eCommerce Made Easy - Growing your Online Business

How to use Video Effectively on your Website to Boost Sales

• Carrie Saunders • Episode 98

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Imagine landing on a website and instead of reading through endless blocks of text, you’re greeted with a short, engaging video that immediately answers your questions. Feels more personal, right? That’s the power of video on websites!

Video is no longer just a nice-to-have—it’s a game-changer for engagement, conversions, and brand trust. If you’re not using video on your website yet, you might be leaving money on the table.

In today’s episode, we’re diving into why video is rising in popularity, how to use it effectively on your website, and what mistakes to avoid so it actually helps your business grow. Let’s get started!


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Carrie Saunders:

Imagine landing on a website. Instead of reading through endless blocks of text, you're greeted with short, engaging video that immediately answers your questions, feels more personal, right, that's the power of video on websites. Video is no longer just a nice-to-have. It's a game-changer for engagement, conversions and brand trust. If you're not using video on your website yet, you might be leaving money on the table. In today's episode, we're diving into why video is rising in popularity, how to use it effectively on your website and what mistakes to avoid so it actually helps your business grow. So let's get started.

Carrie Saunders:

Welcome to the eCommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, k Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month-old my main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the ecommerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech into easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned ecommerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the show.

Carrie Saunders:

Today, we're talking about video on our websites and how to use it effectively and the mistakes to avoid. So there's a rise in video on websites. You probably already noticed this. So why is video becoming a must-have for websites? So people process videos about 60,000 times faster than text. Think about it when we are in person with somebody, we are used to processing human speech and talking directly to a person. When we have video, that's kind of emulating it and simulating it. We process that much faster than reading text. It builds trust faster, as well than static images and words alone. Google loves video. Websites with video content rank higher in search results and attention spans, they say, are shrinking. But we've really not had that great of attention span anyway, and especially patients on websites, and it's getting even shorter, I feel like on websites specifically, and videos keep visitors engaged for longer. According to recent studies, websites that have video are 53% more likely to show up on the first page of Google Kind of shocking results. It's something I didn't quite realize until doing some research on writing this podcast episode Plus having a video on your landing page can boost conversions by up to 80%. Think about it.

Carrie Saunders:

We talk about trust a lot on this podcast. What builds trust other than a human connection, and video is one of those ways to build a human connection. So how do we actually use video the right way on your website? Because I know that I have some pet peeves on how video can be used on a website, so let's look at those. So, first off, we can have a homepage hero video, because first impressions matter and a short, high quality video at the top of your homepage can quickly communicate who you are, the problem you solve and why somebody should care and should keep on reading on your website. We want to keep this video about 30 to 90 seconds max. Definitely add subtitles, since many people watch videos without sound. Plus, it also helps it be ADA compliant.

Carrie Saunders:

And then, when we have products or services, it is a great idea to have explainer videos around those products or services. Your visitors don't want to just guess how your product or service works. They want to see it in action, so you can show the transformation your services provide. You can demonstrate how your product works in real life. If it's something that's a physical product. You can also address common pain points and how you solve them if you're a service provider. And when we're doing these videos, we want to focus on benefits, not just features. Similarly, unlike the episode we have for how to make product and service descriptions that sell, we are talking about benefits and not just features, and those are podcast episodes as well. People buy solutions, not specifications. They want to know why and how it's going to solve their issue and they want to be able to reach that determination quickly, so we want to focus on those benefits.

Carrie Saunders:

You can also use videos for customer testimonials and case studies, as we talk about on this podcast. A lot social proof helps you sell. It helps build trust, and a real person on video sharing their success story is far more persuasive than a written review. Ask your best clients or customers to record a short video about their experience. Showcase before and after transformations when that's applicable and keep it authentic. Real emotions build trust. Don't overproduce these testimonial videos. The more natural the better, and the more natural the more believable is why that's much better. So make sure they're not overproduced and they're pretty. You know close to exactly what that person has recorded.

Carrie Saunders:

Also, you can have educational and blog embedded videos on your website as another options. They can enhance your blog content and keep your visitors on your page for longer, which signals to Google that your content is valuable. We talk about this a lot in our search engine optimization episodes how long a person is on a page and you can repurpose your blog post into short educational videos. That's one idea you can do. You can add videos inside of how-to articles to visually demonstrate your points and how you're doing what you're doing, and you can use YouTube or Vimeo to embed your videos to improve the site speed. That is a great way to help not have the time to load for that page to be a lot slower if you're using YouTube or Vimeo. You can also have it in-house and have it hosted on your own web page, but make sure that it's nice and quick and that you can service that pretty fast. And also always always on all these videos. Transcribe your videos this helps with search engine optimization and accessibility and always make sure you have captions on them.

