Welcome to YourMarketingPodcast. This is Series One – How to Start a Successful eCommerce Business in Less than 30 Days. In this step-by-step guide, you will learn how to quickly launch an eCommerce store and start seeing those sales roll in! And here’s your host…Ishani DePillo.

Hello, everyone. Ishani DePillo here. Today’s podcast is going to be an interesting one – talking about creating worthwhile visuals through an audio podcast. Definitely going to be a bit challenging, but I think we can pull it off.

Real quick, let’s recap the last podcast in case you missed it. It was all about product development and how to successfully create and manufacture a product to sell. By now you should have a prototype or a sample of your product. On Today’s episode, we are going to be covering some really stellar ways to capture photos and videos of your product, using that sample product or prototype.

I say sample or prototype because You don’t want to wait around for the bulk order to arrive because that could take months and you want to keep moving forward. Using the sample or prototype for photos and videos can help save you time and launch faster, especially since editing video and photos can take some time.

It seems like photos and videos are taking over the world! Ok, I’m exaggerating a bit. But with 1 billion active users on Instagram and 1 billion hours of videos watched every day on YouTube, the way of the world is heavily dominated by visuals. Your customers want to see, feel, and experience your product before they commit to making a purchase. And to be very successful in selling your product, you, the brand, needs to provide that.

So how do you create worthwhile visuals that speak to and engage your target customers? Let’s start with the bigger elephant in the room first: VIDEOS. Customers nowadays have the mindset of ‘try before you buy’ and that reshapes how people shop.

Did you know that in the past year, 40% of users turned to YouTube to learn more about a product before they bought it? Crazy right?

And according to Unbounce, adding video to a landing page can boost conversion rates by 80%. So what does this mean to you? The underlying take-away here is that you need videos that feature your products and you need them to launch your website.

So since your customers want to “experience” your product before they buy it, you need to create a video that brings life to your product. To do that:

1. Start with a video strategy. Think of your favorite product. Have you seen their commercial?  I’d bet that the commercial struck a chord with you. With this in mind… launch a video marketing strategy. 

• Start with goals for your video: Your video needs bring awareness to your product, to have your target audience consider your product and lastly decide to purchase your product. So that’s awareness, consideration and decision.
• Next, think of your target audience because you need to create a video that will connect with them: What’s their age, are they male or female, or both. Also, use your target audience as a guide to choosing the talent to be on the video.
• Then, Start to think about the story you want to tell. Remember it needs to be one that will resonate with your prospective buyer. One that will motivate them to buy your product. The basic framework for your video should be to: 
  1. Bring up the customer’s pain point or problem.
  2. Introduce your product.
  3. Provide the solution. This is how “the product your selling” solves the problem.
• And lastly keep it real. Authenticity speaks volumes.

We interviewed Emily Briggs, our in-house videographer for Your Marketing People. She shared some starting points when coming up with your video strategy for your first product video

2. Once you’ve got the concept nailed down, workout the details. How long does your video need to be? Which scenes do you need to include? Do you need a voice over? How will you film it – with an actor, with a customer, with b-roll only? 
3. Decide whether you are going to do it yourself or hire a professional. If you are going to hire a professional, then you don’t need to worry too much about the details since the professional will likely take care of it. But it’s still good to be informed about the process. 

Here is Emily Briggs again with her recommendations on hiring a professional versus not.

5. If you are going to do it yourself, then:
   1. Get the right equipment. A video only looks as good as the equipment you use to produce it. For beginners, we recommend 2 DSLR cameras (one of which should have a zoom lens), a tripod, portable digital recorder, and a Lavalier microphone.

Sometimes less is better. Emily shares additional advice on equipment and what to get when you’re first starting out.

