Harness The Power Of User Generated Video Content And Grow Revenue With Ajay Bam Of Vyrill

In today's episode, my guest is Ajay Bam, who is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Vyrill. They're a video commerce platform. They really help Shopify brands or recently-released apps. They also help retailers increase revenue and find new customers by leveraging authentic video reviews, how-to's, and unboxing. All these kinds of UGC videos really are making a lot of impacts and really helping brands add that trust and allowing people to convert faster and better-branded videos.It's so interesting. I'm hundred percent sure he's going to talk about Vyrill. Like I said, recently launched a Shopify app and it really is helping the Shopify store owners. There have been some alpha and beta users that I know of. And it's really interesting how they're helping improve a lot of really important KPIs for brands like customer acquisition, page engagement, and revenue.I'm really excited to learn a lot about this amazing new technology that's been in the works for a long time. It's finally available for primetime. So please, also make sure you listen through to the end of this episode, because there is a very special listener-only bonus available for those that want to take Vyrill for a quick spin to see what it can do for your brand.Hi, Ajay! Welcome to eCommerce Fastlane.Yeah. Hi Steve. Thanks for having me here on the podcast. Really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you!

My pleasure. I know we've been bouncing our calendars a bit, and I know that you have been knee-deep into working on this platform for quite a while. I have the backstory and we talked in agreement with the bet and it's just, that it's very impressive.

Kind of what's led up to us being here today to make more of a public release about what Vyrill is and what it's doing. So let's talk a bit on the high level first because people love video, we love YouTube, and we love unboxing videos. But I think brands don't understand how you can find it and leverage it as part of an overall marketing strategy. So maybe you can share just on a high level first about Vyrill.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks again. At a very high level, the problem that Vyrill is solving is, was twofold. One, shoppers are now watching a lot of videos. You just see content and branded videos, such as reviews and boxing videos, how-to videos, infomercials, and more before they shop. And they're making a lot of videos after they shop. So there are massive amounts of video content for your brand. And if you're a retailer on 35 platforms in 89 languages. So if someone made a good review, I'm sure, you as a brand would love to know who made the review, and what they said inside the video about your product and brand.

And if someone made a good review, you would love to license and leverage that video for product marketing. How do you make sense of massive amounts of video data? It did really drive your two key KPIs, which are customer acquisition and revenue is really what Vyrill is focusing on. We help brands and retailers increase revenue and find new customers by leveraging authentic video content, such as reviews, unboxing videos, how-to videos, and more, along with their branded content for insights, demand generation, and content marketing. And really our secret sauce, if you will, is we're building a Google for commerce video, and we're also one of the few companies in the world that can Google inside the video as well. At a very high level, think of us as a platform to capture your video content, both your branded videos and also all your UGC videos as well from multiple platforms.

Once we captured, we can help you rate and rank all that content in nine dimensions. Get into more on that as we chat more. We help brands find the top 10 reviews and the worst reviews for the product. We then also have a licensing tool where the brands can capture the email address of their creator so you can license content as a brand or retailer. And then finally, so excited to announce our Shopify Vyrill app. It's really an in-video search app. So we're solving the problem for your shoppers on how they can instantly find answers inside the video. We all have burning questions about a product. And how can you instantly answer that question inside the video is really the key problem they resolve. So we'd Shopify app. We offer InVideo search personalization and video SEO, which, we'll discuss more in detail. But really at the end of the day, all roads lead to this, the two KPIs, customer acquisition and revenue.

Right? A hundred percent. That's funny, I'm actually on one of the stores that I guess was an unearthly kind of a beta user, and I'm actually on their product details page. It's just so cool checking out these videos posted by brands and shoppers and you have two dedicated toggles of shopper videos and then branded videos. Then, a really neat little search bar above.

We'll probably dig into this in a few minutes. I just typed it was a beauty brand. I typed the word “vegan” in. Then, here it is. It found vegan-friendly cosmetic products or manufacturing processes. So interesting. And then, so it somehow was able to transcribe the video and then, just display the correct videos by the shopper. I guarantee you the way you connect to these video platforms where people mean YouTube being the largest, but there are lots of others out there where people are publishing content out there, unbenounced to the brand. And how do you leverage that? And then legally have rights to use it and to push ads against it?

