- Feb 12, 2021
Updated: Nov 1, 2021
The pressure is on for brands to provide effective online shopping solutions. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Tik Tok have harnessed tech to incorporate shoppable video to allow brands to interact with their customers.
Social, shoppable solutions
70% of shopping enthusiasts turn to Instagram for product discovery. Through a ‘see tap shop’ philosophy, the platform provides a straightforward online shopping experience. By clicking shoppable video, photos and stories, consumers can learn more details about products tagged. They can either buy the product or bookmark for later using the save feature. Soon, customers will be able to complete in app purchases. Using Instagram Story Ads, brands can connect with 500 million accounts daily using photos or videos of up to 120 seconds long.
Through livestream shopping, check-out enabled businesses can form richer connections with customers in real time. Viewers will be able to buy or save products added to the shopping video. Prior to streaming, you can add up to 30 products to a collection and pin one item at a time while Live to feature that product. Products shown must be approved before they can be added to live videos. An influencer looking to explore the shop live feature must have featured products approved before they can be tagged.
For Facebook Pages, there are three ways to feature your products:
If you have a Commerce account with Commerce Manager, a linked Facebook Page and a product set in your Facebook catalogue, you can tag and feature product sets from your shop and add links.
If you have a Facebook Page but no commerce account, you can manually add the products and links that you want to feature just before going live.
You can also just start a live shopping video without the setup and talk about your products as you go.
Since Facebook owns Instagram, businesses can replicate and unify their shops across the two platforms. Businesses and brands can compose collections to show in their ads once they are clicked on. Live stream shopping has been proven to be extremely effective, the app NTWRK saw their sales surge 400% after using the tech to sell limited edition fashion pieces.
TikTok has partnered with Shopify to launch shoppable video ads. Sponsored businesses on Shopify will be able to advertise using TikTok for business ad manager dashboard to run their ads. This will include a “1-click” pixel conversion tracking, target audience tracking, creative tools and $300 credit for eligible merchants. Even small businesses will be able to create shoppable video, so long as they are partnered with Shopify. Through a “shop now” call to action, viewers can purchase the products that they see on screen. In 2019, TikTok trialled shoppable video links with influencers but it is not yet clear whether this feature will roll out to TikTokkers. For now, the feature lies in the hands of pre-approved businesses.
Google’s Shoploop provides a video shopping platform for discovering, assessing and purchasing products. Here, users can view videos from real, relatable people using products available for purchase. The aim is to create an online shopping experience that feels like real life. Customers can select products of interest to save for later or be directed to the brands website to complete the purchase. Shoploop’s current focus is centred towards content creators, publishers and online store owners in the beauty industry.
In June 2020, YouTube introduced the “shop now” call to action on video ads shown. The feature was introduced to drive more traffic from the product listing to the brands website. With this, YouTube seeks to improve the way in which ad effectiveness can be measured.
Each platform offers an online shopping solution. However, as standalone apps, it can be difficult to manage multiple ad formats and directly measure and compare ad effectiveness from platform to platform. As a result, things could get unnecessarily complicated.
Cross platform solution
Smartzer offers a cross platform solution to these complications. The quick, easy and customisable interactive livestream and interactive video formats allow users to upload content and create immersive, shoppable video ads. These videos can be replicated across any social media platform, e-commerce site and even email newsletters. This removes issues associated with site specific advertising methods. You can efficiently measure the performance of your interactive videos by using the Smartzer analytics dashboard. Here, brands can see data for key video KPI’s like views and clicks as well as behavioural data across distribution platforms, devices and markets. By using Smartzer’s interactive video software brands observed a 50% increase in engagement rate as well as a 15% increase in click through rate four times more likely to lead to a conversion than regular video.
Smartzer encourages interactivity through mobile optimisation. For example, TikTokkers can experience highly engaging ads without glitches by clicking the call to action URL featured on brand campaigns. Through Smartzer’s MINI shop, TikTok ads can be connected directly to the product feed. By clicking the ad, users can see all the shoppable products and a link to the brand’s e-commerce, leading to increased conversion rates and stronger ROI.
To minimise issues, brands should consider moving towards quick and easy, shoppable and social solutions.
- Feb 12, 2021
2020 was the year for cancelled plans. The Summer Olympics was cancelled for the first time since World War II, Glastonbury 20/21 was cancelled, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, The Rolling Stones and The Weeknd were all forced to reschedule their highly anticipated tours and ITV’s Love Island was unable to take place. The list goes on.
With the word of the year being “unprecedented”, the only thing we could be 100% sure of was that the events industry needed to adapt to accommodate for restrictions.
While some brands have refunded and rescheduled events, some have made the virtual transition to livestream. In fact, the occurrence of virtual events went up 1000% since the start of COVID-19 with 52,000 on just one platform, 6Connex.
Brands driving virtual events in 2021
Livestream Music
Online livestream venue StageIt has been helping to connect fans with lesser known artists for years. Here, acts stream live from the comfort of their homes via laptop cameras. Through an interactive chat room feature, fans can communicate with artists by asking questions and requesting songs. With venues closed, StageIt enables fans to financially support artists through a monetized system and acts can show their appreciation for viewers via a virtual tip jar. Through interactive video streams, fans can win prizes such as band merch or one-on-one Zoom sessions.
