Beginning Your Customer Journey

Introduction

Online shopping is big and getting bigger. It already accounts for 15% of total U.K. retail sales, while still posting double digit growth year after year. Given these figures, it’s no surprise that we Brits spend more online than any other country in the world—over £1,170 a year per person!

As much as customers like buying online, they look to the internet to help them research their products ahead of time even more. To understand more about this, Brightcove asked 2,000 U.K. consumers about their online shopping habits and expectations.

The results are eye-opening: although online retailing is a well-established practice, there is a huge opportunity to plug the expectations gap and make your customers even more likely to hit the ‘buy’ button. Our research has discovered that over three-quarters (77%) of consumers say that more ‘real life’ experiences—via video and multimedia content—would encourage them to make a purchase online, providing a strong indication of consumer expectations in the years to come.

Having some token videos alone isn’t enough to draw in and convert prospective customers. Consumers are twice as likelyto purchase goods after viewing videos integrated into a brand’s site, versus videos on a branded YouTube channel. Other contextual elements, like search, are vital to ensuring your audience doesn’t leave your website in search of the right information.

These findings have major implications for marketers, including which channels they use to reach prospective customers, and what information they provide to ensure they convert a potential customer into a loyal one. It’s no wonder that retailers are continuing to develop their omnichannel strategies, ensuring their online presence is as good, if not better, than their physical one.

As retail stores move to these sorts of omnichannel strategies, they must keep in mind that video has become an essential part of the customer buying journey.

So, what does it take to make a retailer’s online video strategy effective?

Engaging Your Customer

Information Is King. The customer’s journey, particularly for high-consideration items, often involves a number of stages across research, selection, and ultimately purchase. The right online tools, particularly video, have especially strong benefits when it comes to helping consumers research items.

While written how-to guides can be effective, videos demonstrating how a product is assembled, used, and maintained is becoming even more important. Home improvement stores, for instance, have quickly adopted online video as a way of providing customers with everything they need to know about planting a tree, or building a deck. In doing so, they empower their prospective customers with the ability to make an effective decision, after which the prospective customers are more likely than not to continue researching the brand.

This is especially true for high-consideration touchpoints on the customer journey that are most vital to gaining or losing a potential new customer. In these touchpoints—such as guiding a customer through the sign-up process or explaining their first bill—video has the potential to provide more information and context than text or images. These can be generic, all-encompassing videos at first. As customers search for more information, they can be led to more granular and customised videos that describe minute details of the product or service, or solve the customer’s specific problem through a step-by-step, visual, and engaging process.

Video reviews that validate the customer’s research and intentions also serve as a significant method of engaging and converting leads into sales. In fact, 55 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds said their decisions were influenced by customer reviews.

Hero, Hub, Hygiene

‘Multi-screening’ has become a major challenge, and opportunity, for marketers —more than a half (55%) of Brits said they regularly shop online while watching television—proof that second-screening (the habit of using smartphones or tablets while simultaneously watching TV) is already a common and widely adopted behaviour.

The lack of dedicated attention consumers now pay to traditional advertising means marketers must rethink their approach to content. One possible change is what’s known as the ‘Hero, Hub, and Hygiene’ approach.

While traditional TV ads, or hero content, can provide high-level messaging that attracts broad-based audiences, these ads must pull consumers into the brand’s digital platforms, where a brand’s hub content can attract the most loyal and interested users. These can then be supplemented by hygiene videos, which serve to draw in other onlookers through search engines using SEO-friendly terms.

In addition, it’s important that any content strategy is mobile friendly. With45 percent of Brits intending to shop primarily on their phones or tablets in the future, having a multi-device content strategy will be vital to ensure retail stores can reach as many of their target audience as possible.

Completing Your Journey

Putting Videos In The Right Context

An effective content strategy requires videos to be engaging and effective in their messaging. However, a video alone is unlikely to convert sales leads if it isn’t presented in the right context. Poor website design, the wrong calls-to-action, and most importantly, poor search functionality, can make the difference between a converted sales lead, or a lost prospect.

A well-designed e-commerce website, for instance, can be very effective in ensuring that a prospective customer stays on your website after watching a video. While free video platforms like YouTube can be an effective channel to promote brand awareness, they are less effective when it comes to getting the customer to engage further.

Qualitative research commissioned by Brightcove found consumers were twice as likely to purchase goods when they viewed videos that were integrated into a brand’s e-commerce website versus on a branded YouTube channel. They were three times as likely to take brand-focused steps—looking at other videos, download step-by-step instructions or products on the brand’s website—when relevant calls-to action were included with the video content. That leads to a direct increase in sales.

