NEW YORK, NY — July 27, 2017. A new report on how brands are deploying videos on their sites found that although brands understand the importance of video and utilize it at a high rate, they often lack in developing a seamless user experience and frequently fail to connect videos with points of purchase.
The findings come from the L2 Intelligence Report: Video 2017, an independent analysis of 60,000 videos and 293 video campaigns deployed by 201 brands across social media, web sites, TV, and mobile.
The L2 report shows that 87 percent of brands use video on at least one site page — a very clear indicator that brands understand the power of video in marketing their products.
The key findings of the report show that brands have a lot of room for improvement when using video.
Of the brands utilizing video on their site, 23 percent employ product feature videos on product description pages, but 61 percent of these were in the bottom half of the web page where customers have a hard time seeing it. And very few homepage and content page videos link to product detail pages, 17 percent and 19 percent respectively.
On top of this, fewer than 10 percent of brands optimize video for vertical mobile viewing and 80 percent use the same videos for desktop and mobile.
The report suggests three strategies that brands should look at to make their use of video in product marketing more effective: improve viewability, location, and “be friendlier to mobile screens.”
The first simply means that brands should enhance video viewability without bogging down the user experience. Top brands accomplish this by including features like autoplay on their videos and reducing video load times.
Brands should place videos in optimal locations across their site. Banner and hero videos are best for homepages while product videos should be placed on product detail pages. “Brands should improve discoverability by deploying their videos in optimal site locations. For example, homepages lend themselves to banner and hero videos, while product-specific videos must be placed on PDPs,” a report says.
The last step proposed by the report is that brands should optimize their videos for mobile viewing by shortening them and displaying them vertically.
These three steps, the report says, are key to how the best brands market products with video in an effective and efficient way.
