Susan
More to marketing.
Susan
Welcome to more to marketing, the podcaster on, marketing, product and everything business. I’m your host, Susan Walsh, and today we’re talking about how social commerce and shoppable videos can boost the brand success. I have a very special guest today. I have eaten with us. He is a founder in the E Commerce space. He has over 2 decades experience in media and Entertainment, E commerce and telco industries in both startups and public companies. He has a passion for solving consumer problems that led him to create a video commerce SAS platform that helps brands and rent and retailers create shoppable video experiences. Welcome to the podcast.
Eitan
Hi, Susan. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.
Susan
No, thank you so much. Can would you mind sharing a bit about yourself, your career, and tell us a bit more about your product that you have too, please?
Eitan
Yeah, sure, probably. You know, I’m in the video business in the since the year 2000. I, you know, my manager told me and I was probably previously in IT. And he he told me, look, you’re not going to the video business and uh please understand before you join, there’s no way to get out because you’re going to be in the video business for your entire career. So maybe you want to consider this, I said. What do you mean? I said. Wait, wait and see. So yeah, like 20-3 years later, I’m still around. Obviously, I started in video when there was no streaming before the iPhones, right. And we talked about, like, the transition from analogue video to digital video, right. Remember the cable companies, the satellite companies, just doing the transition to introduce. Digital TV to our homes, right over seller boxes. And my company I used to work for Israeli tech company. We started to experiment with delivering video over IP networks versus satellite or other fibre networks. So obviously a lot of challenges and yeah, then the iPhone was introduced and video was widely started to be deployed over on also on the distribution side of things. So we started to receive video and watch video across any platform. Then Netflix launched and late lately. And obviously, Disney and also the in every country like the mobile operators and probably some of the leading content providers also introduced their own apps for video consumption and various subscription models. And it’s an evolving, it’s quite of a mature industry. So we call it like media and entertainment industry. So that’s where I started. But during the we’ve established VMI, together with my partner about a decade ago already 10 years. We’ve been operating in the video space and this is the industry where we started on that media and entertainment side of things. We work with mobile operators and content providers around the world to launch their own white label, Netflix like type of service. So think about mobile operators and was introducing probably VOD library and channels to be consumed.
No.
Eitan
And the CTVS or mobile apps or an IP sandbox which is very common today. Four years ago, we have identified the big opportunity of video going into marketing and specifically into commerce and this is where we decided to launch to launch another. Business units unit that is using our existing technology that was developed including all our patents around video management. Streaming and actually there were existing technology in new markets, right, in terms of marketing definition. So we took our technology building blocks and actually adapted them towards commerce. And primarily we today we work with brands and retailers and we help them launch video experiences across their own websites. And all across their own partner is going to be social channels, marketplaces, affiliates and brands. We learned how to work with those brands to create shoppable experiences across those different channels. And we we are a SAS company that is actually. Integrated to existing e-commerce platform and create those seamless shoppable experiences on all the channels. So yeah, many years in video and we saw that I saw the transition of video from all these waves and I’m still around and there’s no way for me to get. Out.
Susan
There’s no escape button for you there is there.
Eitan
No escape better. No, no, no.
Susan
Now you really are.
Eitan
Still trying to find him. No kidding.
Susan
Passionate.
Susan
Now, thank you so much for sharing a bit of more about your background and how the company came about, and I really think there’s a lot of powerful messages that can happen with video content, but I’d love to know from you. Can you explain what shoppable videos are and how they actually differ from those traditional video content that we’re probably used to seeing old school?
Eitan
Yeah. So today I think when an era, definitely when TikTok is around, where short phone video is very, very important and the amount of content is being created is increasing more and more. Just to give you some piece of information, the video is according to Cisco Video is more than I think. 82% of the worldwide Internet traffic, right. So the majority of the media consumption is not text, not audio, not you know, different type of formats, not pictures. But it’s video so. And why is that? Because video works. Video is much more of an engaging format of communication. It creates more emotional triggers within audiences, and it involves, you know, the pictures, the audio and. Actually, an opportunity to build relationships which are very, very important in today’s way of doing business. People want to buy from someone that they’ve built some built some relationship with and it’s both true for B2B and B2C. So, so lately we see that the. The increase of the creator economy, where influencers and creators are creating content for brands. So from a brand perspective. They they go to agencies can be digital agencies or offline agencies and create a variety of packages for content creation. If it can be creator creators creating content, what’s known as UGC, right, so user generated content brands has the full IP ownership on these videos and they can distribute them on their own. Social channels and they’re on their own website, primarily on their own social channels. And these videos are mainly. Build for creating impressions, brand awareness. Some of them are like rating conversion like special promotions, so the the the Creator will probably suggest a coupon code or some form of. Redirect to our website to continue purchase the other form of video creation is around influencer marketing where brand will reach out through influencers. Whether they pay them to create content and post on their behalf on their influencer social channels to increase exposure. All they do like product setting or. Like gifting, right? So it depends on. So the size of the influencer is obviously nano influencer micro mega and today there is a big tendency to go to the micro and even nano influencers because they have a more stronger and committed community. Although it’s a smaller one. We see also growth in the Fundo lead content, which is very, very important these days for differentiation. So video is created all over by the way, there is also. So we talked about those short phone videos less than 59 seconds just to go on YouTube shorts as well. But they go to TikTok, obviously go to Instagram reels, YouTube shorts. And there’s also a longer form video which is. Usually a white screen 16 by 9 type of aspect ratio of the video. This one goes probably to YouTube and there is also live events as well, right? So now live is very very big industry.
Susan
I’ve seen life growing quite a lot.
