2.1 Product Videos Overview

Hello, and welcome back with this tuts plus course on WooCommerce. In this part of the course, we're going to start looking at adding product videos to our store. But before we actually start planning our own video, creating it and uploading it, I'll take a look at some other online stores that use video to great effect. Now, there's a lot of evidence that video can help you sell your products. There have been quite a lot of studies like this one here by Kissmetrics, that looks at the CSO benefits of including video, and also look at the sales of products that do and don't have videos. And studies like this give you some interesting examples of sites where owners have added video and really boosted their sales. So let's take a look at some of them. You can use videos for three main purposes. The first is to make your product look amazing. So you use high-quality professionally recorded video to make your product seem absolutely beautiful and heads and shoulders above the competition. The second is to dispel any doubt that people have about the product by showing them exactly what it looks like. So, for example, you might show a demonstration of something, or show a video of a model wearing an item of clothing. And thirdly, you can use videos for instructional purposes, so you can show people how to install or setup your product if they need to do that, and how to use it as well. And I'll take a look at some examples of all three of these. So first let's have a look at this one: Advance Auto Parts. This really isn't a particularly well known or amazingly designed site, but it what it does do is it uses video really effectively. It shows you how their products work, how you set them up, and gives you a real feel for what you'll need to do once you buy the product. It also takes the opportunity to show you what the benefits are of each product. And Advance Auto Parts have found that their sales have really gone up since they've added video. Another example here, is Simply Hike. Now they show videos demonstrating how to put up tents. So here, we have a particular tent, and if you hit play the video, is streams a video that's been uploaded to YouTube. And this shows you how to put the tent up, how it works, and what benefits you will get from it. Really useful for anything where people have to assemble your product. And this video has really good SEA benefits for the site. If I Google this particular tent, I look at videos, the first result I get is from the Simply Hike website. So it's not from Vango, the manufacturer, or from any of Simply Hike's competitors, but it's from Simply Hike themselves. When people are looking for a specific product that's quite technical, they might look at videos of how the product works or how they set it up, and if you're using video that can really help your SEO and it will help people find your site. Once they've looked that You Tube video they can then click through a link to the website and buy the tent. So now let's have a look at a couple of examples that are designed to make the product look amazing. Most car manufacturer's use video quite widely on their websites, and these videos show you the car in action. So they're designed to really make you feel you'd love to own that car. They're not practical videos that show you how to drive a car or how to use any of the controls, but they're lifestyle videos. They reflect what's in their adverts. Another brand that uses video like this is Apple. They didn't use videos to show you how to use their products in detail, instead what they do is they use adverts to make you want their products and make those products look amazing. So you can watch their films, previews, or adverts, and you'll see people using their products, you'll see how great their products look, and you'll get a feel for the benefits of the products and what you might get if you own them. Another example here is Ikea. Ikea use videos in some of the sections of their sites to give you practical tips and also encourage you to buy more. So, for example, in the kitchen section of their site, there's tips and advice on planning your kitchen and also on buying appliances. And the idea here is that you'll be more likely to buy an Ikea kitchen because they've helped make that process easier. And also you might be more likely to upgrade your appliances if you've seen the video showing how they can work and how they can enhance your kitchen. Clothing retailers also use video to demonstrate their products. So here on the Marks and Spencer website, you can see an example of a pair of jeans. And there's a video that you can watch that shows a model wearing the jeans, walking around in them, as you might expect, which gives you a feel for how they might look on you, and this can really help bring a product to life. Particularly when you're only selling your product online, clothes can be quite a high-risk product for people to buy, because normally people expect to try clothes on before they buy them. Being able to see how they look in the flesh can really help prompt a purchase. So those are a few real-life examples of how retailers use video on their websites, to help prompt more sales. So how is this going to apply on our website? Well what we're going to do in this course, is we're going to add videos to individual product pages. So here, where you've got images that people can select between, will also add a video. And the way that we'll host that video is we'll upload it to YouTube to start with, and then we'll stream it from YouTube to the site. This has three main benefits. Firstly, you don't need to worry about storing large video files on your site. Secondly, you also don't need to worry about what format to use for your video, and whether it will be compatible with your users computers or phones. And thirdly, and possibly, mostly importantly, using YouTube for video, as we saw with the Simply Hike website earlier, can really help your SEO. People might find a product that you're selling through YouTube, watch your video, and then click through to your site and buy it. So in the next part of this course, we'll set things up in WooCommerce so that we can stream that video. That's all for this time, thanks for watching.