Five reasons shoppers want videos to buy products

Five key strategies for creating authentic and entertaining social-media videos that inspire your audience to hit that share button, video content
Varna Bulgaria – February 02 2015: YouTube multi devices set comprising Apple iPhone app logo iPad Air2 application and desktop version of YouTube on Macbook Pro screen. Isolated on white background.

Seven years ago, whilst living in the UK, The Winning Group reached out to me to help them start Appliances Online’s video strategy. Back then, video wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. And e-commerce-specific video was extremely rare. Today, such videos are still quite rare. This is despite the fact that product video reviews have got some of the easiest metrics to measure a return on investment on (and a return on investment they always get!).

I’ve learned a lot about why shoppers want videos in order to buy products. Here are my most prominent learnings:

1. Humanising a brand

The most important lesson I learned from reading dozens of reviews from shoppers was they were over the moon that someone on video had spoken to them about the product they were about to purchase. People make connections to other people a lot easier than they will to a product, so having a human educating your prospect about the product they are interested in will create immediate loyalty to your brand. Shoppers prefer to feel like they are buying from someone and not a faceless corporation.

2. Convenience

In a world where attention spans are short and consumers want immediate results, shoppers don’t want to waste their time reading manuals, going through fine print, and scrolling for hours trying to find the information they are after before making a purchase. Make it easy for them to purchase by collating all the important information about your product in one succinct video.

3. Seeing the product in action

Each shopper lands on a product page with a differing reason as to why they want to buy. Companies may not be able to answer all questions in a script or manual, but showing the product do its thing will go a LONG way in answering the majority of questions prospects may have. People want to see exactly how the product will perform once they have it in their hands, so by showing it doing what it does, you’ll get them to visualise the product in their life.

4. Education

Educating prospects on the purchase they are about to make creates psychological allegiances to brands. Good customer service has -and always will- entice shoppers to buy from companies who exceed at customer service. Investing in a video review for products is investing in your customer’s shopping experience. If you educate your prospects well enough on the products they are looking for then it’s a no-brainer that they will choose to buy from the company that took some time to talk to make their purchasing journey easy.

5. The closest thing to touching the product

Having analysed thousands of product reviews and hours of video data, we saw that the devil really is in the detail. Data from our earliest videos showed that customers kept rewinding back to close-ups we had of panels or buttons on white goods. Sometimes, the most innocuous of details (for the production team), ended up being what people were really after. For these types of shoppers, having a video review with a lot of close-ups of the product is the closest they are going to get to ‘feeling’ and ‘testing’ the product without actually having physical access to it. Think of it almost like test driving the product from the comfort of their own home.

Video is the easiest way for e-commerce brands to connect to their customers and bring a human touch that helps them sell faster.

Michael Langdon, Founder, Serious Levity and author of “Welcome to the age of Emotion: How to attract and connect with customers using video”