If it's great content or building relationships with these micro-influencers that you didn't even know existed. So this is a really exciting topic for me. So before we unpack all of that, cause I really wanna understand the origin story. Cause I think it sets the stage a little bit better about, how did the pieces come together? Like for you and the founding team? I guess I'm trying to understand the desire and the expertise to even want to get involved with video.

Yeah, absolutely. So I've been sending shopping behavior for about 15 years. Previously built an in-store shopping app company called Modiv Media out of Boston, and sold that to Catalina. We built an app where you can scan and bag inside retail stores with your phone. We increase the speed of checkout and we increase your basket size inside of the store. We built that company. Sold that company in 2009. After that, I went to work for Nokia, the phone company, where I launched the app store in about 35 countries around the world.

I study online and offline shopping behaviors, particularly in-store and mobile. I'm also a keen observer of what's happening with shoppers and what's going on. It was interesting like even pre-COVID video was already growing by 300 to 400% year-to-year between YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Then, COVID happens. Tiktok happens. And suddenly video blows up. And if you think about why Tiktok really grew, from a consumer behavior shopper perspective, is that what really matters at the end of the day is authenticity, right? What's in the content and Tiktok really offers that right. It's content that it's genuine, it's entertaining, it's fun, it's silly. It drives and always knows that things are sometimes, they say, when someone is joking or someone is funny, they're being honest. And so you can see that, but Tiktok videos deliver on that authenticity. I just read a stat that there was more video content created last year in one year than in the last 30 years. That's crazy. It's outstanding. Like mind-blowing, right? And so essentially coming back to the question, I began noticing that shoppers are now watching videos before they show up — reviews, unboxing videos.

Just visited my niece. I asked her a question, I said, “What can I get you for?” This was actually before the holidays. “What can I catch you for holiday?” It's interesting. She sent me a YouTube how-to video “boba clip”. She wanted boba tea. And she sent me a how-to video and she's like, “Uncle, this is what I want.” And it tells you how the Gen Zs, she's 14-year-old, YouTube aware, if you will, social media aware. And all the Gen Zs and millennials, most of them are starting their journeys with video, right? And on average, Gen Zs and millennials are spending about 2.16 hours every day on their mobile device watching videos. This is above and beyond television by the way.

That tells you the power of video and how much influence it's creating as well. Then, in the midst of this, we have Amazon, which has already a mass of 215 million video reviews on its platform. So consumers will now expect their shopping journeys to be video then. And so all of these trends, if you will, and observations and what people are actually doing before they shop is what led me to start Vyrill. We realized that there's a big gap in the marketplace. There's no humanly possible way to dig through massive amounts of video content, only machines, and AI. And with now with AI and machines, we can do it better. And so that's really the problem we set to solve. And so we started the company at UC Berkeley out of the Machine Learning Lab and the SkyDeck Incubator Program. And here we are after five years, essentially we have trained the machines to watch videos. And we're marching onward. And here we are launching our Shopify.

Yeah, this is lovely. And you know what, that's one of the main reasons why I have the show is because I love to find innovative solutions that are solving problems. And I know that video is very engaging. It's interesting, I'm in the podcast world and I'm in the midst of getting my YouTube channel going. What's interesting about that is that, plateaued a bit from the audio perspective. I think it was like a 30% penetration, I think 30% of the US population has listened to a podcast in the last month.

And it hasn't really changed. It grew quite a bit during the pandemic up to about 30%-ish. And I think it's still growing year over year, but very slowly. I'd argue maybe even plateauing where from a video perspective at Tiktok, as part of it, YouTube is part of it, at one point, Instagram stories too. Video is the most engaging way and offensive way of engaging people. And here it is not, there's an 85% penetration of YouTube and YouTube is still growing. Google-owned property, growing and growing year over year. And you think I don't know, it's 500 hours a minute or something being uploaded to YouTube.

It's a massive beast. But the thing is that what your solution does? What I understand is it really understands the buyer’s intent and understands what people are talking about. So can you talk a bit about that? Because in agreement, you shared that a little bit, how you're really, almost doing a better job than Google about the understanding of “what is this video all about” and then “how can a brand leverage?”

