We uploaded the video easily, we put it onto our website easily (Without needing to know how to code) and our customers can watch us easily. 10 out of 10. We are very impressed! Many thanks, I look forward to adding more videos.
Since we opened up the vzaar video player to allow embedding on multiple website platforms we have seen a really interesting variety of video types emerge from our user base. I thought it might be worth highlighting a five examples that may inspire future video production or shifts in how you utilise video to drive sales, awareness and customer interaction.
1. The Product Demonstration Video
The classic video type that is starting to usurp normal jpeg pictures. Given our eBay roots, we’ve seen lots of businesses shoot videos that focus on describing the item for sale in detail. A seller describing the item’s size, specifications, colour and possible blemishes and the item in working condition (think cars, bikes and industrial equipment!) are obviously the norm but thanks to video the type of product shot on video has now evolved. Whereas before selling a house or rental space might have taken anything between 10-20 pictures, with video its possible to demonstrate every angle, every nook and cranny with a hand held video.
2. The Cross Sell Video
So you’re selling a golf club. Its a lovely Ping and you’re expecting the buyer to shell out £200 for the item. You know he’s going to play golf, you know its only a matter of days before he’s out there on the fairway so why not pitch (pardon the pun!) to him the types of items that every golfer requires? Matching Ping umbrella or glove perhaps? A bag load of tees? Some merchants have therefore run a video for a product then cut in at the end the sheer range of items that they also sell so that the buyer is left tempted by other additional items in or around the point of checkout.
3. The Talking Head Video
The type of video that we are seeing a lot more of recently as people become more and more comfortable with the art of talking to the camera and selling and marketing their service. We’ve had preachers upload their Sunday sermons, lawyers do a piece to camera about their service and upload that to their website and Life Coaches. If you are comfortable with talking to your customers and explaining aspects of your service in detail then this might be the type for you?
4. The Business Profile Video
So you want to impress upon your customer that you are a reputable, trusted seller to do business with. How can you do that without resorting to phoning up each potential customer? Why not take the route that some of our users have and produce your own Business Profile video. Put your team in front of the camera - there is nothing like seeing the person you are buying from for driving trust - or show how professional your premises are so that the buyer is left confident in your ability to deliver the item as described. Some vzaar videos have seen the MD or CEO appear to add that extra air of credibility.
5. The Customer Support Video
Why expect a potential buyer to go through reams of text concerning terms of trade and returns when you can do this in a simple video? We’ve had customers actively seek to reduce the number of questions they get into the customer support queues by tackling with video frequently asked questions such as “How do you pack and ship parcels?” or “How do I return items to you?” It also helps to defuse what could be an awkward customer-seller moment if your customer support representative appear in person in a video to add a friendly disposition to the transaction.
Alternatively, if you are selling an online service try using screencasts to demo your product as this user does.
To eBay has long been a verb. I’ll eBay that later tonight I’ll tell my wife when we are uncluttering the house. The company, to all intents, own the online auctioning moniker and they sweep up quite nicely in most categories from automotive to collectables to antiques and more recently residential property. That’s not to say that dominate in all ecommerce verticals as there is one that is bubbling away quite nicely that I have been using for a year or so now.
Parkatmyhouse.com is the eBay of parking spaces if you get my drift. The site allows users to effectively market their car parking space, garage, forecourt to a market of would be buyers/drivers.
Imagine you are going to see Andy Murray at Wimbledon this summer. The weather is set fair and the strawberries are looking good but you want to drive to SW19. On street parking is a no no and the various car parks in the area will be doing a mean trade at very high prices. So instead you visit Parkatmyhouse to see that there are currently 147 spaces currently available for rent, ranging from daily rates (usually between £5 and £10) to weekly and monthly rates for the longer term visitor or commuter. In theory, if you get in early enough its possible to bag yourself a secure, off street space for your car and enjoy the tennis without worrying about traffic wardens, parking meters or timing restrictions.
Continue reading Sites We Like: Park At My House.
Although we are deeply in love with video here at vzaar we’ve had a number of requests of late for audio to be added to our list of compatible file types. Well over the weekend, we made the necessary change, which now means you can now stream sound files in mp3 format.
Perfect if you have
- an audio file you want to share (perhaps you are a musician and you want to show off your talents!)
