyalty”.

Product Videos Are Not Just for Branding

Fine if you want (and can afford) this kind of branding, but what is it doing for sales?

Videos are not merely a form of advertisement—they can ultimately help you increase conversions and “close the funnel.”  The brick wall that most online retailers run into is statistics. It’s often hard to determine the exact number of new customers that videos attract. Perhaps anxiety and doubt about their effectiveness in optimizing the middle of the funnel has conditioned marketers to eschew videos in favor of more familiar forms of media.

 But that is a short-sighted view, especially considering that with Treepodia’s admin dashboard you can attribute sales directly to product videos, and even drill down to the exact video version that’s working best for each product. In fact we’ve recently upgraded your admin dashboard and enabled a full integration with Google Analytics to give you access to even more actionable data.

Product Videos Build Trust

Our own clients have repeatedly seen their sales conversion rates rise double digits when they gave customers the option to see video, even when they weren’t watched!

 Product videos work so well because they communicate extremely effectively and succinctly with your visitors, helping to reduce anxiety and dissolve resistances.

Not only does seeing the product in use in real-time, give shoppers a better idea if it will suit their needs, but your investment in what is perceived to be a premium medium demonstrates your commitment to your brand and products. Simply put: Videos prove you trust the goods you sell, that you believe in them, and so in turn, shoppers trust you.

Embedded Product Videos Get Clicks

If you embed a video directly onto your page, its view rate can rise to as high as 35%. Research shows shoppers are more likely (sometimes over 100% more likely) to buy a product after watching a video. Looking to boost sales? Embed your product videos directly on your product pages “above the fold”.

Attributing Product Videos to Sales

As we mentioned earlier Treepodia attributes purchases to the specific version of product video the consumer watched, giving you complete clarity regarding which videos are generating sales. With this information, you can iteratively choose which videos to promote and which to improve, repurpose, or rebuild.

Treepodia’s embeddable player offers an “Add to Cart” button right in the player itself. It allows your viewers to make a purchase at any moment. This is another feature that enables you to attribute a sale to a specific video.

Conclusion

If you’re passionate about what you do and what you sell, start creating product videos and watch your conversion rates improve, all through your sales funnel. Ditch the doubt and start making product videos to increase your sales!

In e-commerce marketing, as everywhere else, there’s always room for improvement. As obvious as this may seem, many marketers seem to have a blind spot when applying this principle to their product videos. It’s as though the effort of producing the initial video content is so great that once it’s done they simply can’t face the thought of going back and improving on it . Of course this behavior pattern makes little impression on Google’s ever-changing algorithm, not to mention the fact that no company operates in a vacuum, and although you might be resting on your video laurels, you can bet your last dollar that your competitors will continue to keep looking for ways stay ahead of the game.

Are Your Product Videos Search Friendly?

Fight the Zombies with AMAZING content – This preview image from a product video generated for Knife Depot uses the zombie apocalypse meme to generate curiosity and clicks

Google has a difficulty analyzing what the actual content of your video is about. You can help it along by adding some textual content to your product video pages. A title, short description and tags go a long way towards enabling correct indexing of your product videos. If you’ve not created and submitted a video site map you’re leaving money on the table.

Assuming you run a blog consider adopting the practice of embedding your product videos in your posts. Blog posts featuring product videos give you and your audience the opportunity to get creative both in terms of how the videos/products are introduced and in terms of the interaction your audience can have with them.

Your blog is also the perfect setting for a wider range of video content – Useful how-tos, unboxing videos, humorous skits relating to your industry, and review interviews are all video content to consider for your blog.

Engage Your Visitors

Not caring about the content you put out there is the biggest mistake you can make. Fifty-word posts and dull poorly produced images and video will get you nowhere.

Content must be INTERESTING. Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Would you find your videos helpful or annoying?  Are they useful, educational, inspirational, or solely promotional. Is there quality such that you feel comfortable displaying them? If your videos bore you, they’ll be sure to bore your website’s audience too.