Eitan
A lot, and the special version of live is what we call live shopping, which is the ability of a brand to go live on multiple channels in order to showcase and promote and sell sell product. So shoppable video is all about creating awareness to the product, but also enable real checkout. From the video itself, OK, now every platform out there, whether it’s a meta like Instagram and Facebook or TikTok or YouTube, even Pinterest and snap and even the marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart and. There is they have various different ways of how to do shoppable video. For example in TikTok you have TikTok shop and you must check out in Tiktok and you must have product pages inside Tiktok. They won’t redirect you to an external product page to continue the purchase and you can get. Fulfilment by TikTok today. So yeah, Jesus is just real competition with Amazon. On Instagram and Facebook, you obviously have a Facebook shop you can redirect to your Facebook shop, or you can tag products on Instagram and redirect to external PDP’s and actually create the shopping experience on those pages. YouTube the same you can redirect to external pages. YouTube is now introducing digital shell for a new API that. In the video player itself, the ability to create to, to introduce, buy now button right and again redirect to external page, but it’s within the video what we call video checkout. OK, so every one of those platforms has a different way of managing those shopping experiences. There is always involvement in trying to streamline the.
Susan
That’s Nancy.
Eitan
Checkout processes. Some of those platforms. From the you know they’re doing many things and enabled commerce is has different priorities for each one of them. Pinterest was there from I think from the get go. They already have checkout experiences and also definitely TikTok. It’s well known that Tiktok is now. Has started as an entertainment platform. They moved to search platform, but now it’s a shopping platform, right? And you can see that, I mean they sold it last year 2023 close to $12 billion on TikTok Shop and the the numbers for this year. Everyone can guess, but at least doubling this or even tripling this, or it’s overwhelming focus, it’s huge right it.
Susan
It’s going to be huge, yeah.
Eitan
It’s huge and they will introduce TikTok shop to more and more countries and. And this has a direct impact on the on everything that we do in terms of shoppable video, so. The the idea of of doing those short form videos, long form videos and also live shopping is to deploy them across entire array of partners and this is a very. I think close to another big trend in commerce, which is social commerce and for brands actually to share profits with channel partners, right. So if brand is they have few alternatives why they can pay a lot of money to meta or Amazon or those channels in terms of advertising. And we know that CPCS are getting more expensive and.
Susan
Mm-hmm.
Eitan
Acquisition is so difficult, so might as well. Let’s deploy ourselves and our products in where shoppers are actually are and create those reshare business deals together with channel partners. It makes a lot of sense or social commerce. Just to give you some of the data is going to be $6.2 trillion business in 20-30, right? That’s around 15% of worldwide commerce and the growth there is explosive, right tick Tock shop. Obviously we talked about the data, it’s the growth, the growth rate are exponentially. And the vehicle for everything is for all these growth parameters. It’s video. Right it takes.
Susan
All that content isn’t.
Eitan
Exactly a lot of content and tick there is what I call the tick toxification of things. Right? So Tiktok taught us that what’s more important is less of a high end production value and very polished type of videos that it usually takes weeks to produce. No, the idea is to be authentic to post daily. Videos to grow the the throughput of the production capacity. In various ways and probably we can talk about it later, but the idea is to. Create videos on a daily basis. Get data and analytics for what’s working and what’s not. And improve from there and and it’s all organically. So we usually suggest to brand to start like 2-3 months on organic. See what’s working, if we see a video that is getting a lot of a lot of traction. And I don’t like, I don’t like to call it viral right because this is not. Quantity. It is quantitative type of parameters that we can then probably increase the the success of these videos with advertising. And we know that the roads is going to be very, very good. All this, by the way, is enabled by our platform. Here at Vimi we are providing a SAS platform that manage all those shoppable video experiences. All the social media marketplaces and brand.com website. Shop ability experience that manage from a single point of contact. The platform is syncing to existing e-commerce platform. Doesn’t matter which platform, second product pages.
Susan
Has all the APIs to hook in.
Eitan
Exactly API or we have like Shopify application, Magento and other which is like we are operating within the Shopify back end. And we associate or the the customer is associating videos to product and once we have that connection in one click those shoppable products will be or or those videos will become shoppable across all those channels seamlessly in one click. This is the breakthrough that I think we’ve introducing to the market. And it’s eliminating the brands for thinking too much. How to manage Tiktok and then YouTube and then Instagram and all those. Channels and we have a big list of social channels and marketplaces and publishers and it’s very easy to take also an embed code from our platform. We just copy the embed which is a video player, a full application that you can embed on your own website and instantly it’s a black box that comes from Vimy but we manage and the shoppers. And experience interactive video and interactive website and product pages that are like uplifted with this type of interactive videos and the ability to check out which we know is improving conversion rates, reducing shop abandonment and create much better performances.
Susan
I think the one thing I love about your product the most is we’re talking before now and also my own research into it is that it just brings the consistency together across all those different platforms because it’s so easy to video it in landscape. But you need it in portrait over here and then you’ve got to convert it and change it. You want to change this and that. That that’s what you can just all do in one spot and it automatically disseminates it and makes it all universal for all these different platforms. You don’t have to go to all that effort, so it saves so much time. And effort as well.
Eitan
Iraq and this is one of the pain points that we heard from day one with with brands that say look, it’s every platform is different. It’s very complicated and it’s so expensive to hire those people who knows everything and.
OK.
Eitan
I think what we did is streamlining all of this and makes life really easy. I mean, let’s brands focus on creating content, focus on marketing and this here is a platform that can just make this marketing or video marketing and shoppable type of experiences across all channels very seamless way. And this is of course. I think what we were trying to to convey as a. Company. We work in a very agile way and we try to reiterate like very very fast. So we we we take a certain product configuration, we work with the like friends and. Close customers and we quickly get feedback and deploy updates and new features in a very, very fast way to deal with technology and AI. You can do things so fast.
Susan
You need to, yeah.
