From Views to Sales: The Shoppable Video Playbook with Eitan Koter

And be consistent and be authentic. People not need to know about you and keep posting. This will win any algorithms out there. And it's not a question if you're going to be successful, it's 100% you're going to be successful. It's just a matter of you being committed. What's working today very much is that founder led content. Okay, that employee generated content. Less working with influencers or working with content creators. But I think it's very important before you do that to just think about your ideal customer profile and who you are a target. And it's I think based on age. Like the platforms are differentiated probably by agent. Right. So like TikToks is all about Gen Zs probably and millennials. That's it. Right. So Facebook, Instagram is probably Millennials, Gen x. Right. And YouTube is just all over the place. Everyone are in YouTube by the way, TikTok short form videos, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts are growing, but also longer form videos. Hello and welcome to the E commerce podcast. I believe that there is more than enough content focused on e commerce marketing and not enough content celebrating the real heroes of E commerce, those running the operation. Each week we find and interview an e commerce operations expert to share the secrets behind how some of this industry's most exciting businesses are run. I'm your host, Norbert Strapler, the CEO of Syncspyder. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecom Ops podcast. And today guys, we have really a cool topic. Never so far here on the podcast we are talking about shopable videos and about video commerce with Ayton from Wimi. Hey, welcome to the show, Eitan. Hey, nice meeting you, Norbert. It's been a pleasure. We've been talking about this episode for quite a while, so really it's a pleasure to do that Finally. Yeah, finally. Thank you so much for joining. Eitan. Tell me a bit more about yourself and especially tell me a bit more about how did you land up in the e commerce world with the topic of shopable videos? Yeah, so I started my background on the video side of things and we are developing technology to monetize video, to manage video and to create videos shoppable. I'm already two decades in the video space and we've started in video where it used to be called broadcast. Right. There was no video marketing or influencer marketing or any stuff, anything of that sort. And we work with mobile operators, content providers and we'll help them with the transition from analog video to digital video. The good old days of Working with cable companies and satellite operators and throughout the years I saw the evolution of video and how video been very, very helpful in so many different categories in so many different ways. Like video is according to Cisco, is more than 82% of the worldwide Internet traffic. Right. I mean in so many different use cases. And obviously when Netflix launched and Disney and all these online video platform and about five years ago we saw something really interesting that is happening in China which is the ability of people just to open the app and go live on the app, on various apps or in websites and sell products through these experiences. When they click a button to buy now, that button is available on the video player. On that video side of things, click buy now and actually make a purchase while they keep watching the video. This is the first time that we saw that in real use case the importance of commerce or video is integrating or converging with commerce. And it's really interesting how these things has evolved. I'm the co founder and co CEO of a company called Vime. We're a video commerce SaaS platform but we've been operating for more than 10 years already. And during those 10 years we were able to work a lot with various type of customers and our platforms sync to existing e commerce platforms like Shopify and all the others. And we make videos shoppable by integrating product pages into videos and launching all these live event and deploy those videos across social networks and customer website and brands websites. So it's all about working with video, helping companies sell their products and services with videos. That's really amazing. And I've seen the list of your major platforms like Facebook, Insta, Graham, TikTok, YouTube, Amazon, Twitch and Websites and what else you're transforming into revenue. How does this actually work? I mean do you need to talk with those providers to allow them to embed such videos with those buy capabilities or is it just a general feature that your videos have anyway available whenever it's seen? So how does it work? So that's a great question because every one of those platform has a different mentality and a different focus and different ways to enable this interactivity or the way to that they provide to help create this shoppable checkout experiences. Obviously we have internal team that Is just working 247 on updating those APIs and those integration with each one of those platform. So we streamline the multichannel or social commerce aspect of things from a single console. This is one of the things that are usually we talk to brands and companies and they have like internal teams Again the big companies, they have internal teams of managing TikTok or managing YouTube or Instagram. And here there is a one platform that can just do it all in a very simple intuitive interface. As we know that it's so difficult to acquire new customers to your own amazing brand.com right. Because of cost of advertising