Visuals are everything when you sell a product online. Unlike physical retail situations, when buyers shop on ecommerce sites they don’t get to touch and feel the products. The visual assets you produce to showcase and market your products therefore play a critical role with respect to conversions. 

Not too long ago, video marketing was a prohibitively expensive ordeal. eCommerce businesses needed to hire an agency that could shoot their videos, contract the best spokesmodels for their product, and handle extensive post-production work. The cost of such an endeavor often ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars, just to produce one video asset.

Besides this, video editing for eCommerce can be a very time consuming process involving reformatting the same video to fit different strategies for website, email marketing campaigns and multiple social media channels. Doing this at scale is virtually impossible without blowing up your budget. 

It is thus interesting to see the extent to which AI has transformed the video marketing space when it comes to eCommerce. Generative AI tools have democratized the video marketing space and today, it allows anyone with a creative mind and a computer to produce aesthetic visual assets for a fraction of the cost. 

Here is a short guide on how you can explore AI videos to get started with using AI for your eCommerce video marketing strategy. 

Coordinating on Video Story Ideation

The first step in a video marketing campaign is to ideate on the creative concepts. A storyboard is a visual representation of what the final product should look like – how the flow of scenes and shots are sequenced, who the main characters are, settings, mood, the call to action, etc. 

Getting the storyboard right is critical to an effective video marketing campaign. Ideally, you will have several iterations done to get the story absolutely right. This is because, once production starts, there is no going back, and even small changes to the script could turn out to be quite expensive. 

Having said that, AI allows you to be flexible with storyboard development, since the cost of edits is much lower.

With LTX Studio, developed by the AI wizards at Lightricks, you can provide a text-based prompt and instantly build a storyboard from scratch. You can also further refine your ideas by building out the characters and settings that will be used across your campaign. 

Source: LTX Studio

You can then customize output by adjusting shot angles, uploading reference images or even using native motion capture tools. Export LTX Studio assets and share them with everyone on your team to efficiently ensure creative alignment before going into production.

Video Production

If you are marketing a bootstrapped eCommerce business with no in-house specialized expertise in video strategy or production, AI tools can help with the complete process. 

Popular generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Meta AI can help you generate ideas for a video marketing campaign. 

Source: Meta AI

Once you have this basic script in hand, you can then head over to AI video generator like Deevid, LTX Studio, Vozo or Runway to flesh it out into usable video shots.

While this may sound straightforward at the outset, professional AI video creator tools require major processing power to build even a two-minute video project. The lag times get even longer when you consider that it’s likely you’ll need to create clips multiple times based on what you see in the output.

In addition to this, depending on the computing resources required, it may take your AI tool several minutes to generate and regenerate these visuals to align with your expectations. For businesses that need faster turnaround times or higher production quality, partnering with experienced corporate video production services can offer professional expertise and resources beyond what AI tools alone can provide.

Personalizing Videos

Traditionally, remaking a video to align with every customer cohort can be expensive. But with AI, personalizing a video to fit each of your customer segments, or even individual customer profiles, is pretty straightforward. 

For instance, if you are creating video ads to run across different geographies, you could change the prompt to make subtle background changes that capture the essence of the local culture. 

Such changes could have a dramatic impact on user engagement and conversion.

Generating Multi-format Videos at Scale

eCommerce marketing involves a lot of different marketing channels, including your own website, social media channels (Instagram, YouTube, TiTok, etc.), email, to mention a few. Producing videos in the ideal dimensions, size, and length for each of these formats can be time-consuming. With AI editors like Opus, you can easily repackage the same video into each of these different formats for efficient distribution.

We already touched upon this earlier in the article, but AI video editors also make it possible to produce the same video across different languages. Unlike regular video production that involves dubbing the original into other language formats, AI Video Editors like Trupeer AI, allows editors to remake the same video completely from scratch into other languages, with minimal incremental cost. This makes your videos globally more appealing. Similarly, you could also efficiently remake the same video across different backgrounds and be culturally relevant, making the global appeal of your eCommerce marketing videos simpler.

AI Is Not Just About the Cost

Although it is true that AI video tools have significantly reduced the cost of producing an eCommerce video marketing campaign, it is not the only factor driving its adoption. 

Augmented reality is already used extensively by various eCommerce brands to let buyers get a better perspective of whether the product fits their requirements or not. AI tools can take this one step ahead and provide a better customer experience. 

For instance, users may not only “try on” a particular accessory virtually with AR, they may also use AI to cobble this together with other accessories to see what provides them with the best look. 

While such features may seem gimmicky at first, AI integration into video-based eCommerce engagement is something that cannot be undone once buyers are used to it.

While these are still early days in AI-based video marketing, we are likely to witness a democratization of celebrity brand endorsements, particularly with respect to the eCommerce space. 

Celebrities and influencers could offer an AI version of themselves to endorse any product online, as a sort of “licensed deepfake.” Since this is highly scalable, we are likely to witness a future where a one-person eCommerce business owner could have a celebrity like Jennifer Lawrence wear her necklace, for only a few dollars in licensing rights. 

Wrapping Up

AI is a rapidly evolving field, and its technological prowess is expected to improve exponentially over the next few years. As an eCommerce business, it is important to monitor these changes to see how they can be applied to your marketing efforts, especially with the visual medium. Simple changes could not only cut your expenses, but can also bring about a massive growth in your conversions and revenue.