Yeah, absolutely. So what makes us really very special and unique is that, and this is the secret sauce to our platform as well, is that we're one of the few companies in the world that can match millions of videos on YouTube to our entire product catalog. Whether you're a small brand or a big, we can match it to your product category, brand, competitor, keyword, and hashtag. We do that matching to make sure we're able to identify videos at the product Q-level. The reason we're doing that is that shoppers want to see all their, “when I select a product, I want to see video reviews for that product or unboxing videos for that product.” So we have a matching algorithm that matters videos to your product catalog. That's step one. 

Step two is once we matched the video, we analyze the audio texts and images in nine dimensions to rate and rank all your content. We analyze the video, everything from sentiment analysis. We analyze the audio for positive and negative sentences, keywords, and phrases about your brand. We also analyze the video for demographic and diversity. So age, ethnicity, gender language, and country— diversity is such a hot topic for brands. They're getting hammered because there isn't enough diversity whether it's age or gender or representation of their target demographic, or even the size of the product.

So able to tell the brand, what they have, but also what they don't have. And this is very important. One of our customers leverages our platform to identify all their missing content for diversity. We then also flag the video for brand safety as well. So we'll look at whether the video has nudity, foul language, or minors inside the video, which are, of course, a top of a brand mine. We also analyze the video's 400+ topics by vertical. So for example, in beauty, we're able to identify whether it's a review or an unboxing video, but also identify with its lipstick or mascara and so on. If it's automotive, we can identify whether it's an inside, or outside tool of the car. Is it a dealership video or a review of the car?

But also identify that it's talking about the gearbox or the battery power. If it's an EV car and so on. So, we identify topics. We identify 600 scenes and landmarks. If you're a sunscreen company, I'm sure you would love to identify whether the video was shot indoors or outdoor. We track if the video is coming from social. We also track all the engagements as well. We can also predict whether the creator of that video is an expert in beauty. So we look at the last 30 videos that they posted on social to identify whether their expert fans are pretty pressed and so on. What we're doing is we're rating this content by looking inside the video. And on top of that, we also look at likes, views, comments, shares, and all that. So brands can now come to our platform and find the top 10 reviews. And the worst review for the product. And this was where they can capture a lot of insights. And so we're really both help them find UGC content and also upload all their videos as well.

Recently, we had a shoe company that just uploaded 500 of their videos, their own produced, videos, making all that content searchable and useful. At first for them on the Vyrill dashboard. But also now they're able to publish all those videos on their product pages and we're making all that content, but they're branded for containing UGC content searchable as well and useful as well on their Shopify app store as well. So this gets into the third point of differentiation. How we're unique and special is that with our Shopify app brands and retailers on the Shopify platform, can actually now add videos to their product pages. But this is very different than an app that simply offers a video carousel that we actually offer in-video search.

So here's the problem, Steve, that we're solving, right? So let's say you and I buy a car. You're interested in a car with leather seats. I'm interested in a car with Chelsea. We are both landed on the Shopify store for auto or auto accessories, and you have 20 videos on the product page. How do I know which video is talking about leather seats or car seats, and most people today will either was the first video of the 20 or the abandoned experience. So here we are, brands have invested their money and made their videos, but the ROI is turning out to be zero. We have nailed this problem. What Vyrill does is we offer a video search bar on top of those videos on your product page. So you can instantly search and type the word “leather seat”, and we'll take you inside the video where in those 20 videos, we can find those four videos that talk about leather seats. And even better, we can take you inside the video, “two leather seats”. So you can see all the references. Perhaps you have a burning question about leather seats. What color is it? What material it is? You can instantly search and you can find instantly answers to your burning questions with video, right? Again, what makes video special is that 85% of shoppers say that video increases brand trust by 20x because they can see the product, the person, and the emotions in action inside the video.

And this is why, going back to your comment about audio versus where it says the video, audio is performing 30% video is performing 85%. There's a reason for this –it's brand trust. Is brand trust would use Steve as a podcaster? Or is a brand test with the brand single product? So we solved the InVideo search problem on the product pages. We solved the problem of personalization and video SEO, so dramatically improved those KPIs.

Yeah. I was thinking about the SEO side of it. Cause I think, Google's algorithm is that “EAT”, an acronym— the “expertise”, the “authoritativeness”, and the “trustworthiness” that goes along with just getting high rankings in Google. I find it interesting that it almost appears that based on having a video search available, it's almost like a one-to-one personalization in real-time because you made a good point about one person or two people looking for a car leather versus something else. And then, it's almost like there's like paralysis analysis almost where there's I've got so many videos and who's curating them in the correct order for the site visitor accordingly. Maybe, your best video generically tells the story, authentically. Those would be displayed on the product details page higher up above the fold-ish but having a search available to really drill down, almost like a filter.

