How LSKD is chasing the customer vibe with video

For decades now, marketers have strived to deliver greater engagement through their online properties.

Many strategies have been tried, from chatbots and shoppable content to greater use of video. While often delivering results, they have rarely achieved the highest level of engagement a customer might expect, such as when they are interacting with real people.

But as the lines between video, social content and commerce become increasingly blurred, many brands are now looking for solutions that help them be wherever their customers want them to be, and that deliver engaging social experiences even on their own properties.

Australian sportwear brand, LSKD, is one such business seeking greater engagement across all properties, in support of its mission to inspire customers to ‘chase the vibe’ through sports, fitness and adventure. While the company already boasts a strong heritage in video content and an active community of 60,000, LSKD ecommerce manager, James Reu, says the team was keen to take that engagement a step further.

"We understand social commerce is a massive thing," he tells CMO. "When users come to our site, we want to give them a similar experience to social media and make sure they are engaged with our website."

LSKD had already made significant investments in video content, including the output of two inhouse videographers. But Reu says the team was keen to find new ways to use video content to spark greater curiosity with its community.

That search led to Tel Aviv-based interactive video technology maker, Tolstoy, which offers options for quickly embedding video content into Web pages in ways that are both highly interactive and shoppable. According to LSKD omnichannel specialist, Jemma Cumming, video is the way people naturally like to consume their content in any location.

"We all sit there, and we scroll, and get lost in six second videos that are ridiculous but so engaging. To be able to connect with our customers in the way they like to consume their content is really powerful. " Cumming says. "Video content is such an underutilised tool, and I definitely see video commerce as something that will elevate brands into the future."

Reu says one of the initial implementations of Tolstoy has been on LSKD's product pages.

"Customers can see the product in situ and have someone talking about the features," Reu says. "Sometimes customers don’t understand what the product is about until someone starts explaining it to them, and it helps the customer make a more informed decision."

He says the interactive aspects of the Tolstoy platform are also proving helpful for customers wanting to explore the company's range.

"We have a lot of products on our site, and sometimes our customers can get a little bit overwhelmed, and they don’t know which product to choose," Reu says. "Tolstoy has another function where you can create quizzes and customer journeys. Based on the questions asked through the video, you end up with an end result which is the right product for you, so it is more personalised. And that personalised content drives conversion."

Cumming says that same technology has since been deployed on iPads within LSKD's physical stores, where it offers a less intrusive way of understanding what product is right for a customer.

"Having Tolstoy in our stores and translating that into a physical sense creates a really strong brand persona, so no matter where you shop with us, it is the same experience," Cumming says.

Reu says the next stage in LSKD's strategy will be to bring more of a 'feed' experience to its online properties – something he describes as 'bringing social media to a website and then seeing how the users run with it', and which he hopes to deploy before the end of the year.

"It basically takes what TikTok or the Instagram Reels is and brings it to your site," Reu says. "You can shop within the feed, which is really cool and definitely something our younger demographic will get around.

"We try to look at the trends and what is happening in the future of ecommerce, and it does seem to be steering towards that social media style shopping, so we want to make sure we are on top of that."

According to Cumming, this blend of video and social will remain a focus for LSKD's marketing strategy, and a key element of how it will build out its community. That strategy is also likely to include greater use of user-generated video content. Cumming says this has already proven to deliver higher conversion rates and an increase in average order value. The goal now is extending the use of his and other video into additional channels such as email and SMS.

"Our entire brand is based around community," Cumming says. "We have a community group with over 60,000 members who are very active, so we are looking at how we translate that community group in a video sense on our site, and how do we deliver our site to users without them having to jump on to web browser or our app.

"Being able to have those feeds and have that user generated content in people's hands really seamlessly is a really powerful thing."

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