Eitan
Yeah, and. And the whole idea is just to make it work 24/7. So our platform is not just, you know, back in front and type of things. We also manage video. Engineering, let’s say video delivery. Those bits of video are moving from a presenter or a host. To some kind of to audiences. And we have events we we support on a daily basis. 20 to 30 million video requests from customers all over the world. It’s massive, just the operation around uploading video and we talk about non live video and also live video right and live video. If a brand is creating a a live event and it’s promoting it, right. This live event can have 10s of thousands of users concurrently on the same stream on the same feed, watching content on his own website. We need to make sure that the website will not crash. To accelerate that, the performance of this web page. Or provide the video player and CDN and the streaming technology that can support this scale and this is again from our engineering video engineering background. This is where we take full control on this all type of operation that is very, very important for Brad. And and just take more and more responsibility in the way we produce. We manage those type of experiences in order to let the brand and the manage marketing team focus on creativity, scripting, creation of content by the way, lately we also introduced. Content packages because other brands told us, hey, it’s all good. Right. But we don’t know where to. Start. Can you help?
Susan
Yeah, you need a beginning.
Eitan
Us with content creation, we don’t know how to choose. We don’t know what’s working. Right, please help. So we we’ve introduced few few content packages in terms of volumes and size of influence. So it works both for UGC and influencer marketing and we bundled everything together with the tech tech platform and operation as one subscription monthly subscription service towards customers. So this is streamlining also a lot of the activities. That we try to introduce to, to, to, to customers. The whole idea is to the market that is to make to make video marketing much more of an easy process and to show that it’s really working. Type of of marketing activity. We are like an extension of their sales and marketing team, right, so.
Susan
You are. You’re you’re just a different channel.
Eitan
Of course, when we create the content, yeah, because everything works through data through analytics, data is everything, and our platform aggregates the analytics and the insights from all the channels, social channels, affiliates, we know everything, what’s working and what’s not. And based on this information, which is obviously available to our customers, they can create better campaigns, they can improve scripting, length of video style of video time of the day when they post, publish the video. So all this information is very, very important for them to improve targeting and focus on those type of videos that are working. And no one knows at the get go what will work. Even 2 brands with the same products targeting the same audiences, they have different DNA, right and different customer sentiment about them. Everyone needs to learn what’s working. So This is why we recommend like 2:00 to 3:00. Once phase one, like a step up onboarding where we create this daily amount of content, we gather analytics now what’s working and then we can improve targeting and even go to advertising on those specific assets that are becoming very, very successful.
Susan
Now I think that’s that’s a very powerful message. I think it’s also plays in nicely with our next questions about how do you, how do shoppable videos actually assist with the conversion rate? How can brands use them to help optimise themselves and understand the analytics and behaviours? So you’ve touched on it so you’re able to to see who’s interacting and be able to see the behaviour. So how powerful is this?
Eitan
Yeah. So video is very, very powerful in in terms of understanding customers and. Insights and analytics. I think more than any type of video, of course. Like you know in E commerce you have hit maps and you get your insight through various platforms, try to understand attribution. This is all very, very important. But when someone clicks the. Here we know a lot. We know from which device they click. We know when it started and when it stopped. We know why it started and stopped. We know if he purchased yes or no. If it was a there was a redirect to a product page. We know that if it is a returning customer for example in live event if someone wants to participate in a chat. And you need to log in right with their credentials so we can retarget them and give them answers. And in our platform we aggregate the chat from all the different channels into one dashboard. So a moderator during live event can respond to questions on various platforms including the customer website.
Yep.
Eitan
Right. Video is much more emotional, emotionally triggering triggered type of experience and shoppable video is like next wave of impulse purchase, right? So it’s you have think about an A host or a brand owner or someone from the marketing and sales team that is going there and creating content.
Eitan
It’s very, very authentic. It resonates very, very good with consumers and they are much more engaged and it’s like a snowball effect if you if you do that correctly and. Brand loyalty and engagement is very, very powerful on these type of experiences. Video where the live or non live we have this data and we can see that like compared to any type of you know we can be a text based or a picture based. These videos are very very powerful. And if you do that correctly, did that correctly, meaning just doing the right video? Related to the stage of where you are on your marketing funnel and probably we can spend some time on that as well and. What we see here that for example, also give you another scenario that a shopper is in a in a in a product page add to CART and we know that more than 90% of them are abandoning the cart right for some reason. So think about in this instance, if he’s hesitating for like 3 seconds, we’ll just pop up a floating. Player with a with a video video review of someone saying how great this product is. This has an impact right? Using video in various ways to trigger shoppers to move to the next step of the of the journey. Whether so because we know like on the on day one we associate videos to products. We automatically assuming you embed our JavaScript in your back end. We automatically deploy those interactive videos shoppable video in all the product pages automatically. We don’t anyone you know need to do that manually so every new video will go automatically into a product page. That product page is no longer this regular 2D.
Eitan
Or even promotional video that people are a little bit fed up with. This is like really authentic video. Someone was using the product. Doing an unboxing or or maybe a video review of someone who already purchased and you watch that in a product page. This increased conversions, you know, tenfold. OK. And we see conversion rates are like dramatically higher brand loyalties is increasing dramatically. If you’re consistent with video creation because you’re not afraid to put your face out there. There’s nothing to hide. Yeah, the barriers are down. It’s very open type of communication between you and your potential customer. There’s and and we see a growth in any type of parameters that you know related to the to to, to marketing.
Susan
I think this is perfect for us to start talking about that funnel. So tell us a bit about how all these shoppable videos should change if someone’s going to be in the funnel on a different stage on their purchase journey.
Eitan
Yeah, yeah. So if we try to probably break down the funnel to upper funnel middle funnel and and bottom of funnel. So let’s say awareness stage. Consideration and decision. Obviously there are more steps, but let’s try to keep it that way. So in the awareness stage, whether you’re introducing a new product or you’re introducing even a new company, a new brand. During this awareness stage, you need to be to build relationship with your potential buyers, right? So talk about.
Susan
Exactly. They might know. They might know anything about you or what. Your product can. Do or if it works.
