With video, you can speak directly to your potential leads and provide them with a demonstration of your products and services, making your content more compelling, while simultaneously proving to the consumer that your product actually works. And by combining effective video content with social selling, you will be able to directly reach your prospective clients.

Videos are more frequently shared on social media as compared to written content – and sharing on social media has an exponential effect. Status updates on Linkedin, tweets, and blog posts tend to receive more likes and shares when they contain video. By embedding videos in your social media content, you will be able to bolster your marketing campaign and increase your audience reach through a greater number of channels.

One of the most popular ways of using video to sell your product is by using YouTube. YouTube receives billions of views and multimillion visits per day. Nearly 80% of people watch at least a single YouTube video each week and more than half of YouTube views are now viewed on mobile devices. YouTube makes it relatively straightforward to start a video channel but being found and engaging with users, needs a little more care on the marketers’ part.

Like your web page on Google, with YouTube you need to use tactics so that you can be found – and stand out – among all the other channels. If you can’t get found its a lot tougher to sell. Implementing keyword research and placing keywords and phrases in your title and tags in your channel will help you achieve this. Tags are keyword phrases that are similar to your video – they are used to create relevancy with your title. You also need to make videos that your viewer wants to watch – videos need to actually convince people that they need to buy from you with compelling and engaging content.

The first 5 seconds of your video needs to engage someone and tell their brain to keep watching. Approximately 20% of the people who start your video will leave after the first 10 seconds. You need to have strategies in place to avoid this.

Viewers also want a clear pathway to take action. You have to know what features are built into YouTube itself to help people take action – such as buying from you – allowing you to drive your viewers’ attention towards a landing page to make a purchase. Optimization purchasing techniques, such as one-click, can then accelerate results.

To help sell the content, applications now let creators sell their own merchandise directly through the YouTube platform. Previously, a YouTube channel would have to include a link to an external provider such as an e-commerce shop for subscribers to buy merchandise. With this feature, viewers can now buy directly on the YouTube platform – with merchandise populated below your video content – and with easy one-click purchase capabilities.

Another very useful tool is livestreaming. Livestreaming such as that associated with premieres, lets channels pre-record a video and upload it as a livestream. People watching the livestream can pay the creator to get their comment noticed. The use of livestreaming can be incredibly effective in selling a product similar to shopping channels on TV.

At endeavit, we help users understand the power of selling products on YouTube and other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. We help our clients with software to perform keyword research and give advice on video optimization to increase sales. We help our clients understand the tools available to perform analytics on their channels to see what is working and what is not and help our clients optimize their digital strategy using video.