BFCM Video Toolkit for Planning and Tracking Your Holiday Strategy

Gone are the days when deep discounts and bumper offers could guarantee massive profits for eCommerce businesses. 

As more and more brands compete for shoppers’ attention this BFCM season, the only recipe for success is curating memorable shopping experiences. You have to wow potential customers with an immersive and personalized experience that goes beyond boring product photos and simple descriptions. 

It’s time to step up your BFCM marketing efforts with interactive and shoppable videos. 

In this guide, we’ve covered all the essential tactics to build a winning holiday strategy and make an impact with video content. But first, let’s look at how shoppable and interactive videos can impress your audience.

The art of shoppable video for conversion rate optimization

Shoppable videos showcase your products at a 360-degree angle with a convenient option to place an order in a single click. They include overlays where you can add relevant product information, like price, colors, size, stock, and more. 

You can share these videos via social media, email, and SMS or embed them on-site during the BFCM season. You can also run ad campaigns with shoppable videos inviting viewers to buy now. 

Shoppable videos shorten the path from discovery to purchase by giving shoppers a complete look at your product and a 1-click checkout option. They can browse the product page or place the order immediately. 

This convenient and short buyer journey translates to increased conversions. These videos also help buyers make confident purchase decisions instead of relying on static photos and guesswork. 

Here’s an example of how Artsabers has been turning TikTok videos into shoppable content for users to learn more about their products and place an order instantly. Embedding these videos on their website has helped them gain $1M in added revenue with a 28% engagement rate. 

Read the case study 

Using interactive videos to bring your products to life

Interactive videos include an element of interactivity in the content. These dynamic videos can include clickable hotspots, product tags, quiz questions, polls, and more. 

These interactive videos combine content with commerce to give potential customers all the information they need about your products and the option to place an order. Unlike traditional videos that only require passive consumption, interactive videos actively engage viewers, share relevant details, and nudge them to buy. 

Besides driving sales, you can also collect granular data about potential customers and understand their preferences. Observe how much of the video they’re watching, where they’re clicking, and how many are buying. 

Here’s an example of interactive videos by MANGO:

Building your shoppable and interactive video toolkit for BFCM

Ready to leverage interactive and shoppable videos for your BFCM strategy? Let’s dive into the steps for creating a holiday video marketing strategy from start to finish.

1. Craft a BFCM video masterplan

While businesses know the importance of video to captivate their buyers, nearly half of the companies surveyed (43%) didn’t have a video-specific strategy. 

Even the best holiday marketing campaign can fail without an airtight strategy. Since Black Friday - Cyber Monday is one of the busiest times of the year, you want to prepare beforehand with a content calendar. 

This calendar will give you a bird’s eye view of your video marketing campaign by specifying your distribution velocity and channels. It’ll also help in allocating resources strategically to maximize ROI without overspending. 

More importantly, following a master plan means you're not leaving anything for the 11th hour to compromise your campaign performance. 

Here are some actionable tips to prepare a BFCM video content calendar:

• Start as early as three months before the retail holiday and make a 90-60-30-day plan

• Experiment with different types of interactive videos and map every content piece to relevant distribution channels 

• Assign an owner for each step of the process, like ideation, storyboarding, creation, editing, and more

• Schedule this content across social media platforms to avoid any last-minute blips in your plan.

Besides visualizing your holiday strategy from start to finish, this calendar will fast-track your work when bulk embedding interactive videos on different channels. So, kick-start your BFCM video marketing efforts with a detailed content calendar. 

2. Page speed optimization for video content

Every second counts in the rush of retail holidays. Shoppers are always racing against time to compare offers and snag the best deals. Even a second delay in your website's loading time can mean you lose tens or hundreds of potential customers. 

If you want to prevent these visitors from clicking away to a competitor’s store, you must optimize your website, especially pages containing interactive and shoppable videos. 

On top of creating a seamless user experience, page speed optimization can also improve your SEO readiness. The result? More visibility on search engines and higher traffic from organic channels—win-win!

Ava Estell presents a perfect example of the ROI you can achieve with page speed optimization.

The skincare brand started embedding video content on several product pages. They added social media content and educational videos to share product information. The brand also embedded testimonials to show the before vs. after of using their products. 

The brand leveraged video content with an adaptive video player design at scale without compromising page speed. As a result, they saw a revenue boost of +£743K at an average of 7% conversion rate. 

Read the case study 

That’s why we created this checklist for page speed optimization for video content:

• Use a CDN: A Content Delivery Network (CDN) has servers distributed globally. It allows your site to load content faster for users worldwide.

• Lazy loading: Leverage the lazy loading technique to improve page speed by loading only necessary content. Instead of loading all the content simultaneously, lazy loading only processes the content required immediately. 

• Compress and resize: Compress and resize visual content to minimize a webpage’s weight with tools like TinyPNG. Smaller file sizes ensure your website isn’t loaded with heavy content assets. 

