Treepodia – The leading Product Video solution for e-commerce

This post was provided by our friend Corrie Davidson, who works as the New Media Coordinator & Product Manager for Washington based online marketing agency Captico. Corrie is a savvy communicator with an interesting perspective and I consider us lucky to have the opportunity to host her here

One of the clearest indicators of online shopping’s growing popularity is “Cyber Monday”.

For a few years now the the Monday after Thanksgiving has seen millions of Americans hit online stores searching for hot digital deals from the comfort of their homes.

The Cyber Monday phenomenon is clearly on the rise since first sarted in 2005 and according, to Internet marketing research company Comscore, this year spending crossed the billion Dollar threshold for this first time.

E-commerce has clearly entered the mainstream of the American public’s shopping habits. The question is what are you, as a business owner, doing about it?

Videos, as my friends at Treepodia can tell you, will certainly help you sell your merchandise once your shoppers are in your store. But how do you get them looking at it to begin with?

Introducing GoPromoIT

GoPromoIt is a new coupon-code based application hopes to help you solve that question. Installed as a button added to any ecommerce website it enables purchasers to share a link back to the site with their Twitter or Facebook friends. In return for the social advertising they thus provide the site they become eligible for a discount or deal predefined by the vendor. Sites must be able to take accept coupon codes in their checkout process as a prerequisite for using the platform.

Tested successfully on Wall2WallStickers and jewelry seller JJ Singh GoPromoIt reportedly came through on the promise to increase exposure. Traffic on these sites has spiked as high as 65% above preceding averages since implementing GoPromoIt. Denny Hamlin’s Speed Wash, a Virginia based car wash, also reported getting positive feedback for their discount offerings. The increase in traffic, one must note, did NOT come at the cost of increased bounce rates, indicating that the new visitors sent to the sites represented interested consumers and qualified leads.

It’s still early days for the service but so far the 50 or so businesses participating in the Beta phase pilot agree that GopromoIt seems to be  a great way to increase awareness and sales via a simple utilization of one of the most basic principles of the social web – the ability to harness “Word of Mouth” validation online.

GoPromoIt also actively promotes the brands who use its service on its website and its Twitter account.

Sharing Statistics – Facebook vs Twitter

An interesting by-product of GoPromoIt’s pilot is sharing statistics:

• Sharing on Facebook was 63% more likely than on Twitter
• 85% of users elected not to customize the promotion message offered by the system as default -

For more information on GoPromoIt, screen captures, and a walk through of how it works, check out: “GoPromoIt.com – Discounts for sharing with your social network”

Captico

The Challenges

Let’s be honest. As an ecommerce retailer you really want one thing: People to buy your stuff. It doesn’t matter if you sell a product, a service, or tea-cup pigs, all of your other goals and needs fit under the giant umbrella of getting people to buy your stuff. In an effort to achieve this goal, clients always tell me the same things:

- “I want more traffic to my website.”

- “I want to be listed first on search engine results.”

- “I want people to come back to my site again and again.”

- “I want people to interact with each other on my website.”

The Solutions

It sounds simple, but the truth really is this: If you want repeat visitors and business to your site, make it a place people WANT to come back to! Give them a reason to come, a reason to stay, and great content that is easy to share with their friends! But I won’t leave you with such vague advice. Lets look at practical solutions for getting your site in front of people.

• Search engine optimization (SEO) is a phrase often bandied about by internet marketers, social media experts, and service providers. Basically it is a term used to encompass a variety of techniques used to increase a website’s ranking in search engine results. Using specific keywords in your page titles, urls, content, links, and even in your photos and videos makes your site more visible to the bots that crawl through the web looking for and categorizing content. Building useful information into your site, like how-to guides or tutorials, provides material that ranks well on search engines as people are more inclined to share it with their friends or colleagues – resulting in more links, more traffic, better search engine result listings, and more sales!

• Encouraging your visitors and users to actively engage with your site and each other through product reviews, discussion forums, or even something as simple as enabling comments on your articles or blogs will help with your SEO as well as increase repeat traffic.
• Once you have people active on your site, make it easy for them to share your content with others – use bookmark and link tools to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or Digg. These sites are free to set up accounts on and can be used to drive traffic to your site. (Check out these guides for help on Setting up Your Twitter Account and Setting up your Facebook Page) This kind of off-site linking also helps with your SEO campaign.

• Showcase your products or services in an easy to understand and transparent way! Data continues to show that consumers research items online before they buy. “If we look at the success story of any unique product or service that was launched and required a change in consumer behavior, the ones that were successful were those which were able to win customer’s trust and offer a clear value proposition to the customer.” (http://www.technetto.com/blog/e-commerce-in-india/) Video is an excellent way to detail and highlight the features and functionality of your offerings. It is the closest thing to physically picking up and turning over a product like a shopper would do in the store and you can address common questions or misconceptions in your branded environment! Plus video SEO is HUGE, not only encouraging viewers to share with their friends, but also increasing your search engine ranking as video is 50x more likely to show up than text in google search results!

These practical tips will go a long way in increasing your market share. If you feel overwhelmed, don’t be afraid to ask for help! You may have friends or colleagues experienced in social media or who know enough basic SEO to get you started, and there are also great companies out there who can ramp up your business. So pick a task and get out there and sell your stuff!

Guest blogger: Corrie Davidson is the New Media Coordinator at Captico, LLC, a technology strategy firm focused on website development, online marketing solutions, and mobile applications.