No less important than the initial interest you’re able to create is how you capitalize on it and request an interaction from your audience. Obviously the best case scenario is to be able to generate a sale, but there are other interactions that can generate value for your business. Getting people to share your content is free advertising. Soliciting reviews and feedback will give you access to market data that would be costly to source otherwise.

Re-purpose Your Ecommerce Video Content

Any quality content you create will require investment. It stands to reason that you’ll want to make the most of that investment. Any quality material you’ve crafted can and should be syndicated via as many relevant channels as possible - blog posts, newsletters, Facebook page and Twitter feed, etc. etc. etc. Video can be further syndicated via the multitude of video platforms out there. The obvious target is of course Youtube, but newer platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Vine are all interesting opportunities, and have an advantage insofar as being associated with fairly well defined audiences.

To summarize when your content is already there, you don’t need to constantly wrack your brain trying to develop new ideas. It’s a better investment of your time to tweak and use / re-use material you’ve already invested in.

Successful e-commerce marketing is all about creating engaging content. Cost effective e-commerce marketing is about finding creative ways to syndicate and re-purpose it.

We’ve discussed conversion funnels on the blog quite a few times, but we only touched on abandoned sales, which are precisely the customers from which you stand to gain the most. Let’s take a closer look at a few tactics you can employ in your videos to reduce shopping cart abandonment and make those lost sales.

Got shopping cart abandonment blues? Product Videos can take that pain away

Display Security Badges

Online customers need to feel certain that their credit card information will not be hijacked when they make purchases on your website. Include badges from your chosen security providers as a slide in your video to instill confidence in shoppers.

Cut Out Registration

Online shoppers want to get in and out of your store easily, spending as little time as possible finalizing their purchases. Ultimately, you want the same. The less time your shoppers have to second-guess themselves, the greater the sales you will achieve. So wherever possible cut down clunky registrations and let your customers check out as quickly and easily as possible. A good example of how you could achieve this if you happen to be running a Magento based store is to deploy the One Step Checkout extension that reduces the standard Magento checkout process to a single compact and dynamic screen.

Once you have a well streamlined checkout process be sure to mention this in your product videos – Let your customers know that buying from you is easy and quick.

Video Helps Optimize for Mobile

Statistics regarding browsing and purchasing via smartphones provide absolute proof regarding the importance for sales of having a good mobile adaptive website. We’ve discussed here often how videos, as easy-to-consume content, make an ideal optimization for mobile websites and help drive purchases.

Price Guarantees

For many purchasing online is still all about the price. Wherever appropriate let customers know that your store offers the best price out there. Include reference to your price guarantee in your videos to help boost confidence in purchases.

List Payment Methods in Your Video

Customers like to have the freedom to choose how they pay for their purchases. Multiple payment options also help establish credibility for your shop. Make a point of including the logos for the various payment methods you accept in your videos.

Clarify Your Pricing Policy in Your Videos

The vast majority of customers abandon purchases because of issues associated with unexpected fees at checkout. An easy way to leverage your videos in order to reduce abandonment is to include a reference to your pricing / tax / shipping policy in your videos. By setting the correct expectation you’re avoiding creating disappointments later on in the process.

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Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/waferboard/6928519859

Why Online Marketers Need to Put Video Content on Pinterest

With over 1 billion active users, Facebook has long been the big brother of social networks. All the while, poor little Pinterest, with its paltry 70 million users, has been lurking in its shadow. But don’t let Pinterest’s smaller stature fool you: this powerful platform is growing rapidly, and it deserves more attention from online marketers.

Pinterst’s Features are Geared for Visual Content

More and more brands are seeing the benefits of using Pinterest, and the reason is clear: video content lasts longer on Pinterest than it does on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, where it gets pushed down news feeds and slowly fades from view. With Pinterest, users can share their pins and rearrange them, keeping the best video content fresh over a longer period of time.

Pinterst Users Opt-in for Content, and Repost the Best They Find

Besides, people using Pinterest actually want the content they are searching for—they hunt for wedding ideas, cool ways to decorate rooms, or different plans for hosting parties. Using Pinterest is like leafing through a magazine: when you find a video you like, you bookmark and go back to it. And this gives Pinterest a strong viral nature. More than 80% of pins are re-pins, which means users will promote their favorite videos and the brands that put out the best video content will grow their audience and reap the rewards from it.

