Short Videos: 4550% Ecommerce Marketing Boost
Originally written off as the domain of teens and influencers, short form videos have emerged as a viable and even key tool for both B2C and B2B ecommerce marketing. We recently conducted an experiment to prove out just how much more effective short form videos can be as a marketing tool, and the results were incredible - among other things, we saw a 4550% improvement in reach on YouTube!
Short form videos are videos under 60 seconds (many under 15 seconds) shot at a 9 by 16 aspect ratio - imagine the way a video looks when you record it with your smartphone held upright in your hand. We’ll walk you through the results we saw and a quick guide to producing your own short form videos quickly and inexpensively.
Short Form Video Results
We posted the same short video to Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube and compared the results to the best performing non-short post or video recently posted to each platform.
On Facebook, we didn’t expand our reach much - the short (posted as a Facebook Reel) drove a 13% improvement in reach. However, engagement was up 75% compared to a typical Facebook post.
On LinkedIn, we saw an impressive 85% increase in reach - we reached nearly twice as many people as our best-performing image post on LinkedIn. Engagement was up by a similar amount.
YouTube, however, was where the short format really shined in this experiment - we saw a 4550% improvement in the reach of our short compared to a recent video, and a 200% improvement in engagement. Over 97% of the people that viewed our short were new viewers, coming from the Shorts feed where YouTube features newly uploaded shorts.
Based on these results and thanks to some tools we will discuss later in this article, we will continue to post short form videos to all of the social media platforms we’re active on that support the format. We recommend that all ecommerce brands publish a short to each of their social media accounts as well and measure the results to determine if it’s a viable way to reach a larger audience - based on what we’ve seen from brands that we work with, you will gain a larger reach at a much lower investment than it would take to drive that much traffic via paid social media marketing.
Producing Your Own Shorts
Producing your own shorts doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming. For our experiment, we used a tried and true format - we visually split the video into three sections - a header, the main body of the video and a footer. The header contained an eye-catching title for the video that stayed constant throughout the entire video. The main body of the video at times showed the speaker but typically showed a still image or video relating to what the speaker was saying. Finally, the footer contained running captions of what the speaker was saying so that even those who had their volume muted could benefit from the video.
This sounds complicated, but we had some help - for less than $150 we were able to find an expert in the video editing app we were using (Final Cut Pro, but you can do this even in the free iMovie app that comes with all of Apple’s computers) on Fiverr.com who in just a few hours produced a reusable template for us that provided the header and footer with branded, eye catching motion graphics. Just remember that in whatever editor you’re using, you want to set it to a 9:16 aspect ratio, with dimensions of 1080 pixels by 1920 pixels.
Then it’s a matter of scripting out your video. Shorter and simpler is definitely better - while shorts can be up to 60 seconds, experiment with a few different durations to see which is the most successful for you - our first short was 45 seconds but based on the analytics, our next one will be closer to 15 to 20 seconds.
Once your video is scripted, it’s time to record. We used an iPhone recording in Portrait mode to blur the background behind the speaker. Remember that chances are you will use the audio more than the video from this recording session.
We combined the template from our Fiverr.com contractor with the iPhone video and we were just about done - but for our topical, we didn’t have any other video to show. Based on research and analytics data, you typically want to change what’s appearing in the video every 3-5 seconds, and we didn’t have enough branded video for that. This is where, again, the Internet came to our rescue and really makes short form video accessible to all. We signed up at Artlist.io for the $29.99/month Max Social plan to gain access to a substantial amount of video footage we could use in our shorts. Then it was just a matter of searching Artlist for the right video clips and dropping them into our video editor.
With the editing done, we exported the final version and uploaded it to each of our social media accounts with a healthy dose of hashtags to help more people on the platform find our video.
Try a Short Video Today
With practice, this entire process could be completed in about 30 minutes or less if you’re a real video editing pro. Even if you’re new to video editing, your first short is something you could learn to do in the span of about half a day. This makes short form videos a marketing effort that’s well within the reach of any and all sizes and types of ecommerce brands. Given that even LinkedIn is promoting short form videos now, we encourage all brands to try a short video today, no matter if you’re selling your products via a B2B or B2C model.
Give shorts a try and reach out to us if you have any questions or challenges applying this approach and also let us know what results you find - once we hear from enough of you, we’ll combine all of the findings into a guide and benchmark for using short videos for ecommerce marketing.
