From movie-length uploads on YouTube to 30-second shorts on TikTok and Instagram, video content is now an internet staple. As a result, brands have rapidly moved to adopt visual storytelling strategies to better connect with audiences and, perhaps, reach new ones.
Branded media aims at driving engagement. When used correctly, video content delivers a compelling experience at scale. What’s more, companies can breach the white noise of one-dimensional promotion and engage audiences with personalized video content. By capitalizing on features like video-reach, you can create dynamic brand content that encourages viewers to interact and, in many cases, make a purchase.
A cloud-based platform for managing both imagery and video, Cloudinary effectively helps generate brand stories. Once video creators have finalized the details that would best capture viewer attention, Cloudinary seamlessly delivers the content with advanced personalization APIs.
This article explains—
- How Cloudinary’s intuitive tools help craft brand stories through personalized videos, replete with captivating, interactive content.
- How overlays and personalized elements accord an interactive product-zoom capability that promises to turn mere viewers into excited customers.
Cloudinary offers a wide range of tools for creating performant, optimized, interactive videos at scale—all while working with media assets seamlessly across device types and conserving bandwidth. Since the basis for creating interactive video has not changed, Cloudinary’s tools work alongside the process through which you’ve been generating content—with no additional requirements for your production team and virtually no learning curve. You come up to speed with the dynamic features and personalization tools that enliven media with only minimal effort.
Ideal for e-commerce platforms, interactive videos deliver an engaging shopping experience with features through which shoppers can zoom in on product details and click within the video to purchase the items shown. The easiest way to make brand videos interactive is to integrate Cloudinary’s software development kit (SDK) with your codebase. Afterwards, you can embed those interactive videos on your website or app that adapt and scale to screen sizes, creating a consistent and attractive user experience (UX).
Cloudinary’s product-zoom feature can be a tremendous boon to e-commerce platforms, enabling viewers to more closely engage with a product, explore its details and, accordingly, make purchasing decisions with confidence. As an invite to viewers, that feature displays instructions and highlights areas with dots to show where to click to enlarge the image, as in this example:
With Cloudinary, you can transform a video by adding an overlay, which entails specifying a base asset—a secondary image—to place on top of the video. The overlay can be your brand’s image, descriptive text, links, or even another video. For example, the video below depicts a video overlaid with the brand’s logo, reinforcing the brand without distracting or detracting from the video content. Additionally, the overlay protects content from unauthorized use.
Through Cloudinary, you can quickly change the appearance of videos or images to spotlight a theme by applying blurring effects, reversing or looping the content, superimposing the background, or performing other transformation tasks. You can do all that in your Cloudinary account’s Management Console. No other software is required.
For example, the video below has been personalized with the noise effect for a grainy texture that elicits a feeling of warmth and nostalgia.
One of Cloudinary’s most applicable capabilities for e-commerce is shoppable video, to which you can add product images that feature the merchandise on offer, hence stimulating user engagement, raising conversion rates, winning purchases, and fostering customer satisfaction. Notably, the images in the product bar offer sneak peeks into the products highlighted in the video. On a click of one of those images, Cloudinary directs the viewer to your website’s checkout page.
In the video below, a model turns the sidewalk into a runway, confidently showing off the products being advertised. Viewers can click the dress or purse to purchase it or find out more details about it. That ability brings viewers closer than ever to walking alongside the model.
Personalized brand videos aim at converting passive viewers to engaged customers. At its most effective, a personalized video tells an engaging story that not only takes viewers to its world, but also entices them to continue the journey long after watching the video. That’s because the story imprints the brand’s message in the mind of viewers, appealing to multiple senses for much longer than flattened ad copy.
Are you intrigued by the possibilities of leveraging interactive videos for your brand with all the personalization enhancements for boosting engagement with shoppers? Check out the details and try out interactive videos for yourself. Try Cloudinary for free today!