Pinterst Puts an Emphasis on Videos

Offering members the choice to see only videos on their home page, Pinterest has put emphasis on video content, which shows how much faith Pinterest has in this medium. To help improve the kinds of content that its users enjoy, Pinterest has added tools to help online marketers put out better videos. Features like rich pins let businesses add extra details—like pricing, availability, and where-to-buy information—to their pins to make them more useful.

Real Time Pricing Boosts Your Product Videos’ Value

The real-time pricing feature for rich pins can also be a major boon—if a user pins a product video, and the price later drops on that product, the user can receive an email from Pinterest alerting them of the price change. Pinterest is helping you communicate in real-time with your customers, highlighting your brand’s presence and constantly reminding them of your active participation in the Pinterest community.

Trending Products – Showcase The Products Your Customers Love

The trending products widget is another useful tool for retailers with product videos. The widget lets you create lists of the most frequently pinned items in your online store and display them on your storefront. So your best products are kept in plain sight, the same as they would be if you were setting up displays in a physical store.

Pinterst Features are Geared for Visual Content

The bottom line is this: if you’re not putting video content on Pinterest, you’re missing out on a prime marketing opportunity. With merchant-friendly tools, a rapidly expanding audience, and a community that loves to share and promote great video content, Pinterest can give you that nudge you need to get ahead of your competitors.

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Image Credit: http://mkhmarketing.wordpress.com

Videos are valuable tools for online retailers. In fact, they might be the most valuable tools you have. But creating, maintaining, and updating video content for all of your products is a time-consuming and expensive venture.

That’s where Treepodia can help

1) Click the “Try It Now” button on the right side of our homepage slider

Designed specifically for ecommerce, Treepodia combines automated video production and dynamic SEO tactics with advanced analytics to increase your sales, conversions, and page rank on Google and Bing.

Getting start with Treepodia will take you less than a minute, which is just a drop in the bucket when you think about the incredible growth your business can realize with an online store full short, memorable videos. Follow these instructions to get started today so that tomorrow your video content can start to drive your online sales.

Try It Now

2) Fill in your information so we can send you your video link when it’s ready

On the landing page, you will see a green button in the slider inviting you to Try It Now. Click on this button and fill out the requested information on the next page: your name, email address, and company name as well as the template you want to pick for your videos.

Fill in Your Details

3) Enter the details for your products

4) Click the “Create My Sample Videos” button

Now enter information about your online business, letting Treepodia know what kind of items you sell as well as your store’s slogan. Upload your logo, select two products to showcase, and add images to accompany them.

Check Your Email to Watch Your Trial Video

5) Check your inbox for your “Video Ready” notification

Go to your email inbox and follow the link to see your products in a beautiful 30-second video. You can try it out another time, if you still aren’t sure. But if you are, click the blue Get Started button to pick the package that is right for you.

Reap the Benefits

6) Head on to the link to see your video

Once you’ve registered, you will gain access to comprehensive information about your products, videos, and business performance. But that’s not all—videos made with Treepodia greatly boost your SEO, increasing traffic to your website and store. What’s more, Treepodia uploads all of your videos to YouTube and automatically performs A/B testing to promote the videos that have the highest conversion rates. In fact, Treepodia’s services are so powerful that you are guaranteed to quadruple your ROI (return on investment).

Video content drives sales, pushing online revenue to unprecedented heights. So what are you waiting for? Start using Treepodia today and watch your online business soar.

It seems as though 2013 was very much the year of short video. The successful launches of Instagram videos and Vine were some of the biggest web-video related news of 2013. These new platforms, while not a direct threat to Facebook’s social media hegemony, do encroach on its turf, especially insofar as sharing photos and videos are concerned, and with recent reports regarding Facebook’s flagging popularity with younger audiences, it’s no surprise the social giant is rolling out new features to hopefully stem, if not turn, the tide.

