Consumer trust is a key factor in any eCommerce platform’s marketing strategy.
Regardless of how big or small a business is, it is trust that helps them build online credibility, attract new prospects, nurture relationships with existing customers, and ultimately sell more products or services!
Incidentally, one of the most efficient resources that businesses have to inspire confidence and bridge relationship gaps with prospects is video content. As it helps them connect their core messages with their audiences while keeping it engaging, dynamic, and genuine.
Now, there are several types and techniques you can use to build consumer trust with videos. So, today, we’ll go over the most relevant in terms of enhancing your marketing strategy and earning your prospects’ trust.
Let’s go!
The Three Desirable Traits to Inspire Confidence
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When you want to start a business relationship with potential customers, it’s vital to first shape how they perceive your brand.
Given that we are focusing on consumer trust let’s take a quick look at three desirable traits that can help you inspire confidence in your prospects: competence, expertise, and humanity.
1. Use quality to display competence
In the digital landscape, your content is the presentation letter you’ll offer to potential customers. Your website, social media accounts, videos, and blog posts will be their point of reference to help them understand if your brand’s worth it or not.
And for that matter, quality is paramount because it speaks to the standards you hold your company to! So, if you are developing videos to show how professional your company is, it’s essential to keep a certain quality level and make sure they have a professional finish.
Now, several elements will come into play for how your video’s quality is perceived – for example, a well-written script and a top-notch visual delivery. However, this may depend on the type of video you are producing.
Whatever the case might be, you need to remember that poor quality can be harmful and scare your target audience away. So, make sure the piece you end up with matches your audience’s expectations.
2. Showcase your expertise
Few things inspire more confidence than sharing knowledge about the topic in question. It demonstrates to your audience that you are an expert in your field.
Keep in mind that when browsing online, people are usually trying to find a solution to a specific problem. But not just any solution – the best solution. So, to be seen as a reliable source of information (and solutions), you must be ready to address those pain points and provide all the right answers.
That’s when video waltz’s in.
This awesome and versatile medium has the ability to condense a lot of important information in a short amount of time, no matter how complex that information might be. Making it a great resource to share your knowledge and display your expertise in the most creative, simple, and engaging way.
3. Humanize your brand
We, humans, are inherently social creatures. We crave to be seen and treated as unique individuals, especially in the often-so-cold-and-impersonal online field.
So, to build a sincere connection with your audience, you need to show them that there are real people behind your brand. People that care about them and their problems.
Take into account that people bond with other people and their experiences, not with brands and logos. Make a stand and prove that your company’s more than just a business, an office, or a product that needs to be sold.
Go beyond the mere fleeting impact and create video content that’s relatable, interesting, and above all, human. By doing so, you’ll be able to build more loyal, long-lasting relationships with your audience.
5 Types of Videos that Excel at Generating Consumer Trust
Now that we know which attributes or elements you need to focus on to foster consumer trust, let’s take a cue from experienced video companies, and break down a few types of videos that can really help you achieve it.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos – a.k.a.: promotional videos – are short, usually, animated pieces that help to illustrate complex business ideas or concepts in simple and meaningful ways.
Instead of hard-selling, their main goal is to describe a company’s product or service in a way that resonates with their target audiences’ pain points, introducing their solution as the ideal choice.
To achieve that, these videos use storytelling as a secret weapon to connect a brand’s message with its target audience. How? By focusing on telling a relatable story about a product or a brand and showing how it can make a prospect’s life easier, all while keeping it exciting and compelling.
This is why explainer videos are great to foster consumer trust – if well executed, they speak directly to the audience, making the message more personal, intimate, and relatable.
Take a look at this cool motion graphics video as an example. In less than 2 minutes, an empathetic narrator walks the viewer through an in-depth but understandable explanation of several types of explainers. And on top of that, it has gorgeous animations to make the brand’s core message come alive!
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Company Story Videos
If you want to show your company’s human side, few things can stand against a company story video. These are a great marketing tool for conveying your brand’s culture and sharing your story with prospects and existing customers.
As explainer videos do, company story videos also use appealing narratives – driven by powerful scripts – to create a strong connection with viewers and foster consumer trust. To do so, they mostly revolve around a brand’s core values, targeting topics that resonate with the audience.
That said, for a company story video to be effective, it needs to feel authentic and unique. There’s no other brand like yours, and you should exploit that. Show your prospects how you like to do things, what drives you, what you stand for, and so on.
Check out this company story video developed by Ben & Jerry’s. They used it to convey a powerful message: their desire to make a positive impact and create linked prosperity for everyone involved in their business (suppliers, employees, farmers, customers, etc.)
Product Videos
One of the trickiest parts about online shopping is that people can’t try out or even touch a product before purchasing it. Fortunately, product videos came to save the day!
These cool videos showcase how a product or service works, highlighting its benefits and key features through detailed visuals. By doing so, people can see it in action and understand what kind of value it brings to them.
As it happens with most video content, there’s not just one right way to make a product video. This will depend on your industry, your target audience’s characteristics, and how they usually make purchase decisions.
Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that these videos are the cornerstone of any eCommerce company. In classy and precise ways, they can reinforce consumer trust by offering solid evidence that supports all the great things you are saying about your products.
