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Dragon Movies 3: Dragonheart
Dragon Movies 3: Dragonheart
When I researched dragon movies for this list, I realized how few good dragon movies there are, and that’s a shame. Dragonheart is probably the most consistently high rated live-action Dragon movie I could find during my research, and it’s a movie I’ve heard of before. For a while I’ve kind of been on the fence as to whether I should watch this or not. Now that I’m writing a book called…
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#cgi#david thewlis#dennis quaid#dina meyer#draco#dragon movies#dragonheart#dragons#fantasy#fantasy movies#king einon#movies#online film & television association#patrick read johnson#randy edelman#rob cohen#saturn awards#sean connary
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The world is stunned when a group of time travelers arrive from the year 2051 to deliver an urgent message: Thirty years in the future, mankind is losing a global war against a deadly alien species. The only hope for survival is for soldiers and civilians from the present to be transported to the future and join the fight. Among those recruited is high school teacher and family man Dan Forester. Determined to save the world for his young daughter, Dan teams up with a brilliant scientist and his estranged father in a desperate quest to rewrite the fate of the planet.
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A film, also called a movie, motion picture or moving picture, is a work of visual art used to simulate experiences that communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound, and more rarely, other sensory stimulations.[1] The word """"cinema"""", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and to the art form that is the result of it.
❏ Movies Online ❏
Its and Jeremy Camp (K.J. Apa) is a youthful and hopeful performer who might want just to respect his God through the intensity of music. Leaving his Indiana home for the hotter atmosphere of California and a school or college training, Jeremy before long comes Bookmark this site across one Melissa Heing (Britt Robertson), an individual college understudy that he takes sees in the crowd at a nearby show. Bookmark this site Falling for cupid’s bolt promptly, he acquaints himself with her and rapidly finds that she really is pulled in to him as well. Notwithstanding, Melissa keeps away from shaping a sprouting relationship as she fears it’ll make an abnormal circumstance among Jeremy and their common companion, Jean-Luc (Nathan Parson), an individual artist and who additionally offers feeling for Melissa. In any case, Jeremy is persevering as he continued looking for her until they in the long run cut off up in a caring dating association. In any case, their energetic romance Bookmark this sitewith the other individual includes a stop when life-threating updates on Melissa having malignant growth becomes the dominant focal point. The determination never really discourage Jeremey’s affection for her and the couple inevitably weds presently. Howsoever, they before long wind up strolling a brilliant line between a coexistence and enduring by her Bookmark this siteillness; with Jeremy scrutinizing his confidence in music, himself, and with God himself.
A television program that shows food introduction in a kitchen TV studio. During the time of this program, the show’s host, who is regularly a big name gourmet expert, plans at least one dishes during the time of the scene. The gourmet expert takes the review crowd through the food’s motivation, readiness, and phases of cooking. likewise called “cel (short for celluloid) movement”, this is among the most established liveliness subgenres. Essentially, it is a method of energizing an animation by drawing and painting envisions yourself. Each drawing or painting is an alternate edge of activity, so when they are flipped or placed in arrangement at the correct speed, they give the fantasy of development. Models are Beauty and the Beast and Spirited Away. A story with respect to a beast, animal or freak that threatens individuals. Generally, it fits in to the repulsiveness kind, for instance, Mary Shelley’s epic Frankenstein. Shelley’s Frankenstein is ordinarily additionally considered the main sci-fi story (organic science reviving the dead), yet it presents an immense “animal”. Other clear Monster stories are of the animals of legends and tale: the Vampire, the Ghoul, the Werewolf, the Zombie, and so on Creatures, for example, that portrayed in Karloff’s The Mummy would likewise qualify.
❏ COPYRIGHT CONTENT ❏
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[1][2][3][4][5] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[6][7][8] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][9][10][11][12] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[13]
Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsistent.[14]
Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[5] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration.
