One in three consumers has changed brands because of the information they found while shopping online, according to research from Google.
That means that great product content can make or break your brand's online presence. Unfortunately, many brands struggle with how to make sure that their product content is accurate and meets not only shoppers', but retailers', needs, as it is hard to do both well.
Consumers expect detailed product content when shopping online so here are a few content creation tips to help make your customers not only browse your products, but buy your products.
Don't skip the basics; instead enable your sales team. This is, admittedly, an "eat your vegetables" point. Make sure to offer multiple product images along with content that highlights the important features of your product. Many brands consistently fail to provide these images across all their retail partners; many in part because their sales teams that work on item setup do not have ready access to product images and specs. If you make the data available to your sales team, you'll make their job in this process much easier.
Invest in videos. Of course, not everyone has videos for every item in their database at the ready. Fortunately, there are many agencies out there that specialize in this type of content creation. An experiment creating videos for your best sellers could boost sales in the short term and provide business justification to invest more heavily in this space going forward.
Make your products findable. SEO for brands means optimizing for on-site search. Winning on-site search is crucial to closing sales, and to win on-site search you need to fill out all the retailer-specific "top off" fields they ask for. Skipping those attributes may get your products listed faster, but if you're buried beneath the top 10 results (or top three on mobile) you're losing both sales and brand awareness. You should also take the time to make sure that your products are optimized for Amazon and Google since that is where most products searches start.
Regularly refresh. Retailers are asking for more content than ever before, effectively outsourcing much of their merchandising function to the brands. This is great for brands, but also requires them to think differently about items setups. Specifically, merchants see the setup as only the beginning; measuring performance and optimizing over time is key to growth.
Update your product copy with user-generated content and utilize retailer analytics to better inform your content updates. Analytics allow you to test and figure out the type of content that works best for your shoppers, and today's best performing ecommerce brands are taking it seriously – in contrast, the worst performing ones struggle with item setup, let alone optimization.
Online product content is vital to your brand's success, so it is important to invest time into planning and executing a strategic product content program that includes the tips above among others. By providing customers (through the retailers they shop at) with accurate, complete, optimized information, shoppers are more likely to turn from simply browsing your products to buying them.