Like this Cambridge Sound piece that offers a thorough demonstration of the product’s functions and special features with elegant animations. The video also features a calm tune that matches the brand’s overall tone.
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Customer Testimonials
When we’re interested in buying something online, one of the first things we all do is go and check the reviews. This is because there’s nothing more trustworthy than hearing or reading what another fellow human has to say about it.
So, customer testimonials and reviews in any form help you build trust, and pair really well with email outreach strategies across all niches. But testimonial videos are particularly effective because they feature real people with real emotions. Sharing their personal experiences and impressions about your product or service.
If you want to develop a testimonial video – and we really encourage you to do so – there are a couple of important things that you should take into account first:
- Testimonials need to feel natural and authentic. People can really tell when someone’s faking an opinion, especially on camera. So, it’s always better not to try to stage it!
- You will probably plan ahead and write some important questions you want to ask. That’s fine, but try to make it as conversational as you can.
- Ensure that your interviewees clearly address how your product or service helped them solve their specific problems and improved their lives.
Check out how all these elements we’ve just mentioned play together in the following testimonial video. The person interviewed takes the time to elaborate his answer without sounding robotic or fake.
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How-To Videos
Truly helpful content is another way to form a strong connection with your target audience and build trust in your brand.
In its more basic form, a how-to video quickly teaches something related to your product or brand by answering a specific question and providing immediate value. For example, how to prepare a mocha cappuccino, how to use Instagram Stories for businesses, or how to cut your own hair!
Because they are very instructional and easy to follow, people love watching them when they need to solve a problem or learn something new. For businesses, developing this kind of content is a great opportunity to position them as an authority and source of useful (and sometimes fun) information.
As a side benefit, how-to videos are not only helpful for converting potential customers but also for existing ones, as they can use these videos to learn to handle your product correctly or how to get the most out of them.
This type of video can take on many forms, such as DIY, training videos, or tutorials. Check out this screencast how-to video created by Asana:
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Bonus Round: More Videos to Build Trust and Delight Your Customers
Some video styles help boost consumer trust indirectly by strengthening the customer-brand relationship. Let’s take a look at some of the best:
Behind the Scenes Videos
These can be included in the “company culture videos” category, but they are so powerful that they deserve a special mention on our list.
Audiences really like taking a look behind the curtains to discover how everything’s done inside a brand. It makes them feel special and included because you are opening your brand’s door, inviting them to be a part of your world.
Since this type of content is (or should be) transparent, it works particularly well on social media – a place that thrives on genuine interactions between brands and customers. By sharing behind-the-scenes videos and other types of BTS content, a company can look approachable and develop a more personal bond with its audience.
The thing is, not every behind-the-scenes moment is worth sharing. The video should send a consistent message about your brand and revolve around a single topic, such as a company event, a new project, or even the office’s pets if that speaks to your core values!
Take a look at this tour inside Facebook’s engineering office in London and see how they’ve managed to convey their company values throughout the piece.
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Live Videos
Ever since their recent addition to the video marketing world, live videos have become one of eCommerce companies’ favorite video styles.
These videos have proven their power to captivate audiences, amassing excellent results in terms of online engagement. They allow companies to interact directly with their customers and establish a strong relationship with them.
If you think about it, it’s no wonder that live videos succeed at fostering trust in a brand. There’s something truly remarkable about a company that dares to speak directly to their audience, addressing their questions and feedback in real-time.
Why does that matter? Because live videos are not so much about the company and its products as about its audience.
So remember: to create truly great live streaming, you need to pay special attention to your viewers. Welcome them to the streaming by name, allow them to leave comments – deactivating that feature may leave a poor impression about your brand – and answer their questions.
A final piece of advice: keep in mind live videos need to be well-promoted before time. Otherwise, don’t be surprised if hardly any viewer shows up to the streaming!
Customer Appreciation Videos
Customer appreciation videos are a great marketing resource that brands can use to nurture their bonds with existing customers.
As you may know, one of the biggest challenges business owners have to face is trying to turn a one-time purchase into a loyal customer.
With these videos, you can go above and beyond, keep in touch with them, and create a memorable customer experience. Plus, this will help you to extend your reach organically because your happy and loyal customers will spread the word about your brand.
One of the most common ways to connect with your customers and show them appreciation is on special occasions. For example, sending a thank you video when they make a purchase or greeting them on their birthdays or holidays.
Take, for example, this Lyft ‘thank you’ video honoring one of the company’s drivers:
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Summing Up
An eCommerce company – or any type of company really, can’t exist without its loyal customers. But for that to happen, you first need to create a relationship with each of them. One based on trust and credibility.
As we’ve just learned, video can be a really powerful tool for building a bridge that connects you with your prospects and nurtures consumer trust. Depending on your industry and specific business needs, there are many options for you to choose from: explainer videos, customer testimonials, behind the scenes, product videos, company stories, how-to videos, live streamings, you name it!
However, regardless of what type of video you end up choosing, remember this: There’s only one way to achieve that kind of trust bond with your prospects. And that is, showing that you care about their problems and that you’re more than committed to solving them.
In the end, it’s all about that!