It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported
by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[15]
❏ ADAPTATION ❏
As referenced, I Still Believe is coordinated by the Erwin Brothers (Andrew and Jon), whose past executive works incorporate such Movies like Moms’ PARTICULAR DATE, Woodlawn, and I COULD Only Imagine. Given their partiality fascination strict based Christian films, the Erwin Brothers appear to be much the same as an appropriate decision in presenting to Jeremy Camp’s story to a realistic portrayal; moving toward the material with a specific sort of gentBookmark this siteleness and truthfulness to the procedures. Much like I COULD Only Imagine, the Erwin Brothers shape the component around the life of a well known Christian artist; introducing his humble begiings and the entirety of the hardships that he should look en route, while melodic tunes/performaBookmark this sitence mulling over significance of the film’s account story movement. Saying this doesn’t imply that that the film isn’t without its heavier minutes, with the Erwin, who (once more) know about strict hints topics inside their undertakings, outline I Still Believe convincing messages of adoration, misfortune, and recovery, which (as usual) are very crucial to watch and experience throBookmark this siteugh misfortune.
This even addresses the film’s content, which was peed by Erwin siblings playing twofold obligation on the undertaking, which has a lot of sincere emotional minutes that may surely pull on the heartstrings of certain watchers out there along with give to be a significant drawing in story of going directly through misfortune and difficulty and finding a reclamation circular segment to get away from it. That is particularly made bounteously clear when working with a deadly ailment that is like what Melissa goes through in the film, which is pretty all inclusive and intelligent in everybody’s reality, with the Erwin Brothers painting the agonizing excursion that Melissa brings with Jeremy close by, who must sort out some way to adapt to agony of a friend or family member. There is a “twofold edge” blade to the film’s content, yet I’ll specify that underneath. Get the job done to express, the film settles rapidly in to the recognizable example of a strict religious component that, while not actually cleaned or unique, could be the “comfort food” to a few; anticipating a healthy message of confidence, expectation, and love. By and by, I didn’t know about Jeremy Camp and the account of he and Melissa Heing, so it was a significant impactful excursion that was contributed unfurling through the whole film’s procedures. As a side-note, the film is a lttle bit a “tragedy”, so for people who inclined to crying during these emotional ardent motion pictures… .get your tissues out."
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[Sledujte] The Marksman Celý Film česky "CZ online 2021
Když se Jerry přestěhuje do luxusního hotelu na Manhattanu, kde právě probíhá svatba století, její zoufalá organizátorka si najme Toma, aby jí pomohl se myšáka zbavit. Hon kocoura a myši vzápětí skoro zničí nejen její kariéru a chystanou svatbu, ale i skoro celý hotel.
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Žánr: Akční, Thriller, Krimi Hvězdy: Liam Neeson, Katheryn Winnick, Teresa Ruiz, Juan Pablo Raba, Dylan Kenin Režisér: Robert Lorenz, Robert Lorenz, Francisco X. Pérez, Wilhelm Pfau, Mark Williams
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In 1889, on November 1 in Gotha, Germany Anna Therese Johanne Hoch, who later would be known as Hannah Hoch was born. Being the eldest of five children, the girl was brought up in a comfortable and quiet environment of the small town. Her parents, a supervisor in an insurance company and an amateur painter sent her to Girl’s High school. However, at the age of 15 Hannah had to quit studying for the long six years to take care of her newborn sister. Only in 1912 she continued her education with Harold Bengen in School of Applied Arts, mastering glass design. As the World War I broke up Hannah returned to the native town to work in the Red Cross. The first years after war the young woman recommenced her studying, getting to know graphic arts. 1915 was highlighted by an acquaintance with an Austrian artist Raoul Hausmann, which grew into the long-lasting romantic relationship and involvement in Berlin Dada movement. For ten years till 1926 Hoch worked in Berlin’s major publisher of newspapers and magazines. Her task was to design embroidering, knitting and crocheting patterns for the booklets. Being on vacation with her beloved in 1918, Hannah discovered ‘the principle of photomontage in cut-and-paste images that soldiers sent to their families’ (National gallery of Art). This find affected greatly on her artistic production, and she created mass-media photographs comprising the elements of photomontage and handwork patterns, thus combining