Carrie Saunders:

And then, when it's appropriate for your business, live and behind the scenes videos are great. People love behind the scenes content, so share your progress, your workspace, a day in the life of your business. Use live videos for product launches, q&as or special announcements. Let your audience see the real people behind the brand. That again further builds that trust.

Carrie Saunders:

Make sure you are doing authenticity over perfection. We don't want to be perfect here. We want to be a real, relatable human being. You don't need Hollywood-level production here. That's likely going to be a very big turnoff, unless that's what you are targeting. Is you being able to produce high, high-quality video as a service? That would be probably the main exception to that. If that's not what your service is, then don't do high quality production video. Make it more authentic, of course, make it, you know, clean and professional, but make it more authentic than it is completely high quality and unbelievable.

Carrie Saunders:

So there's some common mistakes to avoid with website videos. We don't want them to be too long or boring. We want to get to the point quickly. Somewhere around 30 to 90 seconds is ideal, unless it's a really big, unless it's a long demonstration video that is actually necessary to show how a product works or show how you fix something. But most of the time 30 to 96 seconds is what you want. We also don't want to have poor quality. While we don't want to have it be Hollywood production, in most cases poor quality is definitely a turnoff. So we don't want to have blurry or shaky or bad audio. People will click away fast, especially when it's bad audio. They'll tolerate visual elements not being as good over audio being pretty terrible. So invest in a decent microphone Most of them are pretty inexpensive anymore and make sure your lighting is really good.

Carrie Saunders:

Another mistake to avoid is to not have subtitles or captions, so make sure you have these. 85% of videos are watched on mute. I know I am one of those people who does not turn on the sound on most of my videos, so make sure your messaging still gets across with subtitles and don't autoplay with sound. Oh my goodness, please don't autoplay with sound. Don't scare your visitors If autoplaying. If you have autoplaying turned on which honestly I recommend not doing keep it muted with an easy play button. I personally get really frustrated with videos that just autoplay, because maybe I'm not ready to process it yet, so you can think about it in that way, they may actually be reading some of your text before they decide to watch your video. So not autoplaying is, I think, what you really should do. But if you do have autoplay, make sure you don't have the sound on automatically.

Carrie Saunders:

Also, we want to make sure we're optimizing for mobile. If your video doesn't load well on mobile, you're going to be losing a huge audience, and then I want you to also consider this Consider whether you allow them to play the video in a faster mode. For me personally, I don't have the patience to watch a video on slow mode. I process words that people speak very fast and it really bores me, honestly, if I'm just going to be honest here and I know there's a lot of other business owners I've talked to too that want to watch videos on a faster mode so consider having that option to let them watch it on a faster mode, even if it is only 30 to 90 second video. Seriously, consider that, because that might be something that your audience is wanting.

Carrie Saunders:

So some key takeaways on how to get started with video on your website. We want to identify where video would be the biggest impact on your website. Is it going to be your homepage? Is it going to be a product page or a service page? Would it be testimonials for you? Don't feel like you have to do all of these at once if you don't have any at all. Pick the most impactful one for now and start there, and then start with that one simple video.

Carrie Saunders:

Your intro about video is a great first step, so this could be on your homepage. It could be on your about page. So a short intro about who you are and what your business is about, and you can use your smartphone if you would like and natural lighting. That can be very effective. You don't really need a fancy setup and you can upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo to help with your site speed, and you can embed them in your site that way. That also then gives you presence on YouTube, especially if you use YouTube, which is yet another great search engine too.

Carrie Saunders:

Keep it short, clear and engaging, always thinking about the visitor's experience. I like to think about talking to a good friend or a good client whenever I'm making video. So think about it that way. Think about talking to that other person on the end of the camera, like it's a real person that's going to help you produce your video. So video isn't just a trend. It is the future of online marketing, as I'm sure you know as a consumer as well. So, whether you're selling physical products, digital courses or services, strategic video can skyrocket your engagement, build trust faster and ultimately increase conversions.

Carrie Saunders:

That's all we have for this week's episode of the E-Commerce Made Easy podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to share it with a business friend so that they can get the value out of this podcast. And, as always, we'd love to have you rate us on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, and you can always drop us a text. There's a little link on the show note description in your podcast app that says text carry, and you can text me right there and I will be sure to read it and you might get featured on our podcast episode an upcoming one if you have a great question that we can talk about. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on any new episodes and we will see you next week.