Melanie
The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Esther of IPA Group bringing premier online promotion to your business.
Esther
And Melanie of STOMP Social Media Training, who empowers business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves.
Melanie
Hi and welcome back to the Monday morning Marketing Podcast. Today I have Eitan Koter from Vimmi, who is the founder and CEO of Vimmi. And you have an e-commerce shoppable video business. So we've talked about video numerous times before, but what made us particularly interested about having you on today, Eitan, is the significance of shoppable video. So tell us about your business. First of all. Eitan.
Eitan
Yeah, so we, this year we celebrated 10 years for Vimmi. So for me personally it's like more than two decades already in the video. So I started with video and we used to call it broadcast. There was no commerce or anything of that sort. So video obviously started with cable television satellite transition from analog to digital. So I was there also running various companies that created this part of the transition. And yeah, I mean during the last probably four years we saw the emergence of live shopping in China. Primarily it's a huge, in terms of gross merchandise value, the amount of business that has been generated in China through live shopping events, those volumes are larger than the largest countries in Europe, for example, the whole entire e-commerce revenues right in China, those live shopping events are much higher than that. And then we saw the transition which is still happening in the last three, four years of the convergence of media and commerce and how video is so powerful, obviously, because you cover this topic so many times in terms of video marketing and today pushed primarily by TikTok and also now with YouTube, the ability to create interactivity into these videos or immersive type of experiences that are creating this next generation of impulse purchase, right? So we know that e-commerce is all about impulse purchase. But video suddenly, for example, just swiping up on TikTok or Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts or watching those long forms on YouTube and suddenly you see a video, someone is showcasing a product, you're totally excited about this product and you have the ability to check out, just click a button on that video player, right? You can even ask a question through the, through a chat system. If it's a live event and there is actually a button there that you can click to buy now like instantly within the video, something that we call video checkout. So someone is presenting the product, answering questions, there's a click to call to action, you click on a button and you are transferring to a full checkout process.
Melanie
Wow.
Eitan
Within the video you know the seller just keep pushing the product in a very intuitive and interesting way and you can have a full purchase happening in our platform and also others. All these live events are recorded and a lot of the revenues are generated post the live event itself. And so shoppable video is probably can be divided into pre-recorded and edited videos like probably short forms, like 30 seconds to 60 seconds videos that are prepared in advance. Maybe unboxing of a video showcasing some specific functionality of the video of the product. Sorry. And also maybe this sharing special terms or discounts. And there is ability to a call to action which encourage shoppers to click to purchase. And also in the, in the shoppable video we have like the short form videos but also the long form videos which are more horizontal like 16 by 9 type of videos that goes primarily to YouTube and the brands or the businesses own website. Again in a very interesting way of having those click to purchase buttons embedded into the video player. And we also have the live events. We know the live event is very powerful in terms of creating this brand loyalty, these emotional triggers that are very, very powerful for purchasing decisions. Live events is someone who's hosting an event right now, streaming can publish it to multiple channels to his own website, but also to his social media account accounts. And showcasing a product and giving users the ability to purchase this product in real time.
Melanie
That's incredible. So how long has this particular tool been available?
Eitan
Yeah, I mean it's for Vimmi it's like more than four years already and that's continued to evolve. There are a lot of market demands and market opportunities in terms of functionalities, in terms of feature sets. What's important, there's a lot of AI involved also in content creation and gamification of those events. Just making those events. And I'm referring to the live events which are usually longer in time. Like our customers sometimes stream for hours, like three, four hours showcasing variety of products in a specific event. And they do that on a daily basis. Right. So I guess it's so they can.
Melanie
They can change the button for each, for each item.
Eitan
You can in advance schedule the various products that will pop up during the event. Or manually you can click a button on the back end sign and just load that button specifically for that specific product. And there's ability to check out on multiple platforms. Each one of the social media platforms are providing different ways of conversion. Right. Obviously for example with TikTok there is any video today can be shoppable. So if you have TikTok shop right and you need to create those product pages in TikTok and you must check out with TikTok, by the way, you can check out with Amazon prime as well in TikTok which is a new and new announcement. And then you can fulfil by TikTok or fulfilled by any other provider, shipping and wholesaling, wholesale provider, warehouse provider that you have. Instagram is obviously different. You can tag products on Facebook, you have Facebook shop, YouTube are providing also kind of, they call it digital shelf functionalities. And YouTube partners are able to add shoppable links inside the video player as well. So, and Pinterest is another ecosystem and obviously Amazon and Walmart, we stream to this platform live from our platform and the idea is to use videos and reuse videos both live and online in as many channels as we can.Because we know that these days it's so difficult to, I mean, customer acquisition is so difficult. Just bringing those users to your own website costs much more than it used to be. And even if you spend a lot, it's not clear if you're going to be successful and your return on ad spend is going to be effective. It's true. Also on Facebook, on TikTok, I mean, cost of advertising is very high. So a lot of companies decides to go and start promoting and selling their products on social platforms and do kind of a revenue share with probably the influencer, the creators and the platform itself.
Melanie
Do you know, you are a remarkable guest because you've pretty much. I've got 11 questions here and you have answered six of them.
Eitan
Okay.
Melanie
Without me even asking them. So I'm impressed. So what is the availability of this platform? Can everybody in Europe, America, Australia, can everybody use this tool?
Eitan
Yes, it's not limited in terms of geographies. We are a B2B company. So this platform is being used by online businesses, primarily brands, retailers, online businesses and they serve their consumers. Right. So it's primarily direct to consumers type of businesses in various niches. It can be like fashion, sports, electronics, cosmetics, even, you know, furniture and car dealers. And you know, we started with probably the most straightforward things, fashion, cosmetics. But it's so active now all over the place in terms of shoppable video, definitely on TikTok that it's. I mean any company in any niche is, is already took the initiative and launching their own TikTok shop and video marketing or shoppable video activities across those multiple channels. And yes, we serve millions of consumers every day in terms of our streaming capabilities, the viewership's of these events and it's really scalable. And supporting any geography out there. Obviously the majority of the businesses in North America and US market which is primarily the largest e commerce industry or geography but obviously it's very, very powerful and also other other parts of the world. And what drives the this opportunity is the, as I said, the difficulty to acquire new customer to your own website. So you go to social. So that's the social commerce aspect of things. And social commerce is really kind of a mega opportunity just to give you the numbers. So it's going to be like $6.2 trillion, trillion with a T, right in 2030. So it's like close to 15% of the worldwide e-commerce is going to be on social. And that's an opportunity that many, many brands are trying to use. And obviously the idea that video makes a lot of difference, right? We know that those platforms are promoting video versus picture or text and probably that's one of the only organic way that you can substantially grow and get exposure through creation of video. But what's working today is and always try to explain brand, don't be afraid of video, right? What's working today. And thinking about this like the TikTokification effect, right? TikTok taught us is that authenticity and consistency wins any algorithm, right? So just go out there, create a list of customer pains or create a list of capabilities that you want to share type of what's happening in the industry, not just pushing your product, but provide value in terms of competition, alternatives, trends in the market, opportunities, knowledge. And once you provide that knowledge, try to promote a product and just be consistent. 30 to 60 seconds is where probably I recommend to start for at least two to three months, maybe post, you know, three, four times a week. And you through the analytics again on our platform you can gather a lot of information how to improve those targeting, how to improve the scripting times of the day of posting the length of the videos and which gives you a lot of data about how to improve the way you create those videos. And what's working is that founder led content, right? Don't spend too much on hosts, on celebrities, it's not required because the new generation of shoppers like Gen Z's Millennials, right, they care about the brand, they care about the people behind the brand. What's working today is not just user generated content, but also employee generated content, EGC versus UGC, right? So think about a brand that few executives or stakeholders in the company are creating content which is very authentic like behind the scenes and discussing the day to day life of that business. This is Very, very powerful to create differentiation. And it costs nothing. It's all organic. Right. And we know from analytics which video performs very, very well. And then we usually suggest to push that video with paid advertising, whether on TikTok or Meta or YouTube. And because we know that the return on ad spend is going to be very, very good for those videos. So that way of creating authentic and consistent type of videos is a way to start organically, learn what's working and what's not, and then promote it with advertising versus the other way around where you usually want to start with paid media and then see what happens. And it's very, very difficult to succeed in this methodology these days.
Melanie
Sounds like an enormous amount of time has been spent on making this a community building platform. And with an enormous amount of. It's almost like a CRM at the back end as well, is that correct?
Eitan
Yes, 100%. I mean those. Once you start to be more active on video creation, again starting with short forms and building up with probably one weekly show, weekly live show, those live components are very, very powerful. Because what happened is that people are waiting for these events again, if you know how to plan them in advance and market them in advance. And this is a very, very powerful way to create a community. Right. And these events are usually published on your own website. And when people want to engage with you, they need to log in and just, you know, chat with you so you have their details. And we're providing a lot of way to retarget those users in a very intelligent way to just try to upsell or try to create conversions around that in a very intelligent way and not push it too much. And that's the way to create communities these days through these shoppable activities, through these live activities. Because it's very, very difficult to maintain all these spheres, right? You have the Twitch community and you have the Snap and, and Instagram and Facebook and YouTube and Amazon. It's so difficult for any marketeers to create some holistic marketing type of experiences. And video is like foundation of all these social commerce and all these type of new way of communicating, making marketing more personal, more community based and more authentic. I think it resonates very, very well with the, with how shoppers are making decisions these days.
Melanie
So one thing you did touch on briefly was talking about the insights. What is the reporting like on this particular platform? Is it something that you can down, you know, as a manager, let's say, because a large proportion of the people here would be social media managers or marketing managers. So they'll be running this for their customers. So could we like download a report and edit it to be our report and deliver it to our customer?
Eitan
For sure. So obviously there are a lot of dashboards that we've developed for various stakeholders. If it's a CMO or data scientist or CFO or the CEO. So you have a lot of dashboard. We aggregate data from all the platform, from the customer website, all these social media accounts. If a brand or a business is working with influencers, for example, and the influencers are creating content and posting the content on their own social media account. Right. We get this information as well. So you have a holistic view of everything that is happening. And video is very, very powerful in terms of analytics because we know a lot because people are engaging with the content and we know from which device they are watching, when they start, when they stop, why they stop. We have plenty like huge amount of data that we enrich in our data lake in our database and we obviously create those dashboards. But these pieces of information is also downloadable and you can create as an agency, you can create your own look and feel in terms of using this information and showcase this to your customers in any way you like.
Melanie
Okay.
Eitan
Yeah.
Melanie
so no, that, that is really useful. So to those other listeners that are managing their own business, is there like a price range for this? You know would, you wouldn't be using sole traders for this. I assume this will all be larger sort of medium sized businesses up to large brands rather than a sole trader. Let's say.
Eitan
No. You'll be surprised. We are working with large enterprise.
Melanie
I am surprised.
Eitan
Yes. We are working with large enterprise, small SMBs and also solopreneurs because if so. But those solopreneurs needs to be totally committed to video because otherwise there is no justification for the platform. Right. And what we see for example, the creator economy, right. So like the future of brands are going to be originated and led by those influencers and by those content creators and any, any, you know, any, any solopreneur out there or any small company. The way to differentiate and grow today is through video. And don't be afraid. No one cares about the background, right? Just the audio. Need to be crisp, nice lightning. Put yourself out there. It's, it's it. You'll be surprised what happens if you be consistent for at least two to three months. You'll be shocked. I see things every day that are really amazing. For me it's not a surprise. I know that it works. If you are being consistent and you follow the process. And yes, we have like a free for life package. You can go live, you can create shoppable video, you can push video to your social networks into your website. Again, this interactive and shoppable video go live and manage.
Everything that I've shared with you is available in our free, in our free package. Again, it's limited in terms of number of events that you can do and the first and then you can jump to the next package which is like $149 per month. And you can. And we have like 3.99 and 6.99. Again it depends on the volumes of video. So if you're a larger organization, you can only create more video. And obviously we need to give you more processing power, more storage, more streaming capabilities. So there are more chat rooms maybe. So that's part of the growth that we are able to provide.
Melanie
One thing I didn't ask actually is about editing. So all these videos can be created. Normally you have to use a third party to do all the editing, unless you're YouTube of course. And then you can edit in YouTube. So do you offer something like that within the package as well?
Eitan
Yes, we have. Again, we are not a fully editing video editing tool. We are sales acceleration tools. So those videos can be uploaded to our platform. We have a basic editing functionalities. Another thing that we do, for example, if we go live, that live can be 20 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour. We know exactly the time that each product was presented and we automatically chop up, chop off these videos to create short form videos just showcasing that specific product. So this is just this doing this long form to short form videos can be done automatically on the platform. And we are providing some basic editing functionalities that are available over there. This is one way to work otherwise just to edit externally and just upload the approved video to the platform and just continue publish it from there.
Melanie
So you can do captions and everything else that we're used to as well.
Eitan
Yes, of course, if you do captions you can do everything. And also when you go live, you can share your screen, you can invite co host, you can invite a moderator to the event or help you with the chat. You can create this picture in picture type of experience. It's very powerful in terms of the richness of video. Let's say that our studio or our production studio is very, very powerful on the go live side of things. So that's also important for anyone who is listening out there. And it's very, very easy to use. You don't need to have an engineering team or a CTO to manage this platform. Anyone can use it. It's a self service platform. We have hundreds of companies who are working or started, you know with, with a, with a simple package and working with the platform without any involvement of our engineering team. And we are also always available, we have a video commerce consultants that are always available here just to share best practices to help out and helping you succeed. Because we see ourselves as an extension of the marketing or sales activities of these companies because we know how video is very, very helpful in terms of promoting the brand.
Melanie
Okay, so it sounds like you can literally start from for free for a smaller business and you can literally scale within the business and the more money you earn from it, the bigger your business grows obviously the more you can pay to for more services.
Eitan
Yes.
Melanie
So who is, who is your probably your best and most ideal customer? I know it can change but who is your best and most ideal customer, Eitan?
Eitan
Anyone who is appreciate it can be a solopreneur or an enterprise. We have all of them on our plate. So anyone who appreciate the power of video for monetization, for scaling their business over there, right. So a lot of like 91% of worldwide businesses, let's say in the western world, sorry are creating videos right for their marketing activities. But that special version of video that is called shoppable video or live shopping video, this is something which is really just started, right definitely in the US and in the western world and we just saw that there was at least double in terms of GMV generated from live shopping. And obviously shoppable video is a big thing. We know everything that's happening with TikTok and other platforms are following up right, like the marketplaces themselves. But also YouTube and Meta are going are announcing a lot of functionalities around making those conversions opportunities. So that's, that's very important to mention in, in this type of, in this type of scenario.
Melanie
So if we were to learn more about your business Eitan, where would be the best place to learn about the business?
Eitan
Great. So our website is vimmi.net that's V I M M I.net. So plenty of information about, you know about video, about Shuffle video, about the platform itself and also we have a pricing page that you can start and sign up again with this free account which is free for life and just reach out to us through Contact us. We'll help you with any questions that you have. I also post daily on LinkedIn a lot of topics around video commerce video marketing. It's on Eitan Koter. E I T A N K O T E R so both my personal account and VIMMI Account on LinkedIn are quite active in terms of sharing a lot of information and special promotions and, you know, stuff like that.
Melanie
Now we did discuss before we started today that I. Our audience likes to take action and so you do have something that might be able to help people take action and understand the platform better. Could you tell us what it is?
Eitan
Yes. Not just the platform, just more knowledge around how video can help businesses accelerate sales. So there is a, there's a free course, an online course I can share, you know, with the audiences. So just know more about the video and for sure I'll be happy to do that.
Melanie
So subscribers will be getting access to that. They'll be be in their email list. Yes. The weeks that this goes out.
Eitan
Yeah
Melanie
So. And obviously we'll share it afterwards as well. So Eitan, what is next for Vimmi? I mean, is there any way you can progress?
Eitan
Of course. I mean we are always trying to find more ways to grow. Right. And there is a big opportunity with AI now. Right. We see the initial, I would say experimentation phase of using AI avatars and cloning yourself as a virtual avatar and just helping, you know, with these AI avatars through these live events because those events needs to be like very interesting. Enticing and gamification is very important part of it. Right. So that's one part of where we see a breakthrough in terms of the product management, let's say the other, other aspects which is very, very important is all the insights. Right. And trying to learn through analytics how to improve things and how to make campaigns much more effective. The whole idea of trying to find what's working today through video marketing that can help businesses out there. So we always analyse the algorithms, we always analyse announcement from all these networks and social networks and marketplaces trying to come up with more and more ideas. There is a big opportunities on also CTV like big screens, like also, you know, you know that Netflix and Disney announced.
Melanie
Yeah.
Eitan
You know, advertising packages. So that's another area. Retail media is very important. The ability of those retailers to monetize their digital and physical assets. And we see big changes in Omnichannel. For example, retailers just digitizing their entire shelves and these screens are providing more opportunities for conversion and for checkout and yeah, plenty of things that are happening. Obviously we didn't talk about augmented reality and virtual reality, which is for some niches like very, very important. Again, not just for training or support, but also for variety of sales and marketing experiences. Wow. So video is like all over and immersive experience are really interesting. And so it's, it's a never, a never ending journey. So this is what exciting.
Melanie
So in other words, you have no time to do all of it. Oh my word.
Eitan
Yes. Nice. Nice term. Nice term. Nice term. Look, focus is everything. I really believe in focus. And this is, I mean, saying no is so difficult. Right.
Melanie
Amen to that. Especially when it comes to building a community.
Eitan
Yes.
Melanie
Which is definitely what you've been doing.
Eitan
Yes.
Melanie
Well, this has been fascinating. I mean, I had some idea of what our conversation was going to be about today. I had no idea the strengths and capability of Vimmi until we had this conversation. So if I've sounded a bit quiet, I've been here in mild agog thinking, oh my goodness, this is ridiculous. There's so many things you can do with this. So thanks again, Eitan for coming on. If you want to reach Etan, don't forget you can visit him through his LinkedIn profile. So E I T A N K O T E R or his Vimmi website, V I M M I. And if you've got any questions that you'd like to ask me and I can pass it on to Eitan, if you're having any trouble reaching him, do let us know. Well, that's it for now. Thank you so much again for coming on, Eitan. And we will be back next week with another podcast. Bye for now.
Eitan
Bye-bye.