That's very interesting because then, you really are directly communicating through video what the person wants to learn more specifically about this product. And it solves a need for them.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And also using the process brands are able to capture a lot of useful insights for even producing their future video content as well. As an example, so I think first you hit the nail around personalization. People want to see people like them buying the product, right? So if I'm a 19-year-old female visiting the website, I want to see the first video that pops up is someone that looks like me is going to enforce the trust. It's going to enforce behavior in the customers by saying, “Hey! Here's someone who's buying a product like me, so I should consider this product as well.” Essentially, we're really helping brands understand the searched terms. What are people searching for? This could be very useful, right? If we know that the most-searched feature for this product they're looking for is leather seats.

They can bring that feature outside the videos while in their promotions and their messaging. And even at Vyrill, we're building video heatmaps so we can even showcase some of the most searched terms on top of the video as well in your future. So we offer insights around video content as well, which video is performing the best by-product level, brand level, and category level? And what kind of topic is being discussed inside that video? So all of these insights can be very useful for producing your content. What we found is, and we have done, by the way, we have analyzed more than 20 million videos. We found that for every brand and category, there are generally three types of videos that perform.

So I'll give you some examples. If it's the beauty category, it's always a review and it should be followed by unboxing and how-to videos. So if you have those three videos on your product page, they're definitely going to increase your conversion and engagement. I can guarantee you that. If you're in the fashion category, it's usually a try-on video because people like to see, people wearing a dress or a shirt. And it's followed by a review and perhaps even a video explaining the materials and how to wash, washing instructions as well. Every category has three or four types of videos that perform. And understanding how what's working and what's not working is very useful. And then also with Vyrill, you can test videos as well. You can literally publish a video from the dashboard. It will show up on the next refresh of the page and you can see how that video performs and then either keep it or pull it. And this can be done both by you, or even by Vyrill as well, programmatically as well. So I think at the end of the day, delivering very useful and targeted content to shoppers is really the key. And then that's, what's going to drive conversion and engagement.

Yeah, this is so interesting. What about the influencer side of the market? Cause I'm saying so from a brand's perspective, I can see the benefits in having your tool located and then the right management around displaying it.

What about the other side of finding creators that are raving fans? You don't even know even existed? Is there a workflow to identify people? And then what does that outreach look like?

Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And a couple of things are happening right now. First, at Varo. We actually track all your video content by product. Onboarding literally takes a couple of minutes. You upload your product or your product catalog, and we can start capturing videos that people have posted on social by-products. And really, as you're thinking about a brand, as you're thinking about the shopping experience, what matters is ultimately going to be the last mile. And in the last month's journey, meaning the customer has actually researched the product. They arrived on the product page, and now they're debating whether they should purchase the product or not. And this is where micro-influencers and authentic content place a big role. We're seeing that across the board, which is, yes, influencer marketing is important but more than influencer marketing, it's important to find those micro-influencers.

So it's very easy to find the celebrity and the top influencers, but it's actually very hard to find your next 5000 fans. That's really the key focus. How do you find that UGC content? And UGC content is very hard to find. It's very hard to index and make it useful and certain-sided, and that's the problem also. So we can actually help the brand find their next 5,000 fans who have uploaded content about their product and brand. And we do this in real-time. What I mean by that is we scan every 12 hours for new content and you as a brand, get a daily email alert, in the morning, of all your new videos and turning videos that have been posted about your brand.

And by the way, you can also track all your competitors as well on the brand. So we offer analysis of your content, where it says your better content as well. And we essentially help you rate and rank all your content. We offer full-cut types of insights. First, we offer you engagement insights. Why is this video doing well? And sometimes, the video is great. But it's not doing well because now we're promoted. So we can also help you find that video. That is an amazing video that you could potentially leverage on your PDPs to drive more conversion and engagement. So we help you find all kinds of videos that people have posted about your products.

