Decoding: Role of YouTube in ecommerce brands' marketing funnel

From putting up exclusive content to announcement ads, YouTube is a key platform for e-commerce brands to generate leads; we take a look at how Nykaa, Amazon India and Myntra make the most of it as part of their digital strategy.

As a video-first platform that has been around for a long time, YouTube has various merits for being a preferred platform for brands to tell stories as part of their digital strategy. People come here to consume content or seek solutions. They are in a frame of mind where the probability of sitting through a long video is higher than someone scrolling on a social media feed. Also, the content is easily shareable on other platforms.

These factors, among many others, make YouTube an interesting choice of communication for brands, especially those that primarily exist online. One of the most important reasons being the probability of a high-intent audience making a purchase. We take a look at the kind of content e-commerce brands such as Nykaa, Amazon India and Myntra put on YouTube as part of their digital strategy.

Nykaa YouTube Strategy

Nykaa is primarily known for selling beauty and wellness products with an extended portfolio of clothing and accessories. They use YouTube to raise awareness about the products they sell, promote the brands they partner with and advocate for the importance of category they function in.

Category-specific Content

When promoting a beauty product, more than the actual product, arguably it's the usage that must be talked about. Nykaa does a lot of videos that show the scope of usage of beauty products. They are also mindful of the language of communication when dealing with region-specific content.

Product-specific Content

In some instances, Nykaa also creates content around specific products and brands that are available on the platform as an offering.

Experts Speak

Advocacy about the importance of the product's existence is key to creating a need for it. It helps make people receptive towards the pros of a product. Nykaa often ropes in experts to talk about larger topical phenomenons.

Celebrity Faces

You can't sell something that is associated with glamour without roping in celebrities. Nykaa routinely gives space to celebrity faces in their content on YouTube, in sync with a digital strategy one would expect from them.

Influencers & Collaborations

Content that's laced with humour helps create demand in a different than an advertisement would. It can be used to normalise conversations that are generally considered taboo. With the help of influencers, Nykaa has created various such light-hearted narratives and assets that are easy to consume.

Facilitating conversations

Beauty is a very subjective topic, one that comes with a lot of baggage of who is beautiful and who is not. By creating powerful campaigns, Nykaa has, in some instances, tried to dispel myths, making way for conversations.

Peripheral content

Nykaa has also forayed into original content where the narratives revolve around the category of products they sell. These works of fiction are often easy to consume as content pieces and don't feel like ads, despite doing pretty much the same job when it comes to communication.

Amazon India Strategy

For Amazon India, YouTube is a space to advertise about offers, brands and products. The page documents the campaigns they have run in the last few years. A large chunk of the content here revolves around their sale announcements and promotions.

Campaigns

Amazon India routinely runs campaigns to create demand for certain specific categories of products that they have on offer on the platform. They share these as content pieces on YouTube and the narrative is often such that they are shared widely.

Announcements

Almost every sale on the platform is advertised with an audio-visual content piece that is shared on and documented on their YouTube channel.

Multi-lingual communication

Understanding the importance of multi-lingual communication beyond English and Hindi, Amazon India often shares content in various Indian languages. The release of such content often coincides with a topical phenomenon (example festivals) where they wish to address and generate demand in certain specific regions.

Promoting offline events

During offline events where Amazon India is involved as a sponsor, video assets are bound to be created for documentation and marketing. These assets are also shared on YouTube to direct people to products and categories available on the platform.

Leveraging cricket

Cricket is one of the easiest narratives to pick on and create content around when the intent is pan-India communication. Such is the reach of the game, especially when it comes to IPL. Amazon India has leveraged in on several occasion with the help of their Chonkpur Cheetahs campaign.

Topical campaigns

Festivals are perhaps the most important time for any e-commerce retailer to assert that they can help people send gifts to their loves ones. Amazon India is not different. They regularly create narratives around festivals on YouTube, often highlighting key brands as per the occasion and strategy.

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Helpful content

Though the frequency of such communication has decreased over time as people have gotten more used to the way things function in e-commerce, Amazon India has various how-to videos on their YouTube page to help people navigate the platform with ease.

Product-specific content

When it comes to brands and products, it is interesting to note that most of the specific communication put up by Amazon India is around their technological products, especially mobiles.

Myntra YouTube Strategy

Marketed as the fashion capital of India, Myntra has a lot to communicate over YouTube. They release content around new collections as well as style guides for people to make better choices while shopping online. A lot of brand-specific content is also put up, promoting the products sold by their partner brands.

Promoting New Collections

Myntra almost always puts up a video asset when launching a new collection of products. The communication is often topical and/or thematic to make people feel the need to make a purchase.

Tutorials & Tips

A good chunk of the content put up by Myntra is around the use of the products they sell. These are explainer videos around the various ways a clothing item can be worn and styled.

Behind The Scenes

Sharing stories about how something comes alive is a great way to reel people in and create demand for the resulting product. Myntra often puts up such content to capture the imagination of potential consumers.

Celebrities In Focus

Much like Nykaa, celebrity faces are key to Myntra's communication on YouTube. They help add glamour as well as help people find ways to fulfil their needs of looking like their favourite celebrity.

Brand-specific Content

Myntra puts up a lot of content around the brands they have available on the platform. This includes exclusive content as well as advertisements.

Leveraging cricket

Cricket is an important event for brands to leverage while creating topical content when a league as popular as IPL is going on. To do so, Myntra has created various assets to showcase its premier and relevant collections.

Movie collaborations

In India, movies tend to be the driving force for fashion and looks as people tend to follow actors they find fascinating. Leveraging such sentiments, Myntra has collaborated with various movies to launch collections with products that resemble those worn by the characters in the movie.

Partner Content

Myntra has shared, documented and amplified fashion-related content on YouTube. These are pieces they created in partnership with media outlets.

Original content

Much like Nykaa, Myntra has also forayed into creating original content pieces around the category of products they sell.

Impact of pandemic

Recently, Myntra had put up several timely and relevant pieces around DIY ideas, helping people get it right as they stay home and experiment.

In an era of digital-first marketing, where in spite of awareness brands tend to limit the strategy and usage of their YouTube channels to share the television commercials, it is interesting to see how e-commerce brands use the platform to create content as a part of the purchase process and user experience.