1. Once you have the equipment Prepare for the video shoot. To produce a successful video, you need to plan out well in advance. This means:
   1. Creating a play-by-play shot list that brings your storyboard to life: Include shooting details, like whether you’ll be using an aerial shot or zooming in tight on the subject’s face. Provide time estimates for each shot, but leave plenty of buffer time. There has to be room for the unexpected, errors, and creativity! Finally, bracket your shot list with wiggle room for set up and tear down.
   2. Gather your crew and assign responsibilities. As you go through your shot list, you’ll probably realize you’re going to need multiple hands to manage all the gear and to capture all the shots. Make sure each team member knows what his or her focus will be, whether it’s capturing movement shots, close up shots, wide angle, or making a coffee run. 
   3. Make sure you don’t forget any gear, props, etc. by making a gear checklist. This includes lenses and camera equipment, your actual product, microphones, lighting equipment, extra batteries, extra memory cards, external batteries, and any props or background drops. 
   4. Manage your time during the shoot. Even with all this planning, expect things to go a bit off schedule on the day of shooting. To help you maximize the time you have, prioritize the shot list. The shot list should indicate critical shots vs. the nice-to-haves. Make sure you film the must-haves first. 

There is going to be a lot of excitement on the shooting day. It can be hard to pause and make sure you’re getting the essential shots. This is one of Emily’s biggest pieces of advice. 

1. Take your time setting up, especially if there is audio involved. You want to make sure the audio is captured clearly.

Does all of this sound like way too much? Well, I hate to break it to you, but we haven’t even gotten to the editing part! Again, If all of this is flying over your head, hire a professional or better yet, a marketing agency to do it for you. 

If you do decide to do the video yourself, Emily’s tips can help you get it right the first time around.

When searching for a professional, make sure you ask for their portfolio to see if you like their style and if they have a background in creating commercial-like product videos. Ask for customer reviews or look online to make sure they have a positive reputation. And I recommend NOT go with the cheapest option. You could end up with unusable footage or an unprofessional videographer and have to reshoot everything, which is going to cost you more in the long run.

Now the fun begins. Let’s dive into video editing tips, also known as post-production tips. To create a worthwhile product video, you’ll want to:

1. Review your footage: Carefully look through all your footage. Take notes on the time and clips you may want to use for the next step.
2. Start creating the story: By this point, you have a bunch of clips to work with. Sync up the audio for everything you decided to keep. Organize what you have into scenes, and start crafting the story with your selected footage.
3. Use the power of Music: Now that you have a feel for the footage and an outline of how the story is going to unfold, use music to help tell that story. For a great selection of royalty-free music, we recommend PremiumBeat and AudioJungle. When choosing your music, think about the emotion you’re trying to elicit from your target audience. You can search for music with these emotions. When selecting your music, be sure to choose a dynamic piece; a repetitive beat can get annoying in a video. Although, don’t choose anything too dynamic. You want your music to complement the video, not overpower it. To make the track fit your video, match your footage with the beat of the song.
4. Making the final cut: Remember the goals of the video; it’s to bring awareness, get them to consider, and finally to make the purchase decision. Does your video align with those goals? Check to see if there is anything that’s unnecessary you can cut out. The faster you can get the point across with your video, the more effective it will be. Try not to go over 1 to 2 minutes in length, because consumers do not have the time, the patience, and let’s be real – the attention span, to get through anything longer.
5. Add in the transitions:  Just like adding music, the transitions of your video also depend on the video’s concept. This post-production technique is to connect one shot to the next. Transitions help with the mood, tell the storyline better, and spice up the narrative. 
6. Correct the color: Color correction is the final and necessary step in a professional-level video. Raw footage is often oversaturated. To evoke the mood of your video, and make everyone look their best, you need to balance out the colors with color correction. Adobe Premiere, includes several built-in color presets. For accurate color correction, we recommend using one of these as your base and adjusting from there. You can also use the color wheel to warm up or cool down your video as necessary.
7. Lastly, don’t forget the call-to-action. Include a CTA at the end so that your audience knows what action to take after watching your video like “buy now” or “Shop Now.”