Eitan
Exactly. People want to buy from someone that they know already, right? So building some kind of a relationship. And it’s true for B2B and B2C as well. So create in during this awareness stage, create educational content. Create market information content like checklists of what’s working and what’s not. Just try to provide value not about yourself or your product. You can share about your background and why you are doing these things. Just try to create this emotional story about you as a founder or about you as a product manager or a campaign manager around these topics. If we move now to consideration while your shoppers are might probably considering purchasing, so try to create those comparison tables. Try to create how to right how to do things, provide some case studies of working exam. Ohh. They give like customer testimonials. Again, video, video, video. Right. It’s very, very powerful. And this just expediting those videos are expediting the whole time to buy process and triggers user to move to the next stage which is decision. So during the decision. And of course, provide. Don’t be afraid to provide competitor alternatives. We see now also in blog and I know Susan that you write also a lot we used to see those versus lists coming primarily from affiliates. But what we see now that those versus lists are coming from the brand.
Susan
Hmm.
Eitan
The providers themselves, so don’t be afraid as a brand or even as a business to compare yourself to others. OK, because you don’t, I mean you don’t surprise anyone, they know who is your competition. You just giving them more information to take smaller decisions, right? Highlighting your uniqueness. So competitor alternatives me versus the others. Product reviews share your prices, special bundles and packages, and why it’s you create. You put all those feature sets and functionalities into those packages. So this is what the type of videos you need to create here. So it’s really important. Don’t jump on steps, right? I mean you need to have those type of videos ready for each one of those stages and create campaigns around this content. If you find the contact which is an awareness stage, you need to automatically initiate those awareness. Just pulling those videos in advance. And the same for the consideration and decision state.
Susan
And a lot of this is Evergreen as well. So you don’t necessarily have to update it too often depending on your product or service because you can always throw up new case like case studies that you’ve got from the past because for a certain period of time, they’re gonna still be relevant. For many people that haven’t heard of them before, all those testimonials as well. So even. A lot of this content is reusable and repurpose, able which is great.
Eitan
Yeah, exactly.
Susan
One one thing that I love about a lot of these ones is if you do do the how TOS or the testimonials, you can reuse them on your website and other places. So don’t think of it as you’re only using it for content, for your social commerce growth you can use them in. Your your bots. Where people are trying to ask questions and it comes up with a video to help. Explain it to them so it turns into part of your frequently asked questions. So and then you can potentially even embed them in your email copy that you’re sending out as well for different purposes too, because most people have the funnels within their email strategy as well. So all of this is repurpose able. It’s not just for one thing, which is your social channels and your growth there. It’s for all these other aspects that you can reuse and repurpose it for too.
Eitan
Yeah, 100%. And obviously you create video for example for us in our platform, we create long form content, it can be non live or it can be even live event that we record. We record 100% of the live events and because a live event may be like 30 minutes, even 40 minutes and showcase. Various products along these 30 minutes. Yeah, we know exactly because we have, we have the like. The checkout page or the checkout overlay on the video. We know exactly each product timing, so we chop up this video automatically to short phone videos in our platform and customer has. Short form videos ready so they can repurpose as short phone videos and post it on different channels. So long for video is really amazing for transcribing and. For creation, creating those short form videos and multiple assets that you can reuse and reuse. And if this inventory is still there, you can still use it for weeks after the original creation and the posting of these assets. And we see that a lot of the sales are happening long after the live event. Is finished, right? Obviously there is.
Exactly.
Eitan
Stays in the live event. And there is a methodology also how to create marketing and retargeting and remarketing. After the live event, which is an expertise of its own, but if you do that right, you can introduce. You can still create a lot of size opportunities after the show itself.
Susan
100% and I’ve actually had a fantastic guest in the past. Theresa, I’ll pop her podcast I did with her in the show notes cause. Her proposition that she does is all about brand and if you get your 15 minutes of fame, how can you make that into a year’s worth of content? So I think that’s a perfect combination there of your power of your video and then how she could make it even bigger everywhere else as well.
Eitan
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Nice.
Susan
I love it. Now what if you could just give 2 examples? Where would you tell someone to start if they don’t have much of A social commerce presence anywhere? What are the two key things that you would tell them to start with?
Eitan
Yeah. So again, please try to understand that. Where are you in the marketing funnel and what you’re trying to achieve, right? Are you just trying to build your brand and create awareness or you’re already a known brand and just try to probably sell more and use those social media channels to create trouble experiences? And start actually selling for them. So this is like foundational number one. Try to understand what you’re trying to achieve. Once you have that figured out, then start to create content around these topics. It’s not complicated today, just create. I did it for myself. For example, it took me probably 30 minutes and I had like 50 customer panes that I can create content about. Right. And obviously it’s very important to use AI tools like you can ask JPT and other tools like help with pain points. So creating the the the the thing that is working the most is providing advice and actionable tips on customer pains.
Susan
Yeah.
Eitan
Right. So you have your.
Susan
Think that’s huge, because then you’re there’s not one person with that problem. There’s gonna be multiple people out there that haven’t voiced it yet. So you’re again trying to build that trust and that you’re somebody to them so that they’ve got a commercial connection to you and they’re watching that video and listening to you as well.
Eitan
Product, you know. Yeah, yeah. Exactly so. We we ask in various servers surveys and we also other companies, what type of content reason is the best is it like trends you know market information, various things, stats and what’s working, what people don’t care about that people care about.
Susan
Stops, yeah.
Eitan
Their pains, and if they can learn something to overcome pain, right?
Susan
I’m just pointing at myself. Everyone. I’m like. They only care about themselves. Me my problem.