International jewellery chain Michael Hill adopted a branded video platform to create a comprehensive user experience for website visitors. They integrated elements like shoppable videos, allowing consumers to buy products directly from within the video or pull up product details for specific pieces of jewellery as they appear onscreen. Michael Hill’s online video strategy saw a 500% increase in transactions and 290% increase in sales in just 12 months.

Search, too, is vital in promoting positive consumer behaviour when browsing. Marketers must provide audiences with the right tools to help them find what they are looking for, and the right metadata to make those videos easily and quickly searchable.

When asked to find a specific video as part of the qualitative research, two-thirds of participants found the video quickly on a well-designed e-commerce website, versus 13% on a branded YouTube channel. In addition, users frequently searched across the entire YouTube catalogue rather than focusing just on the brand’s videos. Thus, by putting their videos only on YouTube, brands allow viewers to discover competitive and other content rather than delving deeper into the brand’s content.

That’s not to say that any video portal will do, however. The same research task, when performed on a poorly designed website, led 47 percent of participants to leave the brand’s site. In fact, just a third of users successfully used the search on the poorly designed website, as it was difficult to find and use.

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Key Tips For A Successful eCommerce Journey

Here are a few pointers on ensuring a successful retail video strategy:

Video Should Be Part Of A User-Focused Interface

Complement your video content with relevant calls-to-action at each stage, allowing consumers to buy your product, learn more, or find related content. This requires you to think deeply about each step of the customer journey when you design the experience, to ensure it is seamless and convincing.

Don't Rely On Your Video Platform Alone

To make sure your video analytics are truly effective, integrate your video data into your marketing automation and CRM platform. This will allow you to build a clearer picture of who your customer is, where they are in the buying cycle, and what they want, allowing you to target follow-up messaging and maximise return on investment.

Create Content That Leads To High Conversion Rates Online And Offline

Creating interactive content that engages viewers ensures a higher chance of conversion and sales success, both on your website and in physical retail stores.

Host content where your customers are

Don’t rely on your website alone to drive sales. With many younger buyers using social media networks as part of their buying journey, it’s vital to ensure that you are reaching customers where they are. Determine a strategy that allows you to leverage similar types of content, across your website, social media, and other advertising methods, with content optimised for each channel to ensure you develop better engagement. Deploy a strategy that drives traffic from third party channels back to your owned properties, where you can provide a fully immersive content experience that combines all marketing collateral—video, text and infographics—to create a full story for the customer, instead of providing just a section of that experience. There you can also capture analytics to ensure your marketing strategy is working effectively, and ultimately lead the consumer to the path of conversion or retention.

Adopt A Multi-Screen Strategy

Traditional, mass-appeal content alone is no longer enough to engage and convert customers. It needs to be compelling and compatible across as many devices as possible to ensure it reaches its intended audience. Tie your hero content into a digital strategy that provides tailored hub and mass-appeal hygiene content to draw in and convert prospective customers, while ensuring your videos are mobile friendly, so they can be seen across as wide a range of devices as possible.

Ensure Your Videos Are Searchable And Convincing

Make sure your videos are found. Integrate them into your e-commerce website, with the right metadata and search functionality to ensure that users can easily find that video showing how to assemble, use and maintain your products.

Track And Analyse Your Content Performance

A good content strategy is never ‘set and forget’. Constantly tracking and analysing the performance of your content strategy is vital to ensuring that content is effective and, if it isn’t, helps you to evolve your strategy. Though website visits and click-through rates are useful, video is a particularly powerful tool to track audience attention and engagement, allowing marketers to produce video content that converts potential customers into tangible sales.

Research Findings

What Makes Us Click

• 67 percent of people found the right content they were searching for when video was integrated into the brand’s website and search functionality. This compares to 13 percent on branded YouTube channels, where most users opted for the YouTube search bar, which led them away from brand’s content.
• Consumers were 2x as likely to buy products after watching video content fully integrated into the purchasing process, versus users consuming stand-alone content on a branded YouTube channel.
• Consumers were 3x as likely to take additional brand-focused steps such as downloading a step-bystep guide, viewing detailed product information, or looking at related products, after viewing an onsite video with relevant calls-to-action, when compared to users consuming content on a branded YouTube channel.

How We Shop

• £114 billion - How much Brits spent online in 2015
• 45% of Brits will shop on mobiles/tablets in the future
• 40% of 16-24 year olds intend to shop via their mobile phones over the next five years
• 77% of Brits want more “real life” experiences via multimedia and video content