- a podcast you want to share with your listeners
- a company jingle, advert or PR you want your buyers to listen to
Once uploaded, vzaar return the file in the following player. The size of player defaults to 334x86 pixels at present.
I cannot be more pleased with my discovery of vzaar. The server is robust, and the player loads immediately - very important to me as I have initially used this on a business oriented website. I especially like the ability to adjust the size of the player to fit my layouts. Furthermore, the player skin/interface is ideal: basic, clean and simple.
An added bonus is the ease of use. When using other streaming firms in the past, I was always burdened with the nuances of encoding the media. Many different formats, settings, and programs all came into play. This became an inhibiting challenge and prevented the efficient showcasing of videos. vzaar has removed these obstacles. All I have to do is grab the media and upload - Brilliant! Keep up the excellent work guys. You have put a very powerful tool in my hands.
Hello again all you vzaar readers, it’s Sami the spring intern at vzaar. I posted an article on the blog last month, talking about how vzaar had started to develop Adwords and SEO Marketing campaigns. This week I’m looking forward to share some more insight with you by suggesting a few useful tips for those of you who are interested in developing an Adwords strategy for advertising your business online.
Be Specific, Stay Focused
First of all I must say it is important for you to be relevant in your marketing strategy ensuring you focus on exactly the product or service you are selling. Providing mixed Google adverts by amalgamating your offers and messages or being too general will ultimately cost you as you’ll generate a lot of clicks from a wide audience. Know your buying audience and pitch to them as if you would face to face. That’s why it may be preferable to stay focused on your niche and the people you usually target. Google mainly rewards relevancy - keep this in mind!
Know Your Keywords
Try to use specific and targeted keywords specific to your business: this is the key to relevancy. Remain as precise as possible in the words you think your customers will use and explore all the combination’s you can think of. Of course some keywords will be more useful than others but you never know when which one will be used and meanwhile keeping some on standby won’t cost you much. Try to think like a buyer. What would they search for. You really have to enter into people’s internet searching habits to guess which keywords and which ads are more likely to getting click-throughs.
Remember you can also choose which negative keywords you don’t want your adverts to be associated with. This helps you avoid a lot of impressions on irrelevant search terms that could easily be eating up your budget.
Continue reading Perfecting The Art of Google Adwords - My Top Tips.
Next Friday June 4th, Video Guy and myself will be joining a number of other businesses at the first Start To Sell Online seminar in Reading, Berkshire. The event is aimed at introducing traditional businesses to the world of selling online or for those who are already online but want to expand their operations.
vzaar are down on the agenda to talk about rich media and in particular how video can hep you sell online. Best to stick to what we know eh?!
What I really like is that after a 10 minutes Dragons Den style pitch, we get to meet each of the local businesses attending in what has been billed as a speed dating meets round table discussions. Should be interesting.
Other speakers include eBay, Royal Mail and Lloyds Banking Group and the whole event has been put together by the good man Chris Dawson of Tamebay fame and his cohort John Pemberton of Give Me Designer Clothes.
If you fancy coming along or would like to know more you can see details here
I just wanted to write to let you know how pleased we are with the vzaar video player here at CoolComputerBags.com. Our site sells fashionable laptop bags, and it’s important for our customers to really see how the bag functions, and how it looks on a model. It’s our best way of approximating the in-store experience one would have touching and opening a bag. We spent a good bit of money getting high quality video shot of our bestselling products, but with the YouTube embedded player used previously, the video quality was too grainy to really help shoppers see the bags. We didn’t get the lift in conversion rates from the video we were hoping for while using YouTube.
I’ve been shopping around online for a solution to our video player needs, signing up for trial accounts with many of your competitors. Your player was by far the most professional in appearance, and your video quality could not be beat by anyone. Even the higher priced providers couldn’t offer clearer video quality, and those with similar price points fell far short.
Starting out at just $10/month, we have an unbranded video player that looks like we did it ourselves. I appreciate your pricing tiers, so we can only pay for what we need. Though, since embedding the new player for just 4 days, it’s getting so many views already I can tell we’ll be upgrading soon! Still, the value for our dollar is great.
I’m looking forward to having a month of using vzaar under our belt, so we can rerun the conversion rate reports. I expect to see an impact on conversion rates this time, with the higher quality video.