So we have an engagement, we have a speech report. We generate a list of all the keywords on how people are talking about your brand and product inside the video. You can use that for generating and building your SEO list. To see how people are referencing your product as well to bring that out in messaging and for your SEO as well. We have a demographic report. This is where you can identify your target demographic. Is it on target? Is it off? What are you missing? Who else do you need to find? Perhaps you need to find creators that are in your target demographic to create more content. And so we offer like different kinds of reports and inside to do all this. You can then take actions on the platform as well, such as licensing. And then, of course, publishing that video to the Shopify app.

Yeah, that's a big thing of the licensing thing I'm always concerned about too, because a lot of people think that well, just because it's up on the internet, you have free access to push ads on it and, or have it that, have it commercially available. But the reality is no, you cannot do that. And then it's not a great way to start a relationship with a potential micro-influencer. Just appreciate the fact that they've created some great content, through keywords and hashtags and just identifying what it is they're talking about.

I think that's very interesting, but then starting to build an authentic relationship with that micro-influencer, I think it's pretty powerful stuff. I want to just go back. One thing about the SEO side of it. I think this is interesting to me because I've noticed that YouTube search results are coming up on Google now. And so that there's obviously a renewed vigor of Google wanting to… Yeah, I guess the engagements there, it's what site visitors are looking for on Google. They do want to watch videos. And so can you talk a little bit about that, about why you believe that's happening, and then is this just a natural progression if Google's doing it and having it in their search results of YouTube videos? Is that the natural progression to have great videos on your product details pages also?

Yeah, absolutely. So very good question. And a couple of comments here. I think we'll finally, the video is here. So all companies have announced a focus on video, including Google. Google just had a conference last week in MountainView. And a lot of focus was on AI and ML and video as well. So video is definitely on top of everyone's mind. Instagram has already announced that this year, they're pushing video, whether it's through stories or generally on their platform as well. So I think more and more, as video becomes important for shoppers, it's going to be more important for all these social media companies and SEO companies as well. Because I think ultimately, they have to figure out a way how to really bring that video to the forefront in search results. And so this is where search engines are today. I think their biggest fear is brand safety, and brand safety rules vary by country and population as well.

I think the biggest fear is profanity and nudity and minors in the video. In many countries, you cannot have minors in the video at all, unless you have acquired the rights and more. So essentially, this is a problem that needs to be solved. And this is a problem that we've been focusing on as Vyrill is really giving signals to the search engine and letting the search engine know that this video is brand safe, meaning it doesn't have profanity, nudity, and minors. If there is, it's approved and properly licensed by the brand. so we're giving signals to search engines and in the process, improving the video as well. And the way we do that is on our Shopify app, we're adding actually all the sort of tags that are visible to the shopper, but behind the video as well, we're adding the transcript and we're also adding all the tags of what's inside the video.

So we can actually let the search engine know that this video is talking about this product. It's a review. It features a 19-year-old male or female. And here are the 20 topics being discussed in the video. Oh, and by the way, this video is brand safe and it is authorized. And so, search engines can use that information and the transcript data to pull the best videos for that product in the search results. And in the process, it's a win-win for everyone. It's a win for the search engine. That's a win for the brand. Because as I explained before, the video definitely drives more engagement. The more likely to watch a video and make it searchable, it's even going to help. When they land on your PDP.

It's really influencing the entire shopping journey. And I see that I see that in the long term, our shopping journeys will start with videos on search engines. You then arrive on the homepage where as soon as you start typing the product name, you'll begin to see video reviews pop up in your search results on the homepage. It takes you to the PDP page where you're seeing the most hyper-relevant content for those videos. By the way, I also see we're also building a recommendation engine as well. So you can also recommend videos for similar products in that category. If you're a DTC brand or similar products.

In that category across multiple brands, if you're a retailer. So you can also then influence the customer to watch more videos and lead to other products in that category. Perhaps they're looking for a product with a different color or size or different features, and then lead that into a shopping cart. And then also the other problem we're solving, and this is what we're doing on Shopify, is that being able to capture videos after the purchase has been made. Post-purchase engagement often is sometimes forgotten, unless you're Amazon. It's important to capture a quick answer, and ask the customers, “Hey, what did you love about the product?”, “Was the setup easy?” So there are ways to then engage with customers with video as well. Post-purchase as well, and capture reviews, unboxing videos, or snippets of comments from your customers to continue to build your brand and your future shopping journeys as well. And perhaps, recycle and leverage that video again. I also see an opportunity even, as you capture these videos, I can see your whole FAQ section for your products, which is all answered with videos. And how better than for the custom shopper to actually see other shoppers answering their questions with a video. 