traditional and modern culture. Her prior preoccupation was to represent the ‘new woman’ of the Weimar Republic with new social role and given freedoms. Hoch was the only woman in Berlin Dada, who took part in all kinds of events and exhibitions showcasing her socially critical works of art. Till 1931 she participated in exhibitions but with the rise of National Social regime was forbidden to present her creative work. Till her last breath in 1978 Hannah Hoch lived and worked in the outskirts of Berlin-Heiligensee. The piece of art which is going to be analyzed in this research is ‘The beautiful girl’ designed in 1919–1920. It combines the elements of technology and females. In the middle of the picture one can clearly see a woman dressed in a modern bathing suit with a light bulb on her head which probably serves as a sun umbrella. In the background a large advertisement with a woman’s hair-do on top is presented. Maud Lavin describes strange human as ‘she is part human, part machine, part commodity’ (Lavin). The woman is surrounded by the images of industrialization as tires, gears, signals and BMW logos. A woman’s profile with the cat eyes, untrusting and skeptical, in the upper right corner is eye-catching as well. This unusually large eye symbolizes DADA movement — a monocle, which is present in almost every Hoch’s work. The colour scheme does not offer rich palette of tints, including mostly black, white, orange and red pieces. The photo is surrounded by the BMW circles which add the spots of blue. An apt description of the piece is given in the book ‘Cut with the Kitchen Knife’ and states that it is ‘a portrait of a modern woman defined by signs of femininity, technology, media and advertising’ (Lavin). In other words Hannah Hoch focused on the woman of the new age, free and keeping up with the fast-moving world. The artist promoted feministic ideas and from her point of view urbanization and modern technologies were meant to give hope to woman to gain equality of genders. With this photomontage she commented on how the woman was expected to combine the role of a wife and mother with the role of a worker in the industrialized world. The light bulb instead of a face shows that women were perceived as unthinking machines which do not question their position and can be turned on or off at any time at man’s will. But at the same time they were to remain attractive to satisfy men’s needs. The watch is viewed as the representation of how quickly women are to adapt to the changes. In a nutshell, Hoch concentrated on two opposite visions of the modern woman: the one from the television screens — smoking, working, wearing sexy clothes, voting and the real one who remained being a housewife. The beautiful girl’ is an example of the art within the DADA movement. An artistic and literal current began in 1916 as the reaction to World War I and spread throughout Northern America and Europe. Every single convention was challenged and bourgeois society was scandalized. The Dadaists stated that over-valuing conformity, classism and nationalism among modern cultures led to horrors of the World War I. In other words, they rejected logic and reason and turned to irrationality, chaos and nonsense. The first DADA international Fair was organized in Berlin in 1920 exposing a shocking discontentment with military and German nationalism (Dada. A five minute history). Hannah Hoch was introduced to the world of DADA by Raoul Hausman who together with Kurt Schwitters, Piet Mondrian and Hans Richter was one of the influential artists in the movement. Hoch became the only German woman who referred to DADA. She managed to follow the general Dadaist aesthetic, but at the same time she surely and steadily incorporated a feminist philosophy. Her aim was to submit female equality within the canvass of other DADA’s conceptions. Though Hannah Hoch officially was a member of the movement, she never became the true one, because men saw her only as ‘a charming and gifted amateur artist’ (Lavin). Hans Richter, an unofficial spokesperson shared his opinion about the only woman in their community in the following words: ‘the girl who produced sandwiches, beer and coffee on a limited budget’ forgetting that she was among the few members with stable income. In spite of the gender oppressions, Hannah’s desire to convey her idea was never weakened. Difficulties only strengthened her and made her an outstanding artist. A note with these return words was found among her possessions: ‘None of these men were satisfied with just an ordinary woman. But neither were they included to abandon the (conventional) male/masculine morality toward the woman. Enlightened by Freud, in protest against the older generation. . . they all desired this ‘New Woman’ and her groundbreaking will to freedom. But — they more or less brutally rejected the notion that they, too, had to adopt new attitudes. . . This led to these truly Strinbergian