Engaging Customers with Quality Video Content

In episode 125 of the Customers Who Click podcast I spoke with Frost Li, Founder of Social Chat. Social Chat does focus on shoppable live streams, but they also work with you to ensure you can re-use that content, chop it up and turn it into useful sales material across the customer experience. Video content, especially live, is great for dealing with questions and concerns. A lot of the time customers dont want to read paragraph after paragraph of text to find the answers, but the same content in video format can be acceptable to them. I've always been working to really get users to click more, and more importantly, with satisfaction with every click. This satisfaction piece is key. Customers have limited tolerance for websites, so if they’re not getting what they expected when they click, that tolerance gets used up and eventually they bounce. Frost is the Founder of Social Chat, you can find her on LinkedIn or head over to https://socialchat.ai/

Key highlights:

02:32 - 10:23 - How Does Frost Keep Customers Clicking? - High quality, engaging content, to engage users in the long term instead of just trying to get that quick sale. Customers want to know that youre the right product for them, not just a little cheaper than the competition (or more expensive). Engaging video content allows you to show off the product, talk about all its pros and cons, give advice such as recipes or style guides. There’s so much use for it across the customer journey to really add value to the customers life, and convince them that this really is the right product for them.

10:56 - 15:16 - How To Mass Product Video Content - Content doesnt have to be high end studio quality. In fact, a lot the time its the lower quality stuff that comes across more genuine and authentic. Customers are more engaged when the video feels real, rather than something thats got an entire team prepping every little aspect of it

Another way of course is UGC, getting your customers to talk about why your product is so amazing is the perfect way to sell. They’ll speak in a language your customers understand, they’ll describe the product differently to you and so cover those angles you might not have considered.

Another plus side is there might only be one of you, but you might be able to recruit dozens of customers to produce video content.

15:42 - 19:17 - What Content Works Best? - Sales content does have its place, but its the engaging, interactive, and informative content that works best. Everyone likes a 10% discount, but if they don’t believe in the product, don’t believe in the quality of it for example, it takes a big discount to get the to open their wallets. Educational content answers the ‘Why’, it answers the ‘Is this the right product for me?’ question, and justifies the price in doing so.

20:15 - 28:27 - Frost’s Top Tips - Think of it as your entire marketing strategy, rather than just producing some content to go on your website. You’ll solve so many problems by just focusing on engaging content, answering questions about the product, how it can be used, styled, cooked, whatever.

Don’t worry about trying to produce 200 pieces of content super quickly across your website. Focus on core areas, the 80:20 rule. If you’ve got hundreds or even thousands of SKUs itll take you ages to produce the content for them, so focus on the level above. Focus on brand or category level content that engages and educates the customer more generally about your business, rather than trying to focus on individual products.

Finally, make sure you have some attribution in place. Find out whether people watching the videos actually improves conversion, get analytics in the video themselves so you can see where people drop off, or where people stop to actually make their purchase.

If you’re not tracking performance, you don’t really know what the point is.

29:00 - 40:33 - Mistakes to Avoid in Video Content - Be data driven, properly data driven. It takes time, this is a long term approach, you need to analyse video performance, but also think outside the box with your analysis. What time of the day are you doing video content? If you’re seeing dropoff at certain times, could there be external factors influencing this? For example, is everyone going for lunch? Or do people drop off exactly on the hour mark. It could have nothing to do with your content.

Just like with advertising, you wouldn’t spend $100 and then make sweeping changes based on that data because its just not enough. You’d spend more, wait for enough data, analyse it and then make changes.

41:14 - Who Would Frost Like to Take For Lunch in the D2C Marketing World?

Someone from Nike to discuss their influencer and video strategy.

42:43 - Frost’s Must-Have Ecommerce Tools:

Google Analytics

If you’d like to hear more from Frost, you can connect with her on LinkedIn or head over to https://socialchat.ai/.