Then also, I think we're also seeing now live video commerce coming up as well in live streaming as well. This is also an area where, you know, after the streaming, can make that content searchable and useful. Sometimes these live streams can be 30 minutes to an hour long. And perhaps you, as a shopper is simply looking for a particular answer inside that live stream around the product. And, live streaming is primarily around, again, building the brand trust and helping answer shop or burning questions. So we can also make that video content. After the live commerce ends, we can make that content searchable. And you can reuse that reuse circle, recycle that content back on your… so in summary, like we're making in video search useful across the entire shopping journey for brands and retailers.

Yeah. I love this. One thing that hit home for me too, is the kind of post-purchase engagement because these are typical, they're quite happy customers when they make a purchase. And you go to the thank-you page and, maybe download the shop app so you can track your order. But I think it's an interesting retention and loyalty play by somehow, once this product arrives or just like how you reengage back with the customer to get that UGC content to then finds out, wow, they really do love the product.

They create a great video. They're one of our customers. It's so interesting to me that you thought of that. And then that's a great engagement post-purchase. I'm not pivoting to a story right now, because I think I know we talked about one there are a couple of brands and I've seen some of the case studies on the early brands that have adopted your solution early on pre-release of your app, just to product market fit and all the kind of fun things you do in the SAS world.

But are you able to talk a little bit about a brand Shopify brand and specifically, Were they trying to solve with video, and then how did Vyrill help them? Was there any improvement overall in engagement or revenue? And just like to unpack maybe their journey as being, an original beta user.

Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things, I think a number of brands you work with, they're thinking about video is top of their mind. And they know that a lot of their shoppers watch videos as well, especially as they're targeting gen Z and millennial populations. We work with a number of brands with our betas in the beauty category and the fashion category as well. So essentially, they're leveraging our platform. One of our brands actually had the founder and the team makes producers short. They produce many videos. In fact, they create one or two videos every week. And they now have about 50 videos. Most of those videos are just simple files, right?

Sitting in that folder. And their biggest problem always was, “How do I find what's inside the video and find the video that I want to promote instantaneously?” Today, they either have to put proper naming conventions on the file names, but if they want to know which of these videos is actually featuring twenty-five year old or which of these videos are actually reviews and they're talking about a particular product. There was no way for them to index and organize and make that content searchable. So, the first thing we do is help a number of these beta brands, upload their video content, and we make it really easy. We actually ask them, we've integrated with the Dropbox file system. So you can just have a free Dropbox account and you can upload videos. We are Dropbox and we simply read the video. We don't actually even host the video ourselves. So it makes it very easy to read the video at scale. And so brands are uploading their other branded content first.

Then, they set up their product catalogs for video tracking. So we also then find all their fan content as well, UGC content as well. We help them find it. We're helping them rate it. We're helping them license it. So all the number of these early customers are using our platform to also find UGC videos as well. Then finally, we're helping them choose both their branded content and also choose their licensed videos as well, and then publish those videos to their product pages and more. You can look up, for example, IB Fresh. It's a very up-and-coming, amazing beauty brand out of Atlanta. They have leveraged our platform.

And a couple of things, the moment you put videos up on the product page to answer your question about the KPIs, your page engagement goes up 2x to 5x. First thing. The second thing, that we found is that when you have interactions with the videos such as a video in video search, or we also ask customers to rate a video, whether they like it or not, as they're watching the video as well. What we found is anytime you offer interaction with the video, completion of watching those videos will go up by 90%. So essentially you're now improving your ROI significantly on your video content. You spent your time and dollars on the licensing of that video or making that video. And now finally, customers can actually find all the answers they're looking for with your video contents, which were sitting there for increasing the ROI to help customers make shopping decisions. And then finally, what we found is depending on the product, that category, and the type of video you have on your product. You can see conversion to purchase and shopping guard go up anywhere from 10 to 68%, depending on the product category and the videos you have. Or all you'll see is a significant improvement in your engagement time and more.

