Cloudinary’s Aditya Ghule unpacks research that reveals why brands that streamline video’s thorny video post-production process stand to gain serious competitive advantage
Digital-first brands love video.
That’s in part because buyers love them too. The impact of video content on buyer engagement, brand loyalty and conversions is undeniable. No longer regarded merely as “nice-to-have,” consumers strongly expect video-rich experiences throughout their buying journeys to help them learn more about brands or better visualise products they want to buy.
Our recently launched Global Video Survey found that 81% of the brand marketers and web developers, who responded, were “completely likely” (35%) or “very likely” (46%) to expand their use of video across their websites and mobile apps in the future.
Marketing and brand awareness videos were the most popular (72%). This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering this category encompasses the videos we often see in the form of branded marketing or storytelling. Close on the heels at 67% were product videos, which so many consumers rely on to simulate the process of ‘try before you buy’. Anyone who’s ever searched online for help in learning to install, use or repair a product will be familiar with the ‘how-to-video’ – the third most-popular type at 52%.
The survey also found that more than two-thirds (69%) host user-generated content (UGC) in order to raise audience engagement (79%), provide authentic user experiences (63%), and improve SEO (44%).
Video boosts authenticity, trust, credibility – and yes, sales
We were curious to understand the reasons why brands are embracing video with such enthusiasm. By far the largest factor was the role video plays in helping to build trust and confidence (78%) with audiences. Relatedly, 68% of respondents use and host videos to improve product credibility and 54% rely on video to drive sales.
Post-production throws up the most obstacles
Concerningly, however, brands reported major post-production obstacles to getting videos online at the scale today’s audiences demand. Seventy-five percent of brands report taking “hours” or “days” to get from video production to delivery. We were surprised to discover post-production tasks like creating video variants for different channels and devices are a bigger challenge (58%) than producing original videos in the first place (46%).
We can conclude here that brands’ precious resources are getting drained by repetitive and tedious tasks like tagging, editing, cropping and optimising video for multiple channels and devices. That means creative and development teams aren’t able to focus on their core tasks of building new and innovative digital experiences.
Solving these post-production issues should be a high priority for online retailers. Why? Because the faster brands are able to publish videos from production to delivery, the more likely they are to expand their use of video in the future and gain all those valuable benefits related to trust, credibility and sales. Specifically, 49% of companies that reported being able to publish videos in ‘less than an hour’ said they were “completely likely” to expand their use of video in the future. This dropped down to only 24% for brands whose videos took ‘days’ to publish.
Rapha delivers videos 50% faster with Cloudinary
London-based cycling apparel brand Rapha was being held back by sluggish and inflexible legacy e-commerce and content management systems. To tune up its e-commerce machine, Rapha decided to migrate to a MACH (microservices based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS and headless) strategy. This strategy included adopting Cloudinary to optimise management, editing and optimising performance for more than 8000 video assets, including UGC submitted by its rider customers. This resulted in the creative team being able to deliver video 50% faster, along with improved SEO scores, and better customer engagement. Check out this video to learn more
Paul Smith boosts video-enabled sales by 45%
By delivering engaging video rather than multiple images on their product pages, Paul Smith not only increased sales by 45% for those products but also reduced image management costs by 40%. Cloudinary’s composable, API-first video solution replaced Paul Smith’s ageing monolithic platform leading to a range of operational benefits, including increasing overall agility. They even won two awards for their digital innovation.
Maximising ‘Return on Video’
Retailers inspired by Rapha and Paul Smith’s stories should consider investing in modern software to automate and accelerate video post-production tasks like tagging, editing, optimising format and quality for different platforms and customising to meet web design guidelines or regional requirements.
The bottom line is this: retailers that are able to manage, customise, optimise, and deliver video to any channel or device at scale, and within minutes, will gain maximum ‘return on video’ – and an edge against the competition.
The author is a lead product marketing manager at Cloudinary, an image and video technology platform that enables the world’s most engaging brands to deliver transformative visual experiences at global scale