is so high and organic contact and SEO is getting more and more difficult and competitive. And video is one of those places where you can grow quite organically if you're consistent. And there are ways to how to do that type of content and there is a methodology that we can discuss where to start and how to do that. But the idea is to deploy those videos and create those shoppable and checkout experiences where shoppers are spending their time. They're spending their time on social media. In the western world we are spending more than three hours a day just surfing various platforms. And if we see an opportunity to purchase. We know E commerce is a all about impulse purchase but watching that video, pushing a product, that's like next level of impulse purchase, right. It's very, very powerful. And we know that conversion rates are very high on video compared to others. Carto button bands are much lower and any type of, any piece of data around video is very promising. Yeah, that's, I think that's true when you do advertising on Facebook or on, on any other social that you do the advertising with a video because it's gives you more and more potential click through rate and of course conversion rates. And if it's already buy able from within the video or linked from within the video, I could imagine that this also helps a bit more getting a better conversion rate. What do you think? For whom is it the right way to start with shopable videos? I mean who is the right audience for that format? Yeah. So if you ask me this question like probably one year ago, I would say it's probably better for those who have products that are less than $100, very small product that you can showcase a transformation like a cosmetics product or a gadget, like an electronics gadget or something like that. But these days are over. Today everyone needs to create videos, right. And if we talk specifically about short form videos, this is the place to start. We work with customers that are like they're in the furniture industry, right. And their products are like four digit dollars or euros and they're like high ticket products but and they sell on TikTok and they sell on other platforms and the attribution of their growth is highly targeted to the fact that They've started to be committed to video. So the place to start is with short form videos, those 30 seconds to 60 seconds videos that are very, very important. And what's working is just that authenticity, level and consistency. Okay. So this, anyone can do that. Okay. It doesn't matter how you look. And if you ever created content, no one cares about the background that you have. You need to have good lightning, really nice mic. Probably you connect to the iPhone and that's it. Spend time on creating content and just create a list of customer pains. Or try to provide solutions around specific topic and create content that is very targeted to the specific stage that you are on. A marketing funnel. So if we just split the marketing funnel into three major stages. Awareness, consideration and decision. So if you are just launching a new product or you are a new brand, just provide on that first level of awareness. Don't push your product. Just provide educational content, market information, trending topics, just provide value, just build confidence with customers. Because we know these days the first foundation is just for people to feel confident that you are for real and you're committed. They feel that they know you better and it's important for them and they will be more open to accept a proposal for you. And when those people are in the consideration phase where they're evaluating few options, don't be afraid to provide competitors information. Share info about your competition because they know who are your competition. You're saving them time and they will respect you for that. Create content around how to do things like case studies. Don't pitch your product and only when you are in the decision phase. When you feel your users are ready, they're warmed up to create a purchase. Yes. And provide product information prices like case studies, testimonials to help them with that conversion. And today you can create that conversion on TikTok shop. You can do that also on YouTube, right? Obviously you can do that on marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart that are providing shoppable videos on live shopping capabilities as well. That's a great place to start. We always recommend to be committed creating content for at least two to three months. Sorry, probably minimum of two or three videos per week. You will learn what's working for you, what video are resonating with your audience. And you will keep doing these type of videos as well. And we usually. And this is 100% organic, right. And based on data analytics, we usually recommend for those great videos that are performing well to push them also with advertising because we know that retail ad spend is going to be very good for these videos? Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think especially on the social channels, if you don't put some coins in on the top, the output is not really well enough for now at least. I mean you have, you've seen quite a lot in the past 20 years in your experience. What do you think? What were the biggest shifts you've seen in the way people shop online? Obviously the way that product pages are designed hasn't changed a lot in so many years. Right. And there are a lot of ideas how to improve the user experience. And video is like very fundamental for everything because we know that video is creating that additional emotional triggers, that psychological state that you feel much more connected to the person that you, that you listen to and you watch. There is also this listening factor and your eyes are moving and by nature if it's a nice storytelling type of event, there is an emotional process that is being involved which is very powerful. So what we see is E commerce platform are tending to be that just we believe that the future of E commerce is interactive. So Hero Banners includes a lot of videos and interactivities and those videos are clickable videos that you can check out and you can also write question in a chat and provide comments and there's someone who's moderating this and can answer your question. Product pages are enriched with videos. Those videos can be created by influencers or by the founder or by employees. But also those videos can be like video reviews which is like next generation of text based reviews. Videos are very powerful. We know for example for cart abandonment. Okay, what I'm a bit interested in is videos are hard to build because you know, there is a lot of knowledge and time that is needed for videos. How do you see that? What would you recommend customers starting with videos? Great question. So let's talk about the type of videos first. Right. So we have one type of video which is live video. Okay, so that's one aspect not everyone are comfortable. Those events are usually longer in time and it involves, it needs to be very interesting in terms of the scripting and the planning and the gamification around those events to make it interesting. One, the other type of videos are non live and they are split into two types. The short form videos which are usually vertical between 30 seconds to probably 16 or 90 seconds and the long form video which is usually horizontal, 16 by 9 aspect ratio. That goes to YouTube for example. Okay, now not every one of us are like video creators and they feel comfortable in front of a camera, but you don't need to because of what TikTok taught us. And this TikTok ification effect, you can start with short form videos. I create short form videos like few times a week and it takes me just five minutes to do them. That's it. Okay. And some of these videos got hundreds of thousands of impressions. Okay. And I just spent five minutes on these videos. Because there is a methodology. The way it works is that it's not a continuous linear growth. You create videos, some of them are not performing and suddenly there is a crazy spike in impression and engagement and then you create. It happens like every two to three weeks. And this just builds you and builds your credibility and your brand awareness and the ability to create business out of those videos. So this is a great way to start. The first thing you need to do is just create a list of 50 customer pains that you are aware of. If you're a brand owner and you don't know to create a list of 50 customer pins, you're in your own business. So just spend 30 minutes, just create that list. Okay. And then just. And you have 50 content ideas to create content about. You can use a lot of tools. For example, you can go to Google, type one of the few of the major keywords of your product or industry and you also see a section people also ask for, right? So it's very close to the search bar and you just. There is a drop down list here with and plenty of other ideas. So these are very good way of finding content ideas. You can also There are like AI tools and like usdepublic.com and there are so many different tools there to just give you these content ideas. And then you can use like again chatgpt or other tool just to create a quick script. You need to use the right hook because the hook is like 80% of the success of the video. The content itself, the topic you're going to discuss and how you're going to captivate the audience like within the first two seconds. Using the Right hook. Again, these are the things you can find online. Very easy to find, the methodology to create the right hook and it's part of the very important part of the success. You can use your smartphone to just capture the video. There are so many tools out there that you can create the entire text and yet you can just read it through like a teleprompter if you're not comfortable with remembering everything. This is how I started by the way. And it's. And then you take it to a simple AI. There are so many AI tools out there. It just Helps you with editing in few clicks. It does everything just clean the noise, clean the ums and hums and just the background noise. If there are, if there's any adding, adding captions. It's like everything is like minutes, that's it. And be consistent and be authentic. People not need to know about you and keep posting. This will win any algorithms out there. And it's not a question if you're going to be successful. It's a hundred percent that you're going to be successful. It's just a matter of you being committed. What's working today very much is that founder led content. Okay. That employee generated content. Less working with influencers or working with content creators. If you are a small brand or medium brand and that founder is still available. Yes, this is part of your job description to create content. Because this is one of the most powerful things that you can do for your marketing activities. So many people tell me that they don't like to be in front of a camera. So we insist we teach them how to do that. And gradually anyone can do that. And it gradually became becoming like a very normal process that they do. And they do it very fast. And