And what's happening now, we address this previously when you asked a question about video SEO. A lot of these search engines are also now improving their video SEO process as well. And we'll continue to see those improvements in the next months. So as companies like us offer a new mechanism for these search engines to understand video on an e-commerce page. If anything you will see improvements in your customer acquisition strategies and inbound to your website as well, coming from a search engine is going to improve as video search gets better on search engines as well.

Yeah, this is lovely. So let's talk about the future of your product. Obviously, I'm blessed and had the opportunity to be able to have the official release in the Shopify app store. I guess one of the first podcasts, just to share this. Thank you for that opportunity to share it with my listeners 'cause there are going to be 20-some thousand people listening to this episode. So they're going to be chomping at the bit to learn more about it. But I'm just curious about the North Star, like what you've just officially launched, but it's been five years in production.

Where do you see the platform going into the future? I just wanna get that warm and fuzzy that I do great things right now for brands proven that I can do it today, but where are we headed into the future?

The future is just amazing. I think a couple of areas where we're going. We are becoming the sort of video CRM and video commerce platform for brands and retailers. So you'll be able to come to one platform at Vyrill and find all the… where we'll be able to help you capture all your videos from multiple platforms. So today, we have integrated with YouTube, Dropbox, and Shopify, and we're adding new platforms this year, including Tiktok, Google Drive, Vimeo, and other platforms as well.

You'll see us capturing more video content as we go along from multiple platforms. And you'll also see us helping you distribute your video content as well. Across multiple channels as well. Your DTC brand, perhaps at some point, you'll bring your product in store. So we have also integrated now with QR codes as well. You can be walking inside a store, you could pick up product packaging, scan the QR code, and we could help you launch a video experience to drive more conversion and engagement for your product and brand. As you can see, we've already enabled the QR experience. You'll see more distribution channels coming on the platform.

So with one click, you'll be able to publish your videos to your Shopify page. Do your social media channels to your Amazon store, or to your Walmart store, and other shopping channels as well. So we see that it's already happening as we add more platforms, we bring more value to brand marketers. And the third thing we're doing is, we're in the process of indicating with an amazing partner. We're adding a shopping cart, a seamless shopping experience, primarily for social media as well. So with just one or two clicks, the brand will be able to promote a video outside the traditional e-commerce channels and be able to monetize from that video as well. So essentially improving the ROI across the entire shopping journey, whether the shoppers are on social, whether they're on the Shopify product, or they're in a post-purchase engagement journey.

So I see the evolution of that. I also see an evolution of the video itself. I think we're now the whole conversation is about Meta and the Metaverse. And what is Metaverse? It is three-dimensional visualization of content, commerce, and the internet. And I wouldn't be surprised in a year or two years from now, we have some new formats such as AR and VR, where you, as a person could just drag and drop your photo inside the video, and you could see yourself wearing the dress right inside the review. There's a lot of like amazing stuff coming. I think the future of video, we're just starting out. I think we're still at the big name. It's a very nascent stage where we are, but if anything, the future is going to be immersive and is going to be engaging. It's really going to help brands and retailers quite a bit even with the bottom line.

I'll just share with you a quick stat that I just remembered is, recently they did a study on how video influences return, and we found that returns go down by 20% after the holiday with brands that are offering videos. And the reason is very simple. With video, the customers are making more informed purchase decisions. Has it happened to you when you have ordered a product? The color was supposed to be beige, but when the product actually arrived, it wasn't. And so with a video, without a video, you can see where the influence happens. But the video you actually, you can actually see the colors. Perhaps in action, but that is the video with that. And this is again where text reviews fall apart. Text reviews are created by the boss. You sometimes don't even know whether the person actually owned the product. But with video, you can see all of this, right? So this is also the other reason why video reviews always outperform text reviews at.

Yeah. It's just having the tech stack to be able to manage it all in looks like Vyrill has been solving a lot of those problems. And so I think this is amazing. So we are nearing the end of the show for today. Where would you like to send everybody? Like what do you believe are the next steps now that your app is officially launched? Where do you want to send people?

Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things. For all listeners who are listening to this podcast, We're offering a 25% discount on our plans. So just mentioned the plan when you reach out to us on the app store. We are happy to make you an offer and give you that discount. But please, do visit our app on the Shopify store where you'll find all the information on how to download the app. We do offer free trials by the way. We know that you, as a brand, you're interested in getting a snippet of how our works.