Okay, that’s a wrap! Now you can add your product videos to your product pages and use it for all your promotions. 

Why is it important to add videos to your website? Our SEO expert, Chris Casarez explains how videos are extremely important in your SEO strategy.

But wait…you’re not done.

We still have photography to cover in this episode! 

Let’s talk about photography and some tips for capturing amazing product photos.

There are two main types of product photos that you will want to take – product photos that feature just your product and then lifestyle photos where your product is part of a scene and showing its intended use. 

1. Let’s talk about pure product photos – An isolated photo of your product on a white background. These types of photos typically feature the product and showcase your product from different angles. Some advertisers or marketplaces actually require product photos to have a white background. So it’s a must-have and having white backgrounds gives you the freedom to add your product to any background for any future uses like social media posts. An affordable option to capture these types of photos is to use a lightbox; there is a variety of them available on Amazon for under $100. Just make sure you use the right-sized lightbox for your product – you need to be able to take photos from different angles so your product needs to fit inside with a bit of room to easily move your product around inside the lightbox.
   • Also, pay attention to the details and zoom in to capture anything you would like to call out. And minimize flaws as much as possible, using some creative methods, like stuff a purse full of paper to show off its full look or use pins to stretch a necklace chain across. There’s a reason why every fast-food restaurant’s hamburgers look a LOT different in real life than in their ads. Make sure your product looks amazing! 

We spoke with an esteemed product photographer, who works very closely with our friends, the photography tutorial experts at SLR Lounge. I will let him introduce himself!

Awesome. So you decide to hire a professional product photographer like Yechiel (yeuk-i-el). Your work ends there, right? Wrong. There’s a bit of homework you need to do to make sure you get what you need from your photographer. Yecheil explains more here!

Okay, so what if you decide to do it yourself? Yechiel gave us some pointers for that as well.

Create a product that sells, that’s why we’re here right?  Well, photos are an integral piece to that, especially in the digital world. Here’s Yechiel’s answer to, How do you ensure you take “photos that sell”?

2. The second type of photo is lifestyle photos – Help your potential customer bond with your brand and envision the type of lifestyle that they could have with your product in hand. Remember you are telling a story so pair your products with accompanying props, styled scenes, and featuring models that look like your target audience. For instance, if your product is running shoes, then show a person jogging – like the Nike commercial. If you are selling tea, then show someone sitting on a porch in the afternoon watching the sunset while enjoying a warm cup of tea. 

When it comes to lifestyle photos, it’s great if you can:

• Use natural lighting and use the great outdoors, if it makes sense. Nothing like natural beauty.
• Capture candids. Not everything needs to be posed. Allow your models the space to move around and try different takes with the products to get a variety of photos to use. Lifestyle photos won’t just be used for product pages – you can use them on your social media channels and to sprinkle all over your website.
• And lastly, remember to take as many photos as possible. It’s better to take more photos and give yourself more to play within the editing phase.

Emily Rathmanner, the owner of the women’s accessory line, Minga, expresses the importance of good visuals and her take on how to capture them.

Just like videography, photography comes right down to having the right equipment: you’ll need a mirrorless or dslr with a lens like a 50mm that offers the same angle of view as your own eyes with max aperture of f/1.8 for depth, and a tripod to steady your shots.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have quality photos and videos to help sell your product; it’s an absolute must. If you are not confident in your skillset, I highly recommend hiring a professional.

Whew, we are officially finished with this episode about creating worthwhile visuals!

In the next episode, we are going to discuss setting-up your eCommerce store and plug in those visuals! And if you haven’t already, we urge you to sign up at yourmarketingpodcast.com/letsgo to receive email alerts with daily check-ins. It’s so easy to get distracted and derailed on this path. And we want to see you launch your eCommerce store and crush your goals! These email alerts will keep you on task and come with even more resources because we can’t cover everything on the podcast. Thank you for listening to yourmarketingpodcast. See you next week!