• User behavior: Refer to user session recordings to understand how they interact with your content and fix flaws. You can track where users click, wait, scroll, or get frustrated. 

• Lite video embeds: Instead of auto-playing videos, you can add lite video embeds to process the video only when visitors click on it. This can significantly reduce the loading speed.

• User experience: Work with tools like PageSpeed Insights and a broken link checker to eliminate friction in the user experience. These tools will help you pinpoint the elements you should improve for a better UX. 

The bottom line: you want to give BFCM shoppers a quick and convenient experience from the moment they land on your site to the one when they place an order. Test and optimize your eCommerce store using the tactics we’ve outlined above. 

3. Leverage AI's influence on video marketing

The run-up to the BFCM season can be as hectic as it gets. 

While you’re juggling so many tasks, from inventory management to customer feedback, running a video marketing campaign can quickly become overwhelming. That’s where AI can work wonders for you.

Generative AI can streamline the process of creating, editing, distributing, and analyzing interactive videos for eCommerce businesses. You can automate repetitive workflows or take AI's help to fast-track the more time-consuming tasks. The result? Maximum efficiency!

Not just that, AI can also personalize video recommendations for shoppers visiting your website. Show them content tailored to their browsing behavior or preferences and boost conversions. 

Take a look at where and how you can double down on AI's influence in video marketing:

• Pre-production: Let AI act as your creative sidekick to fine-tune your ideas. Design and enhance your script outlines based on AI inputs. Besides, you can also create storyboards quickly with AI-powered storyboard generators.  

• Production: There are many ways to use AI to speed up your content creation efforts. Use AI avatars to add a human face to your brand. Or use AI tools to edit your videos quickly with professional quality work. You can also generate text-to-speech voiceovers to narrate your script.

• Post-production: Add the finishing touches to your product videos with AI tools. You can also repurpose content intuitively to distribute your video on different channels. These tools will trim the best highlights of the video to create short or long clips.

• Performance analysis: Another crucial use case for AI tools is measuring the success of your videos. Get real-time analytics to assess how your content is performing with metrics like views, impressions, click-through rate, completion rate, and more.

You can also use AI to find user-generated content on different platforms and convert them into shoppable videos. For example, if a customer posts a positive review of your products, you can turn it into a shoppable video and use it as social proof.

Brands like Busy Baby Mat imported content from TikTok and Instagram to create shoppable videos. They even discovered user-generated videos on YouTube and embedded them into their store as testimonials. This video-driven strategy helped them gain 451+ hours of added time on-site and boost conversion rates up to 27%. 

Read the case study

4. Streamline video integration with bulk embedding

Once you’ve done the legwork to create an airtight holiday strategy, it’s time to get real and embed your interactive + shoppable videos on different channels. 

The tricky part is embedding each product video manually can take hours (or even days) of your time. Imagine the hassle of individually adding a video to the relevant product pages—sounds like a nightmare!

With a bulk embedding solution, you can conveniently add these videos to the right pages in minutes. Create a consistent look for your brand across different platforms and easily scale the number of embeds. This scalability is great when you’re expanding your business or ramping up the volume of interactive videos you create. 

To embed shoppable videos in bulk, you must first create a centralized library of all videos. A bulk embedding solution will connect directly with this video library and embed them based on categories or tags. 

One of the critical factors to consider when bulk embedding videos is the design of the video widget. These videos must be responsive across different devices for a seamless shopping experience.

You should also optimize each video for search results. Add relevant metadata, links, and thumbnails to rank on search engines. 

5. Realize the ROI of advanced video strategies

Another essential element of your BFCM video toolkit is the right KPIs to measure success. Is your video strategy effective enough? Are your videos bringing the expected results? You can answer all of these questions (and more) with a set of metrics to track video performance. 

One of the most important metrics to measure is direct sales from interactive/shoppable videos, also known as the conversion rate. You can track the number of clicks in a video and attribute the source of that sale to shoppable videos. You can further categorize these sales into on-site and off-site orders.  

Besides conversions, monitoring engagement with metrics like views, watch time, and similar is crucial. These metrics will tell you if your videos are intriguing enough for shoppers to spend time browsing your website or click on the CTA.

Shoppable video platforms like Videowise also offer a personalized analytics dashboard to keep you on top of all results. 

You can consistently audit these reports to find gaps and opportunities for your video marketing strategy. For example, if you notice a video is generating maximum sales, promote it on more platforms and amplify the message. Similarly, if a video isn’t receiving enough views and clicks, collect customer feedback to iterate it for better traction.

Unlock BFCM success with your video toolkit

Video marketing in peak shopping season is a totally different ballgame. You need to prepare well in advance to make your season a hit. 

As you gear up for the Black Friday Cyber Monday sale this year, bookmark this guide and start building your holiday strategy. Read our case studies to learn how industry-leading brands have achieved success with shoppable videos. 

Once you’ve chalked out your game plan, connect with our team to understand how Videowise can increase your video marketing efforts. Get a product demo tailored to your goals, needs, and budget!