Bigger artists such as The Weeknd have held live, interactive virtual concerts. In August 2020 he took to TikTok drawing over 2 million total viewers and raising over $350,000 for the Equal Justice Initiative. Adam Lambert will host a series of live streams this February 2021 discussing Stonewall day and up and coming LGBTQ artists. Eddie Vedder, Phoebe Bridgers and more are set to perform virtually for the 34th annual Tibet House US Benefit concert with tickets starting at $25.
Livestream Fashion
Harnessing the magic of the internet, Dior streamed their Autumn 2021 Men's show live online as a part of Paris Men’s Fashion Week on 22 January 2021. The innovative, vibrant collection inspired by surrealism and science fiction reflected the limitless possibilities of combining technology with fashion. Featuring art from Kenny Scharf the show was streamed live using Amazon owned platform Twitch. The technology has also been used by Burberry in their Spring/Summer 2021 show. By contrast to Snapchat, Facebook Live, or Instagram, Twitch’s streaming service is more public, bringing the front row seat at fashion week to your device screen. The interactive video experience gave viewers the opportunity to connect with each other in live chat rooms. As a result, live streaming could bring the fashion community together during a socially distanced period.
Live Shopping
With store doors closed, interactive video is opening up new opportunities for ecommerce. Department store Brown Thomas partnered with Smartzer to create interactive and shoppable video events featuring brands like Laura Mercier and Bare Minerals. Customers could book onto breakthrough beauty masterclasses and tutorials to learn about makeup products and application techniques. They could shop the content shown in the stream via a product carousel and add items to their basket without leaving the stream. Through these exclusive events, customers were provided with a bespoke, live shopping experience that generated a community feel for like minded makeup enthusiasts.
By using Smartzer’s player that was fully integrated into the Demandware API, up-to-date product information could be instantly pulled into the Smartzer editor and player to be showcased to viewers. The private videos are now available on Brown Thomas’s ecommerce site for anyone to view. By using these videos for video content marketing, brands can engage and inform standard web visitors and turn general traffic into qualified traffic. Tests have revealed that a consumer who watched a video demonstrating a product was 144% more likely to add that product to their shopping cart. Through interactive, demonstrative video content brands can increase online engagement and build trust with their audiences to increase conversion rates.
- Feb 11, 2021
Updated: Sep 7, 2021
Online shopping made up 21.3% of total retail sales for 2020. Amazon counted for nearly a third of all online sales in the US. With a 44% increase over the year, 2020 saw the highest annual growth in US e-commerce in at least two decades. Perhaps an unsurprising figure considering the world was told to “stay at home”. Nevertheless, the pressure is on for brands to optimise online shopping experiences for their customers.
Offline meets online in livestream shopping experiences.
Through live shopping, brands can connect with customers to sell products in real-time. Viewers can watch a live stream and purchase the items shown in the clickable side-bar, a call to action encourages viewers to complete a purchase without leaving the stream. Using this “see now, buy now” mentality, some shows saw their sales reach $1 million in just ten minutes.
For merchants, platforms like Bambuser and Smartzer make it easy to broadcast a live shop. Through the Bambuser app, brands upload URLs of the products that they plan to showcase in the live stream then “go live” with their content to potential customers. Smartzer allows brands to build a shoppable carousel of products by importing directly from a product catalogue or manually. Merchants can then connect the platform they wish to stream on to Smartzer using the RTMP ID and a Stream Key to go live.
Live, Camera, Action
Using Amazon’s livestream gaming platform “Twitch” Burberry took their Spring/Summer 2021 show online, live from London Fashion Week.
The stream received 42,000 concurrent views and offered multiple perspectives from celebrities like Bella Hadid and Erykah Badu using “squad stream mode”. Viewers could simultaneously watch and discuss the show in real time in a communal viewing experience. Unless you are Kim Kardashian, it can be pretty hard to secure a front row seat at a Burberry fashion show. Through live stream, this can be possible for anyone and with in-person audience’s discouraged, live stream offers an immersive, digital alternative in unprecedented times.
Clarins unveils its first virtual shop to connect with customers at home.
Through several interactive online features, Clarins has reimagined beauty e-commerce by partnering with Vee24. Through a virtual and explorable online boutique, viewers can explore the store for information. The skin workshop teaches visitors everything there is to know about Clarins application techniques and a virtual try-on feature allows customers to test makeup using camera filters. Using VeeStudio and VeeSchedular, Clarins is bringing the in-store shopping experience online. Customers can book face-to-face, highly personalised live consultations with beauty coaches and view live streams with guest influencers. As a result, all the benefits of in-person shopping are replicated online.
Brown Thomas has partnered with Smartzer to deliver shoppable beauty masterclasses.
Like Burberry and Clarins, Brown Thomas has reimagined the online shopping experience for customers with department store doors closed. Using Smartzer’s platform, Brown Thomas created a fully customised shoppable video. Fully integrated into the Demandware API, the player allowed for up-to-date product information to be instantly pulled into the Smartzer editor and player. When viewing the live shop Customers could click items in the video and add them to the basket without leaving or pausing the video. Through a variety of beauty tutorials customers can click, learn and buy in a matter of seconds.
Each of these brands prove that interactive video technology can help businesses to sustain customer connections in unprecedented times.