Eitan
Yes. Yes, exactly. It’s it’s OK to be, like, egoistic in this sense, right, because you have obviously anyone, if you is working in a smaller company or bigger company, we all have. Of our, you know, lands and targets and. Things that we need to do, and if we can learn something to streamline or to reduce time or to do it less costly way or in a more professional way, then this is something we would love to learn. So focus on, create a list of 50 customer payments, right and then just provide answer to this. Another important thing is just. Focus on your expert. So this is very, very important. Sometimes I see people who want to be very, very broad because they want to attract a big, a larger audience. But this is just, you know, I mean, you need to just fight this this natural way of thinking of. Trying to probably respond because you’re just creating confusion. So my thinking is like be laser focused. You have a very defined product very defined. Customer definition and audiences. Just every one of these niches is a community that you need to attract to build relationship with and 100% it’s big, right? It’s big because if you’re a smaller company and you create a community. It’s great if you are a larger company then probably your product definition and the audience definitions should be larger, but don’t like make this mistake if you are in a small medium companies and think about your huge competitor. That is like, you know, 20 years ahead of you and has like much audience. So try to define. Yeah. So it’s very foundational to define who you are and just define just be laser focused on the customer definition and.
Susan
Yeah, that’s not you.
Eitan
And justice define create yourself as D expert in this field, right? Like for me, just to give you my for my private experience, initially when we started in video commerce so we said OK we need to be like e-commerce expert and I started to create all this ecommerce. Content. No. So I never, you know, I. I’m in like 5 years in e-commerce. I’m not. I have people who are like 2 decades in e-commerce. They know much a lot for me, but I am 2 decades in video right? So now I’m so I I started to zoom in right from it total, you know, large e-commerce. Yep. Moving it a little bit further down to probably video marketing. OK. And I try to say, OK, I will talk about video marketing and I will try to attract those CMOS and head of marketing. I think video marketing is a very, very big topic, right? And there is a special version of video marketing, video commerce, OK. And video commerce is like a a roof term for shoppable video live shopping. So these are like big wall because yes, because our platform is shoppable video live commerce. Sorry.
Susan
Yep, that is your expertise.
Eitan
Live shopping and multi channel commerce so OK video commerce is we coined this term just to be like a general? Overview of what we are doing and now OK, so I’m the video commerce guy. So try to narrow in on all this. And today I’m creating coding only about video commerce and this is what resonates well and probably takes time for all the algorithms out there to learn what you actually want. But you need to.
Eitan
Maybe take you one year, but you need to just. Be there. It’s really more authentic and more real and more people will be attracted to that. You can’t be someone that you are not. It’s people can identify this in less than one second, right. And yeah, today with Jen. Zig, I’m going going into the into the into the marketplace and they have a different way of thinking and it’s very important to keep that.
Susan
So Sophia.
Eitan
Authenticity, focusing on your expertise. These right and then based on those customer customer pane start create content, create one video a day just explaining I mean there are so many tools out there to help you just streamline content, you don’t need to take outsourcing companies or production companies, no short form videos, no one cares about the background. Put yourself in front of a camera and the initially it’s going to be a very challenging, difficult, difficult property you use. Various tools to do that, but that’s OK. Don’t be afraid to do that. And once you become expert into it and it can maybe take you one hour to create one video initially and you know after one month it will take you 15 minutes to create a video. So and maybe edit in another 15 minutes if you’re using the right apps and everything. So this is where we aim. We aim for higher volume. OK, the production value doesn’t matter. They’re. Use the right hooks. There are plenty of you know articles out there and videos to give you some of the tools that are working today in terms of scripting things, it’s something that needs to be learned. Obviously the hook is very the hook is like 80% of the success of the video from from our.
Susan
Exactly because you gotta get that message out. Don’t you like that call to action? The purpose?
Eitan
Right. So. Exactly the hook. My recommendation is to be very short. Just one sentence. But also very specific to the topic of that specific video. OK. So if if you talk about some specific pinpoint highlight that in the, in the, in the hook be very, very specific about the topic and you know just to be on the safe side use that hook as a question mark. Right, this this obviously triggers the people, the audiences to think. Right. And it’s like. A very unconscious way of getting them thinking about your question and be more engaged because they already put an energy to think about your hook so they’re already invested in in terms of their efforts and energy. So they for them just to continue watching your video.
Watch.
Eitan
Reading your post is much easier and that’s. So. Yeah, and this is what we recommend. Obviously deploy that across all channels and see which channel works. Which one is is more favourable? And and again, if you’re B2B or D2C, right? You know already, I guess where your audience is and this is where you need.
Susan
To focus, you’d hope they know anyway.
Susan
What are some of the pitfalls that?
Eitan
Yeah.
Susan
You’ve come across. Have you got any examples that you can share where people just? Haven’t quite grasped shoppable videos could do for them and may have done it. Maybe a a weak one or failed and it’s really highlighted the importance of being able to look at your data properly before you go out.
Eitan
Yes, I mean the the 1st and. Almost thing that I see people are doing is just stopping right? Because we talked about algorithms and I always say don’t care too much about trends and algorithms for sure, but sometimes it takes a while. For them to resonate, and actually they need to learn who you are, right? Exactly. Just focus on your authenticity and your unique values. And let the algorithms you know figure out who you are. What do you do? They will know to target this and to expose this to the right audience. But we don’t know how long it’s going to take. It may take one week, but it may take three months. OK. And we don’t know. How long it will takes, no one knows, right? And again, it’s changes from platform for platform.
Susan
Exactly.
Eitan
So don’t quit after one month or after two weeks. OK, it’s not working for me. No, there’s no way in the world. It’s not going to work with you for you. Right. But you need to have that patience.
Susan
Exactly.
Susan
And I think.
Eitan
Right. So other people?
Susan
Yeah, I was. I was gonna say it’s one of those funny things that. Even in podcasting, because you’re a podcaster as well, and I’ll make sure all your show notes are here. They say some figures actually say you need to get to 100 episodes, or maybe even two years before the algorithms start to kick in to say you’re a consistent podcaster and like eye drop weekly. So that’s 100 episodes that takes over 2 years to get to that point. So everywhere.
Eitan
Yeah.
Susan
Is all about consistency, keeping at it and eventually you will see the fruits of your labour coming through.