dramas that typified the private lives of these men’ (Maloney). Hoch’s technique was characterized by fusing male and female parts of the body or bodies of females from different epochs — a ‘traditional’ woman and ‘modern’, liberated and free of sexual stereotypes one. What’s more, combining male and female parts, the female ones were always more distinctive and vibrant, while the male ones took their place in the background. Hannah created unique works of art experimenting with paintings, collages, graphic and photography. Her women were made from bits and pieces from dolls, mannequins of brides or children as these members of the society were not considered as valuable. Today Hannah Hoch is most associated with her famous photomontage ‘Cut with the kitchen knife DADA through the last Weimer Beer-Belly Cultural epoch of Germany’ (1919–1920). This piece of art highlights social confusion during the era of Weimar Republic, oppositionists and government radicals (Grabner). In spite of never being truly accepted by the rest of her society, this woman with a quiet voice managed to speak out loud her feministic message. Looking at Hannah Hoch’s art for the first time I found it confusing, because couldn’t comprehend the meaning. It was quite obvious that every single piece and structure is a symbol of the era, its ideas and beliefs. However, after having learned about her life and constant endeavors to declare about female’s right, little by little I started to realize what’s what. As an object for research I chose ‘The beautiful girl’ as, to my mind, its theme and message intersects with the modern tendency: a successful, clever, beautiful and free woman has to become one in no time, cause the world is moving faster and faster. I enjoyed working with this artist as her example is inspiring and is worth following
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As an associate professor of English at Denison University, Diana Adesola Mafe makes her stride in the resistance where she teaches courses in postcolonial, gender, and Black studies. Her newest published endeavor is described to include “in-depth explorations of six contemporary American and British films and shows, this pioneering volume spotlights Black female characters who play central, subversive roles in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.” We were able to steal her away for a moment from her busy schedule where she is currently teaching a few classes to pick her brain about Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before and how it came to be.
Black Nerd Problems: Diana, thank you so much for making time in your busy schedule for us! First things first, presentation is everything. I love the book cover art and the title! The cover features a Black woman in a sci-fi type setting, centered in the middle of it all. I’m a visual learner so this image speaks to me before I even read a single page. Centering a Black woman is a very deliberate step in analyzing different collective portrayals of Black women especially when we are subjected to not being a leading lady in many mainstream projects. And it doesn’t go over my head that she’s a beautiful dark skinned Black woman, as European beauty standards have really amped up colorism. What input did you have on your cover and why was imperative to have imagery that aligns with who you are and your book’s content?
Diana Mafe: I’m so glad you mention the book cover! Despite the old adage about not judging books by their covers, book covers are an entry point to a text (much like titles) and they can send a powerful message even before you flip to the first page. I’m pleased to say that I had considerable input on the cover, which speaks to the flexibility of the University of Texas Press. I chose the image and filled out a questionnaire that allowed me to weigh in on things like design and color.
I remember spending several afternoons and evenings combing through online images in an attempt to find something that captured the spirit of the book. This meant doing keyword searches by combining terms like “Black women,” “science fiction,” “space,” “superhero,” “Afrofuturism,” and so on. Eventually, I happened upon a photograph of a black female Iron Man as portrayed by the Liberian model Deddeh Howard. As soon as I saw it, I thought, that’s it—that’s the cover. Having a Black woman literally front and center is important because that, in many ways, is the point of the book. To do otherwise would (ironically) perpetuate the very erasure of black women that I’m trying to interrogate.
BNP: I’m also very much in my fangirl feels because I’m assuming your title, “Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before” is a nod to Star Trek’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Granted your introduction is titled, “To Boldly Go” and you mention Nichelle Nichol’s pioneering Lt. Uhura as one of few early gateway representations of Black women.
