Product videos are one of the best ways to engage shoppers. And with Shoppable Videos (that is, videos ads) now a part of virtually every Retail Media Network’s offerings, the time has never been better to use video to create awareness for your product. One of the most compelling forms of video is stop-motion video, which can present your product in an engaging, animated format. Yet historically, stop-motion videos have been expensive and time-consuming to create. Fortunately, new approaches, combined with new tools like our Video Builder, are making it easier than ever to create stop-motion videos for your products. With these new capabilities available, here are five key benefits of using stop-motion videos to promote your products.

1. Create awareness for your products.
First off, stop-motion videos are a great way to create awareness for your products. They can be used in many different locations, from top-of-funnel shoppable videos that create awareness for shoppers to brand-stores and product detail page image carousels that support video. They can also be used for below-the-fold content on those pages that support videos below the fold.

2. Turn product shots into engaging, animated content.
When it comes to E-Commerce marketing, what sets stop-motion videos apart from other forms of content is its ability to turn existing static product images into engaging, animated content. Many clients are concerned about whether they have enough marketing content to start with to create compelling videos. They are often surprised by how compelling the stop-motion videos created from their existing product images assets are.

3. Inform shoppers.
Stop-motion videos are great for informing shoppers. You can easily highlight the benefits of your products and show how they’re distinct from other offerings in the market. Animations can be used to draw attention to key product features. Meanwhile, animated text can be used to inform shoppers about ingredients, how a product is made, or other key points. It can also be used to highlight use cases. One of our customers used animated text to highlight how a new squeezable food product could be used for sandwiches, as a spread or as a snack.

4. Create relevancy for seasonal opportunities.
Throughout the year, there are many opportunities to engage shoppers. Seasonal events and occasion-based opportunities both present compelling opportunities to highlight the benefits of your products in ways that are meaningful for shoppers. In the past, updating videos for seasonal opportunities was challenging due to the time and financial investment involved. This was especially the case for stop-motion videos, in which each scene needed to be redone by hand in order to create a video relevant for the season or occasion. Fortunately, with new tools and approaches to video creation, it’s possible to update a few graphics in one scene, and have those update throughout all the other scenes in the video. Whether it’s an animated barbecue or snowflakes falling from the sky, your existing videos can become seasonally relevant in just minutes.

5. Make your brand memorable with entertaining content.
In today’s highly crowded market, creating content that is entertaining, and therefore memorable, is key. Shoppers digest so much content these days that videos that entertain will stand out from the crowd and remain relevant for shoppers long after they see your video. Whether the video you create with our Video Builder is used as a Shoppable Video to create awareness, or on a product detail page (PDP) as part of an image carousel to drive conversion, stop-motion videos can be not just informative but entertaining as well. The right animations, combined with the right messaging and audio track can result in videos that provide important information to shoppers while doing so in a fun and entertaining way.

Conclusion
In conclusion, stop-motion videos are a great way to inform and entertain shoppers, while communicating key messaging and driving clear calls to action. With the right tools, stop-motion videos can be built quickly and easily from existing marketing assets. There’s no need to create new marketing assets. With our Video Builder, you can simply drop in an existing product image. Then, using built-in effects like rotation, fade in, fade out, and more, you can bring your product image to life.

We typically combine a product image with a thematically relevant background and an audio track to match. Plus, with the help the Bulk Update capabilities built into our Video Builder, you can swap in new product images and backgrounds in seconds. That means you can create videos for all the products in your portfolio in the time it used to take to create just one.