this authenticity wins. And if you're being consistent for a few months, you're getting an amazing result that's 100% guaranteed. This episode is made possible by B2Bware, built for wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers who who are tired of watching buyers leave because placing an order is still too complicated. One platform, Live ERP pricing, self service ordering and AI that reads your customer emails and turns them into orders automatically. That's cool. Really, really interesting. You got those 50 topics now. Okay, so you have the script, you're now going in front of a regular smartphone camera, recording that wherever you are, and then you're posting it on social media. Which channels are the right channels for me as a founder to go through? Yes, another great question. So if the content is created by you as a founder, you will, you can deploy, for example, with the VIME platform, you can deploy this content on all the platforms. Right. Which is fine. Technically you can do that and it's very easy to do. But I think it's very important before you do that to just think about your ideal customer profile and who you are targeting. And it's I think based on age. Like the platforms are differentiated probably by age and. Right, so like TikToks is all about Gen Zs, probably in millennials. That's it. Right. So Facebook, Instagram is probably Millennials, Gen x. Right. And YouTube is just all over the place. Everyone are in YouTube by the way, TikTok short form videos, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts are growing, but also longer form videos. YouTube is also growing as well. Yes, video is growing all over the place. Okay. And so you need to create content, you need to post it all over. But you need to be committed to that platform where you analyze that your users are going to spend most of their time. It's the right fit for your audience. Right. We work with customers that for example they are posting to and they're working with shopping channels because they are targeting 60 plus like the senior adults, they're not on social, they're probably spending their time in front of the tv. So it really depends on their ICP and which one you want to target. If you're a B2B or if you're a D2C making all these analysis and. Yeah, and post all over. But be committed to one platform, learn the platform, engage with users, comment and create more content around that specific platform which you're going to zoom in and zero in. Just make that platform a success for you. Learn about the advertising ways to publish to work with advertising on that platform. Learn roas. I mean all these different parameters that are very important. Maybe work with an agency, but find that platform that will win your audience. You mentioned already that it's important to start with non advertising videos. So with guiding users with helping users talking about the topic and helping. What's the right point? Actually, how do I understand when it's the right time to put in some advertising elements? Yes. Usually between four to six weeks you have enough analytics data that you can use again on the VIME platform that gives you a lot of information about engagement and about impressions and you will start to find this commonality or that common denominator from these videos. It can be maybe time of the day, the length, the way that your style of presenting, maybe the content topic, the specific subject that you are talking about. This is something that you can easily find within four to six weeks and then on the following four to six weeks just try to zero in on this type of content and grow from there. So that's probably the best practice around that. Okay, great. Thank you. Then I have a question for what you will hate me for because everyone else is going to ask you, I think what makes a shoppable video go viral. I heard the leaders from all these platform and no one is using this viral term anymore because even all of these platforms, they don't like virality. Like it's more about the essence and the engagement with this type of content. Right. And they mean business. All these platform, I mean Facebook, Instagram, they want to sell more ads. So who cares about virality and about cats, right? The same as TikTok. TikTok is a shopping platform these days in YouTube as well. They care about advertising. So these are the monetization, the commercial aspect of things are the true winners. But again good videos are. Will be, will have. I would like to use the term better engagement or high level of impressions because they are created in this authentic way and they talk about a trending topic. The subject of that video is very important. What are you going to talk about and what value you provide. And these type of things are. You can only know through working with a variety of tools just to find the right content ideas. Okay, Customer page is a great place to start with that like the foundation list of 50 lines. And I'm using there's so many tools out there to help you with content ideas and find the right content, the trending content. And yeah, just create those videos. Some of the. As I told you, I sometimes spend a lot of time and my team is spending a lot of time on editing and sometimes we spend one minute on editing. It doesn't matter. Those videos are performing very good even if they are totally polished or we spend just one minute on editing with few clicks on those AI tools. Right? Yeah. So AI is playing really a huge role nowadays in video. This is why those pre for your previous questions about people that are afraid going on in