According to Reel SEO’s Mark Robertson, online video is the swiss army knife of online marketing, and social video can help eCommerce retailers turn conversions into conversations. He discussed this at length in his keynote, “Welcome to the ‘REEL’ Web: Why Video Marketing has Evolved Beyond SEO” at Liveclicker’s 2011 Video Commerce Summit in San Francisco last month. I sat down with Mark to get a high level overview of how social media has changed search and what tactics and tools eCommerce marketers can harness to move beyond product videos.
Mark says that SEO has evolved over the last 10 years, and now social media engagement enhances SEO rankings, a lot. Universal video search is becoming less effective for e-commerce transactional queries.
“I feel that eCommerce providers, for the most part, have done a fairly good job with online video, and they’ve embraced product video, specifically. So product videos on their landing pages, which makes sense. It’s cost effective, highly measurable and they are there to sell products. But I believe as well, that online video is the swiss army knife of Internet marketing. It really can be used all over the customer life cycle. So, whether it’s customer service, whether it’s marketing, even recruitment, people are using video.”
Mark emphasized that while product videos are great, they don’t lend themselves well to social sharing or universal video search. So while they’re incredibly important, he says that marketers’ must embrace social video throughout the customer life cycle and produce video that lends itself to social. He cited a number of strategies and video types that can be applied to the video marketing purchase funnel, and a key ingredient to every application is to make all videos sharable.
