When BlendTec wanted to show the world how powerful their blender was, they turned to video. Yeah, they could have written about it, used words to describe its blending power and how well it mashed up every day objects — but they didn’t. They used video to illustrate how a BlendTec blender could grind up iPhones, marbles, glowsticks, Chuck Norris and everything else you can imagine. And it worked.
To date, the BlendTec YouTube channel has 200,00+ subscribers with more than 4 million views. Sales increased by more than 700 percent. It turned a small business into a household name. That’s the power video can have.
Product videos are extremely effective. They let customers get a better feel for what they’re buying before they make the investment. They let them see what the product looks like, how it works, the upkeep, assembly, etc. You can provide How Tos to show people how to put that swing set together, how to assemble that bouquet or even how to put the batteries in that darn toy. It took me a How To video to learn how to finally put the SD card into my Blackberry.
Customers understand the power of video. And so does Google.
Earlier this month, Google let site owners know that they had created a new attribute to go along with Google Product Search which allows business owners to include video product reviews right in their feed. You won’t quite get the flexibility of something like BlendTec grinding up an iPhone, but creating video reviews that answer natural questions helps serve as a powerful point of difference, while also helping customers make important buying decisions. They increase the chances that someone will buy your product.
Check out the product listing for the Nikon D90.
To get videos showing up in your Google Product listings, you’ll need to add the “youtube” attribute to your data feed. In the attribute, you’ll want to include the YouTube video ID for each one of your products that you’re uploading a YouTube video for. You should also include the UPC, ISBN, brand, and MPN information in the tag of your video review. It’s not guaranteed that Google will add your videos in the feed, but you at least give yourself a chance of having them be accepted. Knowing how powerful video reviews can be, it’s a worth the bit of extra effort.
Creating video reviews to go along with your product is a great way to set your product apart from competitors, to answer customers natural buying questions, and to help them build trust in your product. Video sells.
You must be reading my mind Lisa. I need to add a memory card to my blackberry and didn’t know where to start. Thank you for providing the link to the how to video. I’m so excited that now I can buy and install one!
Martin Lindeskog
Are these videos showing up when you do a search on specific products?
So if a picture is worth 1,000 words and video has 24 frames/second, then a 30 second video is worth 720,000 words.
Hi Lisa
I like the way you put it: “Creating video reviews to go along with your product is a great way to set your product apart from competitors, to answer customers natural buying questions, and to help them build trust in your product. Video sells.”
You are absolutely right! Our case studies and testimonials from across the web show video presentations help increase conversion rates 30% at least (see this post – http://bit.ly/18um4X for example). Interestingly for luxury items the improvement in conversion rates is in most cases much higher.
Cheers,
Mike
http://treepodia.com
As buying of products through Google online shops is now common,your review is very helpful.
J
I believe Google Base is the only feed I’ve seen that will accept a video url field. I’ve checked all of these, with no luck for this feature: http://www.productfeeds.org/ – good list, but I see no other video options so far.
Anyone see a list of sites like Google Base that will accept video?