‘Content is king