Council Post: How To Get More Out Of Your Customer-Centered Video Content In 2021

Gil Becker is CEO & President of AnyClip, the AI-powered online video platform. Tweet at him @Becker_Gil

Video’s potency as a sales tool has quickly become common knowledge, but many — if not most — online retailers have stuck stubbornly to their old ways. So, it’s worth rehearsing some statistics. For one thing, videos are what your customers want: Seventy-two percent prefer to learn about a product through video as opposed to text. More importantly, they work: Sixty-four percent of people are more likely to buy a product after watching a video. In fact, the right one on your landing page can boost conversion by upward of 80%.

Of course, it is one thing to say you need video, another thing to produce videos that are actually relevant to your audience and still another thing to maximize that content’s latent value. It’s that last step in which most marketers get caught up. They lavish resources on content tailored precisely to their audience, only to let it languish ignored or half-watched. The right video can yield an ROI unimaginable in the analog days, but only if it’s used strategically.

A Common Misstep

Before examining what you should do with video, I’d like to discuss some common mistakes, or more accurately, the one mistake that can lead to a cascade of bad outcomes for your brand: YouTube.

Marketers often consider YouTube a powerful tool in their social media toolbox and a convenient way to host and share videos. On the surface, this makes sense. It is, after all, the second-biggest search engine on the web, and used correctly, it can bring your product to a massive new audience.

But marketers should keep in mind that YouTube, while it might get your product in front of eyeballs, might not be the best way to convert viewers into customers. If and when a potential customer comes across one of your videos, sidebars and prompts can quickly whisk them away to another corner of the YouTube ecosystem — more often than not, to content made by your competitors. At the end of the day, it makes more sense to focus your attention on building out the video on your brand’s own domain because the odds of conversion are much higher.

And despite being synonymous with the 21st century, YouTube is, in a way, a relic of the 20th. Where sister products like Google Books allow users to search inside of texts, their videos are still indexed via external markers, such as title, description, manually-inputted tags, etc. This means that when a potential customer tries to see your product in action (and they almost certainly will since 90% of consumers report that videos are helpful in their decision-making process), they might come up empty-handed, even when you’ve put in the money to make exactly what they’re looking for.

How AI Can Help

Increasingly, there are brands whose high-quality, expensively produced video content is gathering dust in the furthest reaches of their websites. It is for this reason, among others, that some people are turning to AI for their video solutions. It can help keep content continuously recirculating and get it in front of the people you want to see it. In my experience, some marketers don’t even realize how much usable content they’re wasting. Eager to press ahead, churning out content and hoping some of it sticks, they neglect the value of what they’ve done already.

As the president and CEO of an AI-based video platform, I’ve observed that AI can fillet a video frame-by-frame, wringing every square inch for a maximum of data, not simply what people are saying but what they’re doing, and not simply the type of product on display but its exact make and model. It can prompt a consumer to buy what they’re watching on-screen. It can also offer the kind of granular, actionable data marketers rely on to make better decisions. What’s working? What’s not? When do customers stop watching? 

But how can you make the most of AI when it comes to video? Keep in mind that AI is a tool to simplify workflows, save time and boost productivity. Make sure you understand the automation and where an application can be most helpful. With video, one of the more useful parts of automation is not having to manually watch hours of footage, tag it and catalog it. The challenge many brands may face, like most of us, is learning to trust the automation. Getting to a place where team members aren’t doubling back over the work of an AI tool is where the mind-meld between human and computer is best served.

Customer-Specific Videos

As technology changes, best practices for video must adapt. Paying close attention to engagement is key. Companies have to rethink how to align with customers’ preferences at any given moment. For instance, if someone is searching for a specific product or information, you need to ensure the video content on your website can answer those questions clearly and keep browsers on your domain.

In light of that, you need to make sure that the videos on your domain are organized and easily searchable. The ability for brands to offer their customers the easy tools — like deep search — to find the best content to match their questions, not only by video but by the moment in a video, will be a game-changer. Lastly, we can never underestimate the importance of matching first-party data with video content to create a truly personalized video experience for every site visitor. 

This is all to say that making the video is only half the battle. Just as important — for conversion and for your marketing budget — is taking full advantage of what that video can do for you. As we hunker down for the long pandemic winter and the uptick in online shopping that will surely follow, that is something worth keeping in mind.


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