7 Video Trends To Ramp Up Engagement on Your eCommerce Store

Video is a revolution of sorts ' a treat for video lovers, a gift for brands, and a potential gold mine for all businesses (including retailers and eCommerce businesses). Here's a perspective: according to Clickz, customers watched over 11 billion online advertisements in October 2012. ComScore puts the figures of total videos watched by U.S viewers at 183 million Internet users who watched 37 billion videos together

Clearly, it's the kind of media you can't afford to miss. Here are some video trends you can make use of to ramp up engagement for your eCommerce site:

Video presentations

If video is engaging, why not use it to make some great presentations on your products or services? Putting up video presentations takes your brand engagement to a whole new level. Use videos to narrate stories, explain how your products are made, present customer case studies, feature some customer testimonials, give an inside view of your offices and/or your team, etc.

Brands can teach

How about turning your expertise into a huge brand-boosting asset? What happens when you choose to 'teach' instead of just creating ads and counting on web traffic? What happens when you take courses on various aspects related to your business niche? Pick up platforms such as Udemy.com and you'll have all the tools you need to launch courses that correlate to your business directly or indirectly. Teaching is a high-engagement, value-added method to gain confidence of your customers.

Video Ads

ComScore also reveals that videos reach more than half of the Internet population in the U.S. A video ad plays 68 times during a single month. Even if you are a small eCommerce startup, tools exist that can help you create video ads (short form or long-form) to allow you to tap into this potential. Once upon a time, advertising using television was for the big players. Video is the new TV. What do you want to do about it?

Media Buying (Video Space)

Media buying was a great way for large companies to maximize their investment into advertising space with the usual suspects being newspapers, television, and magazines. Off late, blogs and online publishing also emerged as new opportunities for media buying.

Today, media buying is not restricted for big boys with easy money. It's up for grabs for anyone with a website. As an eCommerce startup, you have options: banners are good but look for advertising space to host videos. Blogs, magazines, other web properties, and video platforms ' take your pick.

Video Platforms

Figures from ComScore state that Google's video sites (includes YouTube) had 153, 212 total unique viewers who watched 37,242, 927 videos at the rate of 1,254.4 videos per minute. In another example, BrightRoll Video Network delivered a total of 1,827,703 ads. What do those numbers tell you about the innate potential of video platforms? Video platforms alone can make for a great avenue for deploying ads for your eCommerce site.

Work to maximize your reach across video platforms. Choose the best video platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo and build up a presence there.

Video Interstitial Ads

James Dohnert of Clickz.com rounded up the state of online Ad-supported Online Video where he reveals that viewership of ad-supported online video grew by 17% this year. Further, he points to a study by FreeWheel where it's been found that longer videos carry multiple ads and viewers watch at least 93% of these videos.  The video ads are a great way to get the attention of an already attentive video watcher. While you'll still have challenges to make these ads work for your business, online video viewers are more accepting and understand the presence of video ads on the video content they'd like to watch.

Make it count.

Interactive videos for eCommerce

Did you know that experiments are being conducted right now on how to make videos interactive? Imagine the level of engagement video provides (not to mention its reach) and then adding interactive elements related to products you sell, right there on the video? Brands are already experimenting with Interactive video. Here's a video from Old Spice. You might also want to look at this Red Hot Chilli Peppers' Video that lets you take a peek.

You may use interactive videos with calls-to-action to possibly drive any kind of conversion ' from signing up to your newsletter all the way to actually buy off a special offer you just made.

This article is an original contribution by John Siebert.

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