I think this is totally appropriate as stunningly revolutionary as her presence was (and how rightfully she is an icon), I love how you also dig in deeper critically and mention the shortcomings of Star Trek to her character. In your final chapter, you dutifully return to Uhura’s more recent portrayal in the rebooted Star Trek films. I really like how you come back to speaking about the male gaze regarding Uhura, especially in her newer portrayal. How do you think this critique can serve as food for thought for Uhura’s next portrayal in the future whenever that happens?
DM: Your assumption about the title is correct—a definite nod to Star Trek. The same goes for subtitles like “To Boldly Go” and “Final Frontiers.” Because Nichelle Nichols’s Uhura is such a pioneering figure, the first Black female science fiction icon, it was appropriate to begin and end the book with her character. And since she has been rebooted in the new millennium, her character offers some insight into how far we have come in terms of black female representation onscreen.
But as I discuss in the book’s conclusion, the “new” Uhura (Zoe Saldana) is not especially radical. The Eurocentrism and phallocentrism of the original show carries over into the reboots. Of course, there are understandable limits to rebooting classic science fiction television and cinema—if you change the original too much, it becomes unrecognizable and thus defeats the point. So along with returning to and revamping classic narratives that we love, we also need to continue imagining entirely new narratives in which old molds are not merely stretched but broken.
For Uhura, that means more screen time, more dialogue, and more agency. The key is to preserve this beloved Black female character without also preserving her constraints. At the same time, it’s vital that shows like Star Trek create fresh characters. Here, the franchise has made a “giant leap for Black womankind” (I couldn’t resist one last space cliché) by debuting Star Trek: Discovery, which gives us Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), the first Black female lead in Star Trek history.
Read on here. [x]
#Diana mafe#university of texas press#black women#speculative tv and film#blacknerdproblems#black nerd problems#carcosa interview#black women in academia#black female professors#buy this book#ask your library to buy it#support black women#star trek#28 days later#doctor who
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Week 5: What will happen when social media meets politics?
What is ‘Politics’?
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when I say the word ‘POLITICS’? Politics can be defined as the activities that related to affecting the policies and actions of a government or keeping and getting power in a government.
Relationship among social media and politics
Social media is playing an ever-increasing part in all people’s daily life. A 2019 study indicated that on average individuals worldwide spend almost more than two hours online each day. Some utilize social media to associate with people, while others use the platforms to escape from their day-to-day routines or vent their disappointments. Social media is increasingly playing a part in politics also. Political groups, Lawmakers and more are utilizing social media as an approach to associate with electors and spread their messages (Lopez 2021).
Over the past century, the way politicians communicate with individuals of the county has changed dramatically. Initially, politicians would physically meet people and make speeches in front of large crowds. However, with the advent of new media, politicians gained power over how to reach people. First, it was the radio that gave politicians with reassuring voice an advantage over politicians who did not have that quality. Back then, it was television that gave tall, handsome, healthy politicians an overwhelming advantage over opponents. Today, we have social media, which is undoubtedly the most powerful means of communication that has ever existed. Politicians can post messages that have the potential to reach billions of people. The advent of social. Media in the political arena has dramatically affected politicians and voters alike.
Pros of social media in politics
First advantage of social media in politics is having large audience. Having a huge audience on social media evens the playing field for candidates who may not have as much money or as well-known as their opponent. This phenomenon was showed up in 2008 presidential election, when Barack Obama, a relatively unknown contender, used social media to defeat well-known politicians. Many YouTube content creators made films in support of Barack Obama in 2008, with one of the most popular content makers being aptly named “Obama Girl”. These individuals were essentially advocating for Obama without being a member of his campaign. There’s a good probability Barack Obama would have lost the election if it hadn’t been for social media (Bromfield 2018).
Besides, another advantage is voters can interact more easily with candidates and elected officials. Unlike in the past, anyone can take part in a discussion and have their opinion heard. If an individual wanted to meet a politician, he/she need to attend a live event. Not everyone is able to do this. With modern technology, it’s now possible to attend virtual events where people can participate in live streaming events and communicate with candidates or politicians. Users can interact with the individual streaming the live video in real time, which makes it unique. It must be an unbelievable experience to have a politician answer your answers live on the internet. Politicians may reach out to voters more personally using social media.
How social media affects politics?
Political campaigns are increasingly affected by every narrative that is shared on social media, regardless of whether it is true or not. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between real and bogus news on the internet. This distinction is especially perplexing in the age of social media. Th never ending flood of links, rumours and memes about political leaders and candidates is a combination of lies, truth, speculation, and satire. There are also sites with political biases or sites that promote numerous unproven conspiracy theories. Even if your friends and followers don’t mean to mislead you, it’s easy to be swayed by false information they publish. As a result, its critical to exercise extreme caution before believing anything.
One of the secret forces that works on social media is confirmation bias. This is particularly powerful with regards to disputable topics, involving politics. In case you’re like most individuals, most of your followers and friends on social media presumably share your viewpoint. This implies that most Facebook posts, tweets, pins, or other content you read on these sites tend to express a similar perspective, one that you already hold. Its regular for individuals to encircle themselves with others on the same page. This is valid both offline and online. On social media sites, this can make the deception that “everyone” thinks the same way. If you have few hundreds on friends on Facebook, for instance, and 90% of them concede on most political problems, the information you get will be sifted through this bias. Individuals will post links to stories that affirm your current existing bias. They will repeat opinions you already hold. Thus, social media might build up our viewpoints and make it harder to engage elective perspectives. In politics, it can assist with making individuals more obstinate and less open minded toward others. Then again, if you put an effort to interface with an assortment of individuals with different opinions, you can overcome confirmation bias and utilize social media to make you more open-minded (Satterfield 2020).
So, what’s your opinion regarding relationship among social media and politics? You can share your thoughts with me by leaving your comment below.
List of references:
Lopez, M 2021, ‘Social media helps bring people together, but in this political climate it’s tearing us apart’, The Denver Channel.com, 1 February, viewed 1 October 2021, <https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/360/social-media-helps-bring-people-together-but-in-this-political-climate-its-tearing-us-apart>.
Bromfield, S 2018, ‘Pros & cons of social media in politics’, Uloop, 7 May, viewed 1 October 2021, <https://www.uloop.com/news/view.php/263903/Pros-amp-Cons-of-Social-Media-in-Politics>.
Satterfield, H 2020, ‘How social media affects politics’, Meltwater, 11 March, viewed 2 October 2021, <https://www.meltwater.com/en/blog/social-media-affects-politics>.
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Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
0 notes
Text
Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
0 notes
Text
Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking
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Text
Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
0 notes
Text
Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
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Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
0 notes
Text
Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
0 notes
Text
Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
0 notes
Text
Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
https://ift.tt/33NkmUm
0 notes
Text
Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
0 notes
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Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?
A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.
It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.
Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.
But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.
If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.
Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.
Why video sales?
A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:
First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.
Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.
When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.
Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.
The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.
At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:
Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems
Made product listings free
Amped up their nearby shopping filter
Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands
Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)
Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube
Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels
Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.
Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.
And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.
To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.
Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.
Why QVC?
“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.
The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.
About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.
“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call
QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!
Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”
While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.
TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:
Main host
QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.
For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.
You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.
Guest hosts
Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.
Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.
Models
Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.
Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.
For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.
Callers
There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.
If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.
Method
“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America
There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.
Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:
“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”
Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.
Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:
“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.
“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.
“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.
“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.
Analytics
The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.
QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.
For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.
Three O2O advantages
In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.
I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:
1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility
Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.
2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity
QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.
70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.
3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands
Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:
84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases
Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%
96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating
The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand
Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%
Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%
If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.
Go n-éirí leat — good luck!
Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.
Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static
product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!
Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:
17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
The ABCs of Video Content
8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
How to Film Creative Product Videos
YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps
Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.
0 notes