Eitan
Yeah, I mean, the benefits of boosting is not just ROI or amount of quantitative sales that you did. There is an overwhelming impact on so many activities that you do just from this this video. Content. Think about that. Maybe an investor saw your video, right? That after one year he talked to him and he said, yeah, I saw you from one of these videos, right? Yeah. Maybe partners. I mean, partnerships are so important. And for today’s marketing, right need to see. Brands, for example, partnering up with with affiliates is so important and. Also you they they see that you are serious, you are committed to to the, to the business, right and you are the founder and you as a leader inside the inside this company with creating those those type of videos even working with external creators if it if it’s done right. It’s very, very impactful. It’s not another blog. I mean, you’ve invested the time and the and the effort. And if you do like series of content, let’s say customer paying with actionable tips and advice.
Susan
MHM.
Eitan
This is that has a major commutative effect, not just in sales volumes, but in many, many other parameters that have been surveyed, like customer loyalty, brand sentiment, many, many others. Let’s say non quantitative parameters that like super super important word of mouth.
Eitan
Right, it’s very easy to share video right with others like social. Social commerce is not just the ability for shoppers to buy on social media, it’s also about the ability of us to share content with our social network and promote products in a way that is not. Sometimes we don’t. It’s not not benefit to us.
Susan
Exactly.
Eitan
But sometimes it is like in our platform. If you share the live video to your network, we give you a Commission till you are becoming an affiliate.
Susan
It’s like affiliate, yes.
Eitan
Exactly. Becoming an affiliate, so it’s very, very interesting. Interesting topics and it’s very difficult for brands to figure out another. Another pitfall is like what type of content resonates right short form long form live like we usually recommend to again those these three month short form videos weekly show Live weekly show just to figure out what’s working so just. Go there past these three months, get the analytics. And learn. How to take it to the next step and and don’t limit this to to just yourself, which we see a huge opportunity now with EC which is like employee generated content. Think about the brand I think.
Susan
It’s huge, isn’t it? You can see it growing everywhere.
Eitan
Yeah. Think about the brand that various employees from various department are creating content. There is like a common theme. You can see the real thing. There is no borders you can experience. It’s like you’re working inside this company and the impact is huge, right? So that this is like employee advocacy we think is like the big next wave and content creation and the opportunity for. Friends are and businesses. Hello there.
Susan
100% agree with that. I have one of my favourite questions. My last two questions and my two favourite ones. So my second last one, what excites you most about shoppable videos?
Eitan
So what I’m excited about for me, obviously it’s helping you know to helping those brand scale it. I love to see when we started the one point in our six months. There. They’re, you know, number of the sales are improving customer service, I mean improving the customer sentiment are improving and if it’s if it’s done right, it’s really the most beautiful thing you can imagine because we work with brands that have done almost everything right. They they already advertise on meta, they already have probably an Amazon store and they try to do. To create content and you need to have a substantial amount of content to work with us and. Then we take him to this journey and they’re like, very for them. The efficiency is improving in terms of content creation and the throughput is definitely increasing and the performance in terms of sales and overall parameters is increasing substantially. We didn’t talk too much, but there’s a lot of AI tools that can help you with. Pre and post production, so it’s very it’s much easier today to create content than than it used to be. So This is why I’m excited about, I think the market is evolving very, very fast. I’m totally excited about immersive commerce like video. It makes commerce more interactive probably right, because you can engage, you can ask questions, you can Click to buy. It’s much more interactive type of experience.
Susan
We’ll set more sensor available with it too, because it’s your hearing and your eyes.
Eitan
But exactly mark? Exactly and immersive content is like the next wave, right? Like augmented reality and virtual reality. More of the some of the virtual experiences which I see, great examples that are very, very successful. And I don’t talk about just opening your shop on Metaverse. So not that thing but just.
Susan
Yeah.
Eitan
Take take your existing product and make it more. You know, interactive or immersive we don’t need.
Susan
Even 3D effects that they can do.
Eitan
3D3D experience augmented reality experience. You don’t need special goggles anything. It’s like people are experiencing this on mobile like the same way, but it’s much more feature proof, much more differentiated type of experience that if done right can create a lot of opportunities.
Susan
9.
Eitan
Social commerce, again inviting others to buy on your on your website. Versus social commerce that you encourage them to you to to purchase on your own TikTok shop or. Instagram. So I think brands is where they go. They want to use all these type of. Experiences. Obviously everyone are busy these days with like operational excellence, profitability, focus, more on the foundation though. Next products, inventories, warehousing, planning, next holidays, promotions.
Susan
Next product.
Eitan
Right. And they don’t have a lot of time to create and go deep into those. All these newest marketing vehicles. And this is where I think our platform helps a lot because it there is a one click integration syncing, it solves a lot of problems and you enjoy all the benefits of this. Methods of of selling these days.
Susan
100% agree. It just saves so much time and then time is something not everyone has a lot of. Now my last question. What brand? Any brand in the world this represents. You and why?
Eitan
Me or me as a person or me as we me. As the company.
Susan
You as a person.
Eitan
Oh, as a person. As a person.
Susan
Hmm. You can be split personality.
Eitan
I think. Yeah. I think. Probably I would go with hotspot.
Susan
Nice.
Eitan
OK. And I try to explain.
Susan
I can see a connection already going here, but go tell tell me more.
Eitan
Yeah. I I think they’re really. No, they they things are very very. Amazing way in terms of it reducing. I don’t think they introduced any something new or something innovative. It wasn’t there before, right? Email marketing web I mean web forms. So many companies are doing that right? But then you do it in a certain way that. Yes, the product needs to be amazing, right? But you know, they’re truly differentiated with so many other things like content creation and the the way they introduce the products to the market and and then adding CRM and then adding the service side of things.
Susan
For different paces.
Eitan
For some reason you know they just become like the number one option, right for all the mark in the in the marketing technology sector, there’s like they go to companies doing things. I’m using hotspot for women, you know and I’ve used. So many tools. It just everything works. Everything there. All the integration work. Works. Maybe it’s the same like Shopify, I guess, right? There’s so many companies are now moving to Shopify because of their ecosystem, right? And the marketplace type of things that they do, yeah, similar. So just going out there and just do things in a better way, OK and.