front of a camera. I mean you have those AI tools that help you with content based ideas, with scripting, with finding the right hook, post production, just editing. It's so easy on shoppable video short form videos. Right. So this is not this long form one hour piece of content that you probably need to plan for a few weeks. No, you can do that immediately. Probably you can spend few hours on a week just block that Calendar and create 20 videos right. In one shot. Get some help maybe very cheap, someone working on this variety of editing platform to just create this video and posting for you. You have a lot of integrations because of shoppable videos like to Shopify to WooCommerce, I think to Amazon, of course Wix I've seen on the list and Google Merchant. What is this integration actually doing or what capabilities does it have to help you sell online? Yeah, so we work with all the E commerce platform there. So the first thing that you do you need to sync products. So from the Brand perspective. Right. So they want. Here are the products you want to sync to Vime to make those videos shoppable. So if you're in, it doesn't matter which platform you use, there's a one click integration or probably a sync is a better word. And we just pull product information, the thumbnails, the title of the product, the price, before and after discount. Probably that's it. Right. Because we need that information when we will. And the link to the product page, right to the pdp because we will. When people are buying, are clicking buy now we need to redirect them to that product page. So this is one aspect. And once you are. So we are on Wix and obviously Shopify and Salesforce and some other marketplaces as an app. So you can just download our app to your storefront or to the backend side of things. And when you're just doing this oauth integration, this vime will immediately know which product you have like without doing anything. That's the essence of the product. And from the Vime console you can just go live. You can upload videos that are created by you as a founder or by the employee or by influencers or content creators and just associate those videos with products. Okay. And when you publish those videos on your website and on other platforms, these videos will be associated with the product links. Every platform provide a different way of representing those clickable and shoppable opportunities. Obviously TikTok shop, those product pages needs to be within the TikTok shop. Okay. That available in the US in the UK, Germany. It's increasing in the amount of countries that are adopting TikTok shop. And also like YouTube. It also depends how many followers you have on YouTube as a brand or as a content creator. If you are using your partner as yes or no, giving you the ability to create that kind of a digital shelf. When you can create ad products below the video player or even add a shoppable link inside the video player. Okay. On Instagram you can just tag products. Facebook, Facebook shops. Obviously Amazon and Walmart is another ecosystem. We work also with Twitch and Pinterest. Yes. We are implementing all the latest of greatest API from these platforms and we provide the maximum that we can to enable checkout, enable shoppable. We also implement QR codes in the videos. So for those people who are watching on the big screen or on desktop, they can just open their mobiles, scan the QR code and just be redirected to that original product page. These things are always evol, always improving. It's very important aspect of all the social media networks and obviously marketplaces and investing a lot and are introducing new, new functionalities like on a weekly basis. Cool. Really amazing. One thing that I also wanted to talk with you about is smart TV ads. Ads on Prime Video and all of those providers and streaming services that started to run ads now on the smart TVs. What do you think about that? What is the best time to start with that and from which volume would you start doing on running such ads? Yeah, so this is a. I think it's a different type of experience, right? So everything that is on mobile for example, or on web is what I call like a lean forward type of experience. You are engaged, your prefrontal cortex is engaged. You are in a mode that you're happy to purchase, you're ready to take action. But when you watch on a big screen, you're probably on a living room, then you're in different mode, you are in a lean back type of experience, right? So the whole brain process is completely different. Probably we are like a reptilian brain is working, right? No, we don't think about anything. Just to click on a remote control and that's it, right? You would like to watch something. So first, this whole thing is still into, I believe an experimentation phase. How do we create that interactive experience where people don't like to buy, they like to get into, to be entertained right? Now, so what for example, in Netflix is great ideas. Like on the, where you have that movie page or that serious page, you have all the description, the trailers, the picture of the actors and then you have like a QR code that you probably send you an email, a reminder to buy certain products that is related to this tv, to the series TV series, right? They will not interrupt in the middle of the movie or something with big QR code to create a shoppable event, right? This is not going to work, right? But we know that Netflix and Disney and Amazon prime, they launch Avon advertising VOD type of subscriptions, right? And we know that these subscriptions are growing, okay? But the way