Introduction
Incorporating video into a retail store website is not something reserved for large large retailers with expensive web development teams at their disposal. In fact, free online video hosting services such as YouTube, Yahoo! Video, and other such service providers now enable virtually any size retailer to easily embed video on a store’s website, a blog, and even in email. By leveraging low-cost video and other “rich media” elements retailer’s of all sizes can supercharge their online marketing strategy to educate, engage, and persuade online contacts to become in-store customers.
Why Retailers Should Incorporate Video Into Online Marketing Assets
Retailers should routinely incorporate video into their online marketing assets such as their website, the store blog, and in email for many practical reasons. For example, it is a fact that when video clips appear in a store website the site is more likely to garner a favorable search engine ranking (SER). The simple reason for this is that the site is more likely to receive more visits because video (no matter how good or bad it is) makes the site more compelling. The more “popular” a site is the higher the SER.
Video hosted on YouTube can easily be used to drive traffic back to the retail store’s website. This is because YouTube already enjoys a favorable search engine ranking – a fact that any retailer can easily leverage to his or her benefit. A properly “tagged” YouTube video uploaded by the retailer that includes a “keyword rich” title and subject tags can potentially be viewed by millions of online visitors. Some of those visitors may want to learn more about a retailer or product and click through to the store’s website.
Video should be included in retail store online marketing assets because it makes it easier for prospects and customers to remember the retailer. Video adds another dimension to a marketing message that stimulates the audience visually AND aurally while plain text only stimulates one of the senses. Video provides the “picture that paints a thousand words” and gives the audience the instant gratification they increasingly insist upon. The more senses that are stimulated and the faster the message is provided the more likely the audience is to remember it.
Incorporating video into retail store online marketing assets adds the powerful element of emotion to a retailer’s marketing message. It is one thing to read advertising copy – even when it is accompanied by still photographs or other images, but it is something else altogether when the audience can see and hear a video message from the retailer. Watching a video of the retailer describe the benefits of a new product can be a highly effective technique for persuading the audience to visit the brick-and-mortar store.
Video assets are extremely versatile in that they can be distributed in a number of ways online. Email signature lines can include a call to action and a link to a current video currently being featured on the store’s website. Blog posts can include the same kind of link – accompanied by a compelling link description – that makes it almost irresistible for a reader to not click on the link. And each time someone clicks on the email or blog link this becomes new traffic back to the store’s website where the retailer gets another opportunity to ultimately drive traffic back to the brick-and-mortar store.
What Kinds of Videos Should a Retailer Produce?
Videos can be effectively used by retailers to produce many kinds of low-cost marketing messages. A 45-second video introduction on the website home page by the retailer or a store sales person can instantly grab the attention of first-time online visitors. Such a video puts a “face” on the retail business in much the same way that television ads featuring actual sales associates for BestBuy put a human face on that giant retailer’s business. Audience emotion becomes the trigger that keeps the online audience from clicking away before leaning more about the retailer’s business and offers.
A retailer can use online, 3-5 minute (no longer!) video segments very effectively to demonstrate new products and their usefulness to potential buyers. This tends to communicate the retailer’s genuine interest in the customer and a desire to improve the customer’s life in some way by using the new product. The retailer also has an opportunity to briefly describe relevant features and benefits in a way that would be almost impossible using any other type of marketing medium.
Videos can be used to share in-store seminars with prospects and customers. For example, home and garden centers frequently sponsor Spring time flower and gardening workshops that the store can videotape using a simple camcorder. The video can later be edited down into 3-5 minute topical segments using relatively inexpensive video editing software (under $100). Each segment can then be uploaded to YouTube and embedded into the store’s website.
Retailer’s should NOT be concerned about producing Steven Spielberg-quality videos. In fact, a video that doesn’t look “produced” tends to have more marketing effectiveness than one that appears more “home-grown”. In the end, the video is not about the production, but about the content and the message. Anyone who doubts this should spend time looking at some of the videos on YouTube that get millions of hits per day.
How Retailer Can Include Video in the Online Marketing Assets
I have discussed “Why” retailer’s should produce online videos and basically “What” and “How” they should be produced. The next step is to deploy the videos in an online marketing strategy. I have already alluded to several ways that video hosted on YouTube and other video hosting services can be incorporated in to websites, emails, and blogs. These services generally offer two ways to “share” videos: 1) Share via a simple link back to the video on the hosting site; and 2) Share via “embedding” directly into a web page.
A simple link to a YouTube video, for example, will take the audience to the exact page on YouTube’s site where the video can be viewed. There are, however, some pluses and minuses to using a link to direct an audience to a video. The minuses include the fact that the audience may get unnecessarily distracted by other “related” videos that will be presented on the same YouTube page as the intended video. The pluses include the fact that a simple link is easy to deploy in a website, blog, or email.
A YouTube or Yahoo! video can be deployed by “embedding” special code into a web page instead of taking the audience to the hosting site (via a link) to view the video. The embedded code allows a website visitor to view the video “inline” within the page itself and without being redirected to the YouTube or Yahoo! site. The specific advantage is that the embedded video reduces the chance of the audience getting distracted by someone else’s video. The drawback is that embedding code in a website may require a website programmer to pull off if the retailer lacks some basic website coding experience.
Summary
Even the smallest retailers should not ignore the tremendous marketing potential of using and leveraging video in all of their online marketing assets. Producing videos can be done at relatively low cost on a periodic basis throughout the year to coincide with new product introductions, in-store events, or to just share some good news with customers. A routine video marketing plan keeps online content current, relevant, and compelling to online contacts that may ultimately become instore customers.
This article was written by Mel Cooper, President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc. MELCOOPER is an online marketing and web design consultancy based in Montgomery, Alabama USA. Copyright 2009 MELCOOPER.
For more information about Online Marketing Strategies for
Retail Stores and Services please visit the company’s website
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