Susan
Seamless.
Eitan
Be innovative in the in in. Obviously in the product, but also in the way you introduce products to the market and how you make product into product launch. Success, right, like using Lean marketing, agile thinking and agile processes like iterate on a daily basis, release versions on a daily basis. Try to be open and transparent in the way you do things. This is what I like and this is I mean we’re, we’ve introduced so many features. And. That we killed after two weeks, we probably we worked three months on them. But it’s.
Susan
It’s heartbreaking, but it might be needed.
Eitan
I believe a lot in, like, lose early. I mean, don’t spend. I mean if if if it’s clear, it doesn’t doesn’t make sense, then kill it and focus on other things.
Susan
Yep.
Susan
You’ve learned from it, haven’t.
Eitan
I have this.
Susan
You.
Eitan
Yeah. Yeah, we did a lot of by the way, we are a bootstrap company, never raised funds, you know, profitable more than 80 employees were already running for 10 years, profitable and growing. So everything that we do is around. Real demand that we get from customers sometime because of our video history and we saw the evolution of how things are evolving and video commerce is in its infancy. We think that we have a good sense of where things are going like. I’ve started to make a decision to start with. E commerce before COVID right before you know everyone just. Thought you know brick and mortar closed and ecomm is exploded and video exploded as well because you need a way to sell online. Even before that, because I saw what started to evolve to emerge, let’s say in China with live shopping and the use of video in commerce. And there is a big mega trend, let’s say that is the convergence of media and commerce right? The media companies are becoming. Businesses and commerce companies and the commerce companies are becoming media companies. We see just examples from last year that Walmart acquires Visio and JP Morgan launch and Chase Media solution. Instacart Partners with YouTube and shoppable ads, Costco launch and launching retail Media Best Buy and Cnet’s new retail media model. Media and commerce are convergent. This is something that we we will see more and more and this is really something that I’m really excited about.
Susan
I love that and I think that that synergy with HubSpot works really well with all the iterations and everything and just wanting to. To be better. So I love that.
Eitan
Exactly. It’s like relentless, right? It’s you can see the extra effort right on every on every product, on every feature, on every, you know, action that’s really serious and totally committed.
Susan
Awesome. Now, thank you so much. I’m gonna do a bit of a a round up, so bear with me a second. Today we talked all about shoppable videos, so a shoppable video is where you actually creating a video that’s built for awareness of the product and can be used in a checkout way so that you can add different pieces to it along the video to make people actually want to buy it and feel like they’re part of the journey and want to actually touch it and buy that. From you and is that trust getting? Built out of it. But tropical videos don’t have to be. All these fancy productions. They can be literally just someone with an iPhone taking authentic video of you unboxing, or you showing it being used. It doesn’t have to be all this fancy pants jazziness and. By being more. Authentic and not necessarily having all those jazzy hands going on around there? It’s actually coming across as more natural that this is something that an everyday person uses and it’s something that I’ll get a lot of use out of myself. Now you can do these videos in all different ways. They can be short, sharp, so short form which is under 59. Bit longer form or you can even do live and the great thing about life is when you record it and then you can chop it up to either be a long or a short form as. Well, so it’s got multi purposes there. Now we were given a huge statistic. Cisco says 82% of all Internet traffic is video. Now that is insane. And that’s just showing how much people do value looking at videos and all the different aspects across all the different channels that people can access when they’re on the phone, on the go, on your tablet. Computer, whatever it is, video is key. And this is the case of both B2B and B2C. Now videos are so important because they are about building that relationship and you can do that in many ways. So it’s not all about influencers. Yes, we know all about them. I’ve got a podcast done about that as well. But influencers do get paid. You can save them. You can give them gifts. They can be micro, nano or those big mass market ones that we all know very well like, yeah, Kim, Kardashians and. Not, but they may not have the right audience. So you really got to work with which influencers actually got the audience that will best resonate with your product and the people that are in your videos. And it could be that the Nanos, because they’ve got the stronger audience and the strong connection are actually better returns on investment. Put your time and effort into. Now there are other. Areas that you can do things in this creative economy. User generated themselves, which I personally love because I like this authenticity that comes out of an everyday person doing that video, and I think they’re magic because when. They do it. They’re not doing it for a reason. Generally there’s no payment behind it most of the time, unless a good an affiliate link, they’re usually doing it because they actually love it and they want people to see it. Being used and that’s what I think is a a huge growth area when it comes to the creator economy, because you’ve got the statistic behind it. You know they’re not being paid multi millions of dollars to just sell this 30 seconds of this product where they’re holding the bottle in their hand where you never see a packing a photo of it. The third creator economy that I love, that we’ve talked on at the very end was the employment one then where it’s your employees actually taking these videos, whether it’s the CEO down to the guy in the warehouse, bringing them involved in that creator mode is just going to bring your brand more to life and be more relatable. Which again brings back the purpose of building a relationship with these videos. Now when you get started, you can start simply. It doesn’t have to be a big show if you want to dip your toe in and see. How it goes? Look at where your audience is naturally coming from. You know that from Google Analytics it’s pretty basic. You can find there where your sources coming from. Then start doing some channel testing. Start small, but don’t give up. Keep going. Keep persevering because a lot of these videos have long tail effects, which I mean is it takes a while for you to see traction. Some things may go viral, but other things will take time. But the great things about videos. Is they can be repurposed and reused for other things, so it’s not just for shoppable video where you can put all these links in to actually make the sale out of, you can repurpose them for your freaking asked questions, your videos, or even reuse them again in the future to do another sale. Pitch out of them, which is great. I love the idea that the hook is 80%, so when you’re creating these videos, make sure there’s something short and sharp in there. Maybe a one sentence that’s really specific. So if you’re going to start doing these videos, a great tip that we got was think of 50 customer pain points and answer them. So that’s 50 videos you can make