Facebook Videos Moving to Autoplay

After a few months of testing, including a launch of autoplay ads late last month, Facebook is scheduled to roll out autoplay for videos.

Facebook Autoplay Videos – How Does it Work

Facebook’s newsroom reveals the new autoplay feature will show videos from individuals (personal Facebook accounts or verified Pages) and videos from pages of musicians and bands already playing as they scroll into view. No need to worry about waking up your entire household at 3am just because you’re doing some late night trolling though. According to Facebook’s announcement the videos will be set to silent by default, and audio will come on when users click.

How is This Different and Why Does it Matter?

The change insofar as interaction is concerned is quite massive. Previously videos uploaded to Facebook or shared from Instagram would require an explicit click on a play button to start rolling. This is quite an interaction investment, and since people normally tend to accept default settings, it stands to reason a huge number of potential videos views was lost, especially if they happened to have less than stellar image thumbnails.

With the new autoplay setting Facebook will be benefiting directly from the way our eyes are engineered to follow movement, with the moving frames capturing our attention subliminally the moment they come into view on the screen.

What’s In It For Them?

It’s no secret video is the hottest content the web has to offer, so Facebook is understandably keen on ensuring it maintains a leading position insofar as where people chose to share, comment and interact with clips.

Direct revenue from video ads is estimated to mean big business too, with Morgan Stanley predicting Facebook could rake in approximately $1bn from new video ads in 2014, rising to as much as $6.5bn by 2020.

What’s In It For Us?

The good news for us marketers is that the engagement enhancements Facebook is releasing for videos benefit our videos too, increasing the value of every Share and Like we can score. We’ve repeated here time and again that social and video are very closely related thanks to the power of sharing. Facebook’s latest features just took that and put it on steroids…

To find out more about how video can help your business contact Treepodia and we’ll be glad to fill you in.

Ever since the advent of online retail the holiday season has seen a steady increase in ecommerce sales, with each year’s figures smashing the records set the year before. In 2012 online shoppers spent $43 billion during the holidays, and this year’s sales are expected to increase 15% and hit $62 billion.

Let our Dynamic Video Sitemap bring some Christmas cheer to your online sales

Some businesses (luxury and gifts to name a few) make over 50% of their annual sales during the holidays, so for them (and for everyone else really) it’s important to make the season count. That’s why we’ve made a big effort to release the latest version of our Dynamic Video Sitemap generator in time for the holiday rush.

What is a Dynamic Video Sitemap?

As we’ve mentioned here time and again, web video is a compelling and highly effective sales tool that increases conversion rates by as much as 85%, furthermore having video on your site can greatly improve your search engine rankings (videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of a Google search result). Unfortunately Google and other search engines are still quite ineffective at indexing websites’ video content, so many sites invest in video only to lose out on many of its benefits simply because the search engines remain unaware of their video investment.

How Do We Help?

Enter Treepodia’s Dynamic Video Sitemap tool. This solution ensures your product videos are automatically indexed on all major search engines, enabling you to reap the full benefits your investment deserves. We often see a full catalog of product videos indexed by Google just a few days after submitting the video sitemap. Depending on how many products you have in your inventory that could translate into literally thousands of new long tail search results.

An example of the type of ROI you can look forward to is provided by our client Modern Automotive Performance. Just days after submitting their Dynamic Video Sitemap, they started seeing 1st page ranking for many of their product names, with cool video thumbnails included in their listing (see a search for DEI Cool Tube – MAP hold first page ranking, with a video thumbnail):

Video thumbnail in search results

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Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/keoni101/5299762128

Influence is a powerful attribute for video marketing strategies . If you have unlocked the power to influence your audience, then you have found the key to video conversion success. If you haven’t quite got there yet, perhaps it’s time to take a long hard look at your triggers to see why they’re not quite hitting your targets.

Including psychological triggers in your product videos increases conversions

We love triggers at Treepodia (the good kind), an event which can spark an action makes marketing efforts worthwhile and presents a clear case for ROI. Now, there are the blindingly obvious triggers (e.g calls to action) which spark actions, but then there are the not so obvious ones which help customers say ‘yes’ to what you’re asking them to do. A very clever marketing and psychology professor – Robert Cialdini  once noted a number of principles which in effect should help you with your ecommerce store. These include the following:

Reciprocity

This is basically when someone gives us something we feel compelled to give something back in return. Have you ever visited a supermarket and felt compelled to buy  100 grams of cheddar cheese because you tasted the free sample? Well, that was the principle of reciprocity.

If you’re an online retailer, of course you can’t pop into someones house to offer them a sample of your products, however the next best thing would be to surprise paying clients by shipping them samples of other products with their purchased product. This feeling of having received a gift that might earn you a second purchase.

Liking

This principle relates to how your product is perceived by customers. The more of a connection they feel with your videos, the more likely they will convert and purchase your product – that’s why the lady at the cheese counter gave you your sample of cheddar with a lovely smile.

Every element of your video should be ‘likeable’ – the video template, the voiceover, the captions – all these build a personality for your video. Bear your audience in mind too, and remember that different audiences have different expectations. A video template that will do well for a sports vendor will probably work poorly for a jewelry store.

Social Proof

It’s common knowledge that customers are more likely to buy your products if they have been recommended them by their family and friends. Make sure your videos have social links to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and of course Google +.  It may sound pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised to learn that a lot of ecommerce stores are forgetful when it comes to applying social links to videos. We discussed the importance of social sharing of product videos for ecommerce here recently.

Incentivise sharing videos before and after purchase, to increase your videos’ outreach and to bulletproof your ROI.

If you want to blast your video marketing efforts to reach your target ROI, allow Treepodia to step up. With our fantastic technology, we can convert your entire product catalog into trigger friendly product videos that will convert the socks off your customers.

Now, you may think it’s a bit soon to be talking about Christmas marketing campaigns, but we want to make sure you’re geared up for the year’s biggest ecommerce drive. Now is the time to get your ecommerce promotions ready, your marketing materials created and turn your analytics and onsite optimization up a notch. There’s a lot to think about around this time of year, and the pressure is high, so we’ve put together our list of essential Top 3 tips for preparing your ecommerce product pages.

1. Product Video Drives Christmas Sales

Product videos will boost your Christmas sales

Your product video will be vitally important to the success of your ecommerce campaign. We’ve demonstrated here often that product videos have a much bigger impact on purchasing decisions than than static photography. This is really unsurprising as a not only does video displays the product in motion with sound and action, but also the medium lends itself naturally to story telling – it’s much easier for a video to be compelling. Around the holidays customers are inundated with offers so standing out is a must for driving sales.

2. Customize your Clips - Offer Customers Something New

Your product video is going to be a big conversion driver, however just to get those extra conversions wrapped up for Christmas, it’s important to exceed a customer’s expectation at this time of year. Push the boat out; offer your customers extra shipping options, gift wrapping and better customer support. This particular time of year is highly competitive, therefore giving customers an extra incentive to buy your products is vital. Don’t forget to add these extra product details into your ecommerce video in order to make them stand out even more!

Our dynamic ecommerce video platform automatically updates your product videos anytime you add or change the description for any of your products, saving you the effort of doing this manually for each of your clips.

3. Social Sharing

Ecommerce activity will peak during the Christmas period. Last minute shoppers will be looking to find the best bargains for their hard-earned cash, and they won’t just be looking on your site for them. Social media activity will also be heightened as people reach out to greet friends and family. The convergence of these two trends make the holiday season a perfect social media marketing storm, so it’s in your best interest to ensure your product videos are easily shareable on social networks. After all, you’ve gone to the trouble of making your video holiday ready, may as well  put in the effort to give it the best chances to be seen. Our product video players come with social media sharing buttons already integrated into the platform. All you need to do is make sure you enable the option.

What next?

Treepodia enables e commerce businesses to create engaging product videos straight from their product page. If you’d like to up the ante this Christmas and create videos to showcase your products you can get in touch here.

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