Product Content
Product content is a vital component of your brand’s eCommerce strategy. Most shoppers not only buy products online but blend online research and price comparisons into their in-store shopping experiences. The path-to-purchase, whether in-store or online, increasingly includes a stop at your products’ pages at Amazon, Walmart, and other online retailers. But product pages are not just a conversion lever; they can also be the frontline in your marketing efforts.
Fifty-five percent of shoppers begin their searches on Amazon, while 28% start with a search engine like Google. Even those starting with a search engine might end up at a retailer since many of the top results are often links to product pages on Amazon. Your product content has to work hard because it needs to do several jobs at once depending on where the shopper is in the buying cycle. Your product content needs to attract new shoppers, inform shoppers who are considering your product, and convert shoppers who are ready to buy. But beyond helping shoppers decide what to buy, unique product content supports brand equity. Brands spend billions of dollars on advertising creative and media distribution, building large and engaged social media communities, shopper marketing, and product research and development.
Unique Product Content: Discovery
One of the most common product content issues that brands face is incomplete or outdated content. That’s why our solution allows brands to audit and measure the quality of your eCommerce product content across multiple stores. But before the shopper even makes it to your product page, you have to get them to click on your product from the search results page. That means that your product titles and your main product image have to do a lot of heavy lifting.
Some brands struggle with providing unique content for each product at their online stores, especially if they sell a lot of the same or similar products. But unique descriptors are especially critical for your product titles; duplicate content can cause confusion for shoppers and damage your search rank. Make sure you include many product attributes in the product title, including brand, materials, key ingredients, color, size, quantity, and any other unique signifiers that fit within the character limits. Differentiation and descriptiveness will help guide the shopper.
Your main product image is just as important as your product titles. This image has to tell a story to the shopper in an instant and like your product titles has to be able to show differentiation from your other products (and your competitors). Unique product content for both your product titles and your main product images are extremely important from a discovery perspective. Shoppers will quickly scan search results to find what they’re looking for. If your titles are not descriptive enough or if your images don’t showcase the product well, you will not earn that click through to the product page.
Unique Product Content: Consideration
Once you have the shopper on your product page, make sure you’re including every relevant product detail that will help her make a purchase. If shoppers are reading this detailed information, they are deeply into the consideration process. Add bullet points that summarize the product description as well as long-form text that details the features and benefits of the product. Specifics such as directions, safety information, or nutritional information are particularly useful. For these descriptions, make sure you focus on unique key phrases, not just the keywords that you might focus on for your titles. And depending on the category, there may be metadata fields such as size and color you can populate to provide more information that allows the shopper to filter results.
In addition to rich descriptions, add multiple product photos. Multiple shots from different angles, images that illustrate scale, flat shots that zoom as well as lifestyle images all contribute to the consideration process. Remember: a shopper can’t pick up an online product like she would in-store; the product descriptions and images are stand-ins for the visceral experience.
Unique Product Content: Conversion
Now that you have the shopper’s attention, there are a few ways unique product content can help you win the sale. For example, adding enhanced or A+ content for your key SKUs and must-stocks. Enhanced content allows brands to feature unique image and text layouts, product comparisons, feature comparison charts, and how-to videos. This rich content will increase engagement on your product pages and drive shopper conversion. And A+ content is only available to manufacturers, so it is inherently unique content and gives brands an advantage over third-party sellers.
Lastly, don’t forget that user-generated content (i.e., ratings and reviews) can provide a wealth of unique content for your product page. Shoppers are the best at using shopper language – and they’re likely using the same words to leave reviews that they are using to search for your products. You can even mine these reviews for keywords and phrases that you can incorporate into your product titles and descriptions. So, what are the golden rules for winning on search and conversion? Be descriptive. Be clear. Be unique.