there straight away unless you want to combine some. But make sure that the end clip goes back to the person you’re trying to talk to. So don’t think of the camera as just a camera. Think of it as the actual port end user that has this problem and really try and tell them that you’re solving it for them with this answer that will come. Through and that’s something that will build overtime and you’ll have more advocacy there as well. Now, daughter, I love this sociable videos have lots of data that comes with them, so you can use fantastic platforms like Vimeo that we’ve just heard about. So make sure you do check that one out. But it comes with all the data which plugs in to all these different avenues and then you can really understand. Who’s opening your video? What device? When? Why? They’re purchasing redirecting if they’re returning so much rich information to help you make more informed decisions. One video may go viral, but that doesn’t mean it’s got the purchases. One video may only have 20 people will look at it, but you get 20 purchases. The power of the data behind it helps you to know what to focus on for your next iteration of videos. When you want to do more. Now live videos and doing videos at least once a day or of. Live video once a week can help you on this journey. So do think about how you can plan that into your marketing calendar and what you want to focus on and that could be as simple as looking at what stage of the funnel. So what we mean here is when you’re making videos, make sure they make sense and appear to people at the right stage at the right time. Are there any awareness stage consideration stage or decision? So when we’re talking awareness? You want to make sure that those videos are part of the building the relationship, the the real seeding, the moment of them wanting to look at you more and consider you more in the future provide value in them. You’re not necessarily trying to sell them, you’re trying to get them to have you as top recall for them and try and build that relationship with the emotional connection. You can do that by like to buy from someone I know education. All those pieces will help them build that awareness with you. Now the next stage is consideration in the funnel funnel and that’s where you can use some really handy tools within shoppable videos to make it more. Interactive or more informative so you can do comparisons how to case studies and testimonials are huge, particularly if you can get the end user to make them for you because they’re just going to be gold mines because they’re real and authentic. The last stage on the funnel here is decision. So they’re deciding to make it. How can you get them to click that final button of buy while watching the video? And it could be things like a competitor alternative. You can go down and do those comparisons, just make sure you check your law in your country or state on that one because some are a bit fun. But they are powerful reviews. Prices. What? What have you got on bundle offers or any special packages or features they should know about to help them make that final decision to buy and they can all be part of the videos and then you can do tests and learn to see which videos actually work best in all these different funnels to all these different segments. So eventually you’ll be able to do in your CRMS. Some very powerful now another stat that I loved was the power of video for reviews can increase the likelihood of conversions by tenfold. That’s a huge amount for the effort of these videos that can be short and sharp and just filmed in 15 minutes and then. Another 30 minutes Max editing once you know how to do all these different things with tools and there are free tools and AI tools and cheaper tools out there that can do it. Or you can go to Vimeo and get them to do a package deal for you. Now the emotional connection is one of the most important pieces you’ve got your eyes and your ears as part of the senses. When looking at these shoppable videos. And there’s also all the new technologies coming out, immersing you with other senses as well. So you’ve got your augmented reality. You’ve got 3D effects. There’s all different things are coming through. They’re just going to make shoppable videos even more powerful for decision making purposes. Now I just love that everything’s repurposed. Able. That’s one of the things that really hits the home for me. And. You’ve just really got to get out there and try it if you’re not already doing it, and if you are, how can you do it better? It’s not about looking at your competitor and saying you’re doing this video. I’m gonna copy you. Ohh, that must be working for them. That’s not the case. Everyone is out there testing, learning and trying new things. But the main thing is being authentic, staying true to who you and your brand are. Being informative and really trying to build a relationship. So when you’re looking at that camera, it isn’t about sell, sell, sell. It’s about how can I actually help you? What will help you today. If there’s a value add. Is there information I can give you? Is there a problem I can help you solve? That’s what you go to a friend for. And that’s what you’re trying to build with these videos that you’re being seen as a trusted. Source that they can actually. Believe and rely on you. So you do have those unique views. Do make sure that you stand out a bit. Rent and also last not least, don’t forget it takes a while to actually get traction for the algorithms to start to work it out might be a week, a month, a year, but keep at it the worst thing you could do is stop.
Susan
How did they go eating?
Eitan
Wow, Suzanne. I mean, I’m really shocked, positively. That’s an amazing, amazing summary. How do you do that? That’s a that’s a magic super power. Wow. It’s really a magic. Amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing.
Susan
It’s my superpower.
Susan
Did I miss anything? Anything you want to add or really highlight?
Eitan
No, I think everything was there. I will listen carefully for everything. It’s really, I thought it’s going to be like a quick summary, but then it went, gone, went on and on and on just to start discussing all those different topics. Really well done. Been really impressed.
Susan
Now this is all from you, so thank you so much for sharing all this valuable Intel with us. To learn more about tropical videos and how we can actually make them work for us and be magical for E commerce and also for social platforms as well.
Eitan
Amy.
Eitan
Great. Great. I hope it’s what you expect and it’s going to be resonating well with your with your audiences. So thank you so much. So then and I’d love to, yeah, I’d love to schedule you on my podcast. I want to talk about loyalty programmes and everything if you’re open.
Susan
Thank. Thank you and for everyone. To it, I would love to come across and share and that’s a perfect segue. So everyone, don’t forget to fully eaten on. All his channels, so especially on LinkedIn and also listen out for his podcast Ecom Pulse and this is a special podcast where he interviews brands, retailers, industry leaders and tech companies that are shaping the future in their industry. So it’s a must listen to get to hear all about those. That new tech coming out and also you get to hear more from this fabulous expert.
Susan
Everything will be in the.
Susan
Show notes.
Eitan
Amazing. Thank you, Suzanne.
Susan
Thank you everyone else, don’t forget to add more to marketing to your playlist so you don’t miss out on future fabulous guests and most importantly, share this podcast around. More to marketing.
