We are now beta testing a new video platform which we believe can greatly improve online engagement – first let me give you some background on our thinking and the challenges we wanted to solve.
We are all trying to solve how we emotionally engage our existing audiences and how to engage new people online. Technology has taken away any relationship between the person buying and the person selling. We are speaking about robots to robots, computers to computers as opposed to people to people. We see this as an endemic problem when it comes to marketing online.
There seems to be a current trend of websites presenting themselves in a very generic way and most fail to build any kind of relationship or trust. We have a problem in the way we present ourselves online, it’s a little cold, perfunctory and not particularly human and doesn’t really resonate with us as humans.
Our attempts to manufacture trust with self-curated testimonials and accreditation logos have further dehumanised brands, I know we have done it too. Inadvertently organisations are trying to start a relationship with us as buyers with a lie, they present images from stock libraries, yes those people with white teeth. Do we feel they represent their customers and do we feel they work for those organisations – no.
Our approach has been to obfuscate our customers rather than tell them who we really are and we have effectively disconnected the buyer from the seller. We have removed the person to person relationships we have become nebulas when presenting ourselves online.
We know from research users tell us; “Show me the content but let me decide” in other words don’t try and sell me stuff. Yet it seems most organisations don’t understand the importance of engagement and insist on pushing sales pitches down the throats of their website audiences.
The successful brands who engage their customers understand they want to interact with them in different ways – which has never been easy thanks to technology.
When brands are able to build strong emotional connections they are able to increase consumer loyalty and charge premium prices according to research from Forrester and Google. One of the most effective ways in building emotional connections with customers is to prove that they are dealing with an actual person and not just a nameless, faceless organisation.
How do we emotionally engage people online?
To better understand the world that live in, we like to tell real stories and in the most part it’s been through a variety of social platforms. During last couple of years all social media platforms have recognised the massive increase in user engagement with video – to this end we have seen live streaming on Facebook and new video channels on Instagram. We have also seen two major new video streaming products in 2016 Periscope and Myeye.
- Unbounce reports including video on a landing page increases conversion by 80%.
- Online Publishers Association: 80% of users recall a video they viewed in the past 30 days.
- Invodo say 92% of mobile video consumers share videos with others.
- 90% of users say a video about a product is helpful in the decision process.
But Video itself has been left out in terms of its development. It arrived on the web completely disconnected from the content around it. In over a decade, the only thing that has changed about video is the size and the quality of the picture.
Webs’ new Video Commerce platform changes all of that.
Video Commerce is a tool that allows anyone to curate video with any content pulled live from the web.
Imagine you were to tell a video story about your organisation but let your audiences navigate and choose a route through related video content. You curate the content but let them decide what they look at and how the story might end for them. You can pull in any existing web content, Google Street View, Websites, shop applications and a box office event feed.
Click below to see a few samples;
If you want to know more about this new platform please use the form below and we’d be more than happy to give you a demonstration.