Improve your Amazon Marketing and make a product video for your listing. It’s powerful and increases the conversion rate of your listing page. Read on.
I have some tips and strategies that will surely help you sell more of your product and capture people who are on the fence and just browsing. Casual shoppers can become customers of yours, buying your product and potentially being able to purchase other products that you offer in your product lineup.
Quick Introduction
First, let me tell you who I am. My name is Ian Smith and I run an Amazon Marketing Agency called Evolve Media. We work with a lot of Amazon sellers and help them with increasing their listings, conversion rate, as well as external traffic including email marketing management and Google Ads.
If you want to book a free consulting call with me to take your listing to the next level, as far as photo content, video content, copywriting, and, overall optimizing your listing to sell more, then go to evolvemediaagency.com either to check out the services we offer and hopefully I’ll be talking to you on a Zoom call soon.
Next, if you don’t want to jump on a call with me just yet and you want to get some free value and kind of see what are some of the strategies that we recommend for you, I suggest that you go to zonchecklist.com.
We’ve got a very powerful Amazon listing checklist, where we break down the different sections in an Amazon listing and give you sales strategies for every single section.
Lights, Camera, Action!
The first tip that I have for you when creating a product video is to have very bright lights. Have a very high-resolution camera. The highest you can doesn’t mean to go out and get a massive expensive production budget and spend thousands on a video.
You can do a lot of this with just a basic iPhone. One of the newer models, preferably because they have good cameras. Use the best quality camera that you have and get some good white lights.
Angles Are Everything
Next, you’re going to want to show all the different angles of the products. Show close-ups and also, here’s a little pro tip for you: if you shoot at a high frame rate (around 120 frames or even at 60 frames) and then you bring it into your editing software, the final video would be around 30 frames. You can slow down that high frame rate video and you can make it seem a lot smoother.
Size Matters
If you’re just doing it handheld and you’re just going at a high frame rate, you can slow it down and it just seems like a super smooth pan across your product. Now when you’re doing these shots, be sure to be very clear about what’s included in the packaging and what exactly they’re going to get.
You want to be careful with bringing in any kind of third-party prop or showing anything in the video that they’re not going to necessarily get. You want to be clear in saying, for example, “batteries are not included” if they’re not because you want to make sure that you set the expectations correctly and accurately. This is going to help you with your product return rate.
When you’re doing these pan-around and close-ups, try to give them an idea of size and scale. Put something in there that helps compare product size; maybe a dollar or a quarter.
Something that everybody knows the size of or maybe have somebody’s hands for viewers to have an idea. One of the best things to do is to include the product’s actual dimensions.
Also, mocking up and showing a bit of a lifestyle video, putting it on the counter in the kitchen or next to other kitchen appliances will give them a good idea of the size and how it’s going to overall blend in with their kitchen, for example.
If it’s a kitchen product, then you want to include some kind of demonstration aspect to it, showing them how to work it, how to set it up, how to turn it on, and how to get it going.
Pro Versus Not So Pro
Now, if you’re shooting this video yourself, you probably don’t have to worry too much about this but if you’re hiring a production company, it may be a concern but you don’t want to go super polished with the result.
Yes, I know it’s gonna look great but sometimes when people see high production value videos or super polished stuff, it loses trust. They think, “Oh you know, the defects are hidden. They’re hiding defects. They’re trying to make it seem way better than it really is.” So, I recommend to you when you shoot it yourself or even with a production company, try to be as accurate as possible and don’t go super polished with it. Don’t go heavy on the editing just try to make a somewhat basic video, because they’re just trying to get an idea of what the product is.
For example, when you go to a fast-food restaurant and see the pictures on the menu. You’re never gonna get a burger that looks like that, it’s insane that’s legal that you can go to a fast-food restaurant, look at a picture of their menu and it’s just complete lies because the burger that you get is nowhere near like that.
Keep Your Enemies Closer
Another thing I’ll recommend is going to your competitors’ listings; look through their bad reviews, look through their customer questions and answers.
Especially if you’re new and you don’t have those on your own but address those FAQs or frequently asked questions you’re seeing, that other people are mentioning on your competitors’ listings.
You should address those in your video to overcome them on the front end because if you provide answers for those concerns, then they’re not going to be on the fence much longer. They’re just going to jump off and they’re going to buy your product. You want to make sure you address all the concerns, check all the boxes that are in the shopper’s mind when they’re looking at your Amazon listing page.
Now if your product is complex and it has a bit of an installation process like a desk, then I highly recommend you either include in your main video a quick setup an instructional how-to video on how to build it and set it up.
Another suggestion is to have a completely separate video because it may be lengthy, around five to ten minutes just for an instructional how-to video, so you want to have that to make it easier for them to:
- Follow the instructions
- Get it done correctly
- Not have to reach out to customer support
- Not have to leave you a bad review
People, People, People
What else should you include in this video? People. Why? Because people resonate with people.
If potential shoppers see that:
- People are using your product
- How does it fit on them
- What colors look good with other colors and how it matches up in different lineups
It’s going to resonate better with them and build that relationship trust, and credibility, which overall helps sell your product. If it’s possible, hire models or actors to get your product on people being used by people.
Show people in your video and don’t just have white background mock-ups. People are gonna help you sell your products.
Evolve Media Can Help You
If you’re wanting somebody like me on camera talking about your product, showing your product, showing close-ups, I can help you out. Head over to evolvemediaagency.com to book a call with me and we can talk about the review style videos that we make for a lot of Amazon sellers.
Aftersales Support Is Crucial
Next, you want to give expert tips and insider information on things like how to maintain the product and overall storage guide for the product.
This will help so that they don’t have a bad experience with it and you can reduce your product return rate, therefore increasing the number of positive reviews that you’ll be getting.
Honesty Is Still The Best Policy But Be Respectful
Being transparent is crucial in getting better reviews for your listing. Next, I highly recommend that you include some kind of comparison table or comparison against competitors.
You don’t have to mention brand names because that’s a no-no but providing information on how your product fares compared to others can be key to your success. As you know, Amazon is becoming more and more competitive.
There are so many sellers for every little product, so you gotta set yourself apart from them. Remember to set yourself apart in a respectful way.
Make Plans And Test Them First
One of the most important pieces of advice I can give is to pre-plan and come up with a script. Come up with a storyboard and think ahead for making a video because you don’t want to have everyone ready and you haven’t done enough pre-planning,
I highly recommend having a storyboard. Invest the time, money, and effort into testing things before the camera starts rolling because if you mess up during the actual shoot, that could cost you a whole lot of money. You could have avoided that with pre-planning.
Audio Should Be High Quality As Well
Earlier, I mentioned shooting in high-resolution video but I also recommend making your audio quality as high resolution as possible. People can watch a low-resolution video, as long as the audio is sounding good.
Imagine listening to bad audio, you probably wouldn’t make it past two or three minutes, it’s just gonna be so annoying. Make sure that your audio quality is good.
Sometimes it may even be helpful to shoot all the video first and then do all your audio afterward; recording it with your mobile phone because iPhones have a good quality microphone now. Sometimes recording the voice-over after you’ve shot all the video clips or after the complete video edit is done is the best way to go.
Don’t Forget To Include Captions
Near the end of the editing process, when you’re almost done with your video, I highly recommend that you include captions in it. A lot of people these days watch videos on mute for various reasons; they may be in an area where they can’t play the sound or maybe it’s late at night and they can’t play the sound.
Including captions and subtitles in your video at the very end will ensure that you don’t have to go back and redo things. These captions will greatly increase the amount of information that viewers consume. They will retain and understand when watching your video.
Also, not everyone speaks English or whatever language you may be making your video in. So sometimes subtitles help with making them grasp what your video is talking about.
Remember not to mention any kind of promotions, pricing, or anything related to an offer in your video because Amazon’s not too fond of that.
Now, Some Techspeak
Lastly to wrap this up a couple of tech specs for you the video must be :
- In at least 1080p
- Smaller than five gigabytes (file size)
- An mp4 (file type)
Amazon does take multiple file types but mp4 is just accepted everywhere. It will probably work best with your computer as well. So when you’re exporting it, just go with mp4.
That covers all the tips that I have for you. I know it’s a lot but I recommend going back to this article and taking some notes.
Additional Tip And Parting Words
I cannot stress the pre-planning enough before you shoot your video. Sometimes it’s best to just shoot a project yourself, without dropping thousands of dollars in hiring a production company.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t hire us. My team and I can get you a video for only a few hundred or a couple hundred dollars, so it’s not like breaking the bank.
Our videos are a little bit different, they’re more like review style or overall talking about the product but I recommend taking a swing at it yourself first. Worst case scenario, you’ll learn from it but I guarantee you’re probably gonna be able to use that video footage on your listing because it’s always better to have something that’s okay and mediocre versus nothing.