One last thing - your customer service has been impressive. I didn’t expect to get a phone call to follow up on our new account, particularly from a company across the ocean. That’s not something you get from a lot of businesses, and has already made me feel even more loyal to your brand. I’ve already recommended you to other colleagues with similar needs for hosting commercial video.
You may have seen this site recently on how to use twitter for marketing and PR.
At vzaar we have been finding Twitter rather useful for marketing and some minor PR. Jamie (‘business guy’ on the blog), takes a bit of time each day to respond to people looking for video solutions and communicate with them. Sometimes this is one way, but it can also become the opening to a conversation which is the best way to find new users. Conversation, not broadcasting.
I’ve also noticed a lot more people following our @vzaar twitter feed in the sales space (i.e. online selling of something). What I find interesting is the average follower count of these people is normally in the 1K-10K range.
I find this curious. On my personal feed I tend to block most (not all) followers like this. I don’t want someone following me to boost my follow count, or because they expect me to follow them back. I want people following me who either actually know me, or want to follow me because they find me interesting. I would say I have probably an 80% hit rate of genuine followers out of my 250ish followers. On our work account I would say this hit rate is probably more like 20% out of the 200ish followers we have there.
But then in fairness, we follow 206 people, and we don’t read the stream of people we follow. We read the search stream and we follow our own personal streams, but we don’t follow the stream of who we follow, as we’re all just too busy, so we’re equally as bad.
I would love to reduce our work twitter stream to people we actually follow and read, but we all follow them on our personal accounts anyway. I think Twitter is splitting into two groups. Those who use them for personal conversations, and those who use them for work and/or to amass followers.
I think there is much more value in real links than the empty links you get when it’s a game and the winner is how many followers you get.
The coffee shop and restaurant above our office, just started a twitter feed. @thepantrylondon only has 14 followers. But all of those followers are valuable as they are all people who live or work nearby. I would rather have 14 valued followers than 10000 empty ones.
They don’t have to be the most followed coffee shop in the world. What they need is people who might by coffee from them, to have an interaction with them when they are not in the shop.
That’s how you use Twitter for PR and marketing.
Ever wondered what dimension we encode our videos at or just how on earth do I add my video to my eBay listings via Turbo Lister? Well ponder no more as I’m pleased to say that we have spruced up the vzaar Help pages and added two new sections on Encoding and Embedding Guides.
The guides might prove particularly useful if you are new to both vzaar and the concept of adding video to your eBay listings or blog page. We have guides that cover the following tools and services:
eBay Tools - eBay’s Sell Your Item Form - eBay’s Turbo Lister - eBay’s Blackthorne - eBay’s File Exchange - Auctiva - ChannelAdvisor - Seller Source Book - Spoonfeeder
Blogging Tools - Blogger.com - MoveableType.org - Typepad.com - Wordpress.org
All our help pages can be viewed in our Help Section
I was looking for a video site to stream a few videos to our book publishing website. I found vzaar. The website looked simple / friendly / inviting and the player is elegant. Uploading videos was simple and so was embedding them. Perfect.
Hi all you vzaar readers, I’m Sami, the spring intern at vzaar. I come from France, where I’m studying Business & Management, and look forward to graduating in the field of marketing in 2010. My interest in sales, communication and new technologies made me choose coming to vzaar in order to experience a new form of online advertising; namely Search Engine Marketing (or Google Adwords if we are being more honest!).
When I first arrived at vzaar, I had very little knowledge of Adwords and I was wondering how I was going to be able to attract to the site new customers with no adverts on the radio, billboards or other forms of conventional media used for advertising. As I started to get familiar with the concept of bidding on keywords, writing new ads and managing a budget I quickly came to realize the amazing opportunity that Google offers businesses who want to compete at a global level.
Whilst Google Search appears to be simple and intuitive to use, Adwords seems a bit complicated when you first dip into it. It took me a fair share of time reading books, watching tutorials, attending webinars and some expert best practice sharing from the good guys at Swoopo, before I really get started but today I can say that I don’t regret it all and neither would you if you do ever decide to work with Adwords.
Continue reading Thoughts on Acquiring New Users with Google Adwords.
Recent Comments