to make this advertising effective is still an ever evolving evolution. And we are just in the infancy of these things. But definitely for those players and to the big retailers. This is why, for example in the U.S. walmart acquires Visio, right? Like Visio is a TV manufacturer, they have an app, it's like an online video platform. So a retailer bought this kind of a company to help with retail media. So retail media we know is a huge opportunity. And one of those Assets of these retailers and companies is those big screens like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney, etc. Etc. And like the big retailers they have apps on the big screen. So true content and through shoppable content is ability to create those type of experiences which is probably the new version of the shopping channels which are getting just out of business. Right. Because you have a dedicated channel these targeting probably today that the senior people calling or even creating, you know these type of shoppable events. And we know that all of them have an online version of it and they are competing with all the other marketplaces. So they lost their key, you know, differentiator. Yeah. So I will definitely again decide based on the ideal customer profile from the brand perspective whether to go and launch campaigns on this platform. I think it's interesting, I think it's very important but it really depends on the ICP like their lead customer profile trying to reach out whether they're spending time on big screen. And we know that those ads are very, very expensive. CPMs are very, very expensive and those let's say conversion rates or the success of those CPM are still in its infancy. We need to get a lot of data to understand what's working and what's not. Again, no one can tell. It's as any other aspect of marketing, it requires experimentation. So you need to try. There is an opportunity. You can't go with short form authentic. This is more big screen, more high production polished type of video with a lot of creative and interesting storytelling in a 32nd or even 10 second slot. Right. Or spot. So it's a completely different mentality position. It's very expensive and. But again if someone has the budget and wants to test then this is the only way to do it. There is no bulletproof to know if it's going to work. I think it's more just for brand building than for performance and shopable. Actually something works a bit better for performance and other formats. But it's really interesting way how you explained it with lean forward and lean back. So the classical terms and online marketing which is very important to understand that it's absolutely the truth. When I watch you video on a big screen I don't want to do something else. I want to relax and enjoy the show. One last question for the day. Who has told you the most about E commerce in your career? And we can talk about. Exactly. Video commerce of course. But E commerce is a big story. So who has told you the most about E commerce in your career? Wow, that's a. So I'm entrepreneur for 15 years already. Okay. And before that I work for large enterprise customers. I also launched, you know, raised a lot of funds from VCs. I also did an IPO on NASDAQ in 2005. Right. So back then I had like amazing mentors. They I have like few people that I remember that helped me a lot in my career. But since last 15 years I learned a lot again from customers. This is why, by the way, I launched a podcast, right? Mastering E Commerce. I launched it a year ago because I wanted to learn more about the industry, wanted to speak to the industry influencers and leaders and potential customers. And I also participate in a lot of like research group and trying to gather a lot of product info, like market information. But mainly talking to customers for me is the best because it has a major influence on us as a product development company, as a technology company, knowing how to create priorities in our roadmap and also trying to define that very professionally that product market fit, which is very, very important for initial launch and also on the additional aspects of that, additional features that we need to integrate more and more. Thank you so much for your time. Great information we got about shopping, videos and video shopping and commerce with videos, creating videos. For me, the outtake is really sit down, write the list of 50 things that the problems that our customer base has and start producing those single videos. That's so important. If you can do that, if you can write down 50 things, then you really know your market. And that's a very important fact and I think a very good guide for anyone who want to start with video to just start with that. It's a simple, simple job and just to be done. Don't miss out on this amazing opportunity because all these platforms are pushing your content in a very, very professional and hard way. So it's an area where you, it's not a question of if it's a must. So find your way to create content and go out there and show yourself. That's that's the best thing you can do for your company. Thank you so much, Aidan for your time. And guys, if you liked it, it's also not just the podcast, it's a video. You can find us on YouTube but just come back for the next episode and we will see and hear each other soon. Bye bye. And that's it for this episode of the EcomOps podcast. If you enjoyed listening and would like us find and interview more ecommerce operations experts, Please search for EcoMobs podcast in your favorite podcast listening app and then subscribe, rate and review until next time.