For a 30-day period, you can upload a couple of videos and actually see the app in action as well on your website and see how it drives the KPIs. So we really offer a freemium model where you can try it out for 30 days and then continue onwards. And I guarantee you that you'll get a lot of insights and improvement in your KPIs with the Vyrill app and it's more than a video camera. It really solves your entire video problems, from capturing to analyzing, to leveraging video content on your pages as well. Yes, please check us out in the store, and please reach out to us. Also, I'll just put my email address out here as well. That's very simple as ajay@vyrill.com.

So if you have a question or comment after you hear this podcast about the Vyrill platform, please reach out to us. And as Steve mentioned, please check out the notes as well. We'll have more information there.

Yeah. I'll have a lot in there. So there'll be ecommercefastlane.comforward/vyrill. So Vyrill. That will redirect a really cool landing page. They'll have all the details of this offer. Thank you for that. It's nice to have that 30-day trial. I think the one benefit is that because your platform works off of keywords and hashtags and brand mentions and things, I think brands will be pretty shocked by the content that's being produced that you may or may not know is even out there in the wild.

And some of these micro-influencers are just customers who are really not asking for anything. They just want to share it with their friends, it's fun, or maybe they're in the early stages of their creator journey, or they're trying to get themselves known and they're just, they really enjoy your product. They've purchased it. And they're hoping that there's a tool out there that is scanning the internet based on brand mentions and keywords and hashtags. And all of a sudden, there is a tool to do that and it's Vyrill. And I think that's really interesting that you can double-check. I'm like, you're creating a war chest of UGC content that, “Hey, you know what, look at all the stuff that's out there.”

Getting an email and saying, “Hey, these videos are all around your particular brand.” And so how do you then leverage them? You watch them like, “Oh, wow. These are great or not so great.” But you can at least work through it. And you have all your nine dimensions. I'm going to make sure I have all this in the show notes. just think it's incredible that you've identified that. I also learned a lot today too, about what is missing in your marketing strategy. And I think that's another thing that you uncover. We didn't really dig too deep into it, but I think that's an interesting part of your platform. It's fine to be doing a lot of great things and finding micro-influencers and great video content, either brand produced or externally produced. I think that's awesome. But then, through all your nine dimensions, I guarantee you, brands, those listening today, you're going to find an area. If it's a diversity thing, it could be a language thing. It could be, that you have no unboxing videos. Who knows? You're looking at your competitors too and tracking them. So, any final comments about how you believe the platform is really going to maximize value for brands today.

Yeah. I think brands should seriously consider video in their basket of tools. And video is a must-have versus nice-to-have, I would say going forward. Even if you're a small brand don't ignore videos because ultimately what matters, what's going to drive the conversion is the brand trust. And customers will see that brand trust with both a mix of your UGC content, authentic video content, and your branded content together, a bundled up. At the end of the day, when customers I know are in a rush, when they want to make quick shopping decisions, you want to give them tools that can instantly help them answer their burning questions about your product.

So think about how video can be leveraged with… in video search to answer these shopping burning questions can help you capture a lot of insights by understanding what interactions shoppers are having with your video content, what works and what doesn't work. Then finally, you can maximize your ROI as well across your entire shopping journey. And, how can you then think about video all the way from the search to your homepage, your product page? And then also, don't forget your post-purchase engagement as well. How to leverage video app for that as well. So I would say that I encourage you to think about the video in multiple domains, and in multiple formats as well. And don't just think about what you have, but also think about what you don't have and how your competitor is upping their game as well with video content as well.

If you're not moving forward, if you're not innovating, you're definitely going backward. So competition is stiff out there. Thank you so much for coming to the show today. I really appreciate it. And you know this, Shopify is on a mission to make commerce better for everyone. And, if I'd add too, that building a path that leads to more entrepreneurship and more independent retail. And you know what I've learned today, it seems very clear to me that you really are also in tight alignment. I know you want to help Shopify brands improve efficiencies and grow revenue for sure through video. Just this lifetime customer loyalty, it's just amazing what video UGC can actually do. And now there's a platform to manage all that. I just wanted to thank you for sharing your knowledge and your vision. Just giving back to the ecosystem and congrats on your Shopify app release.

Yeah, thank you so much. And we look forward to more continuing conversations, with the Shopify team, thanks for having us on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

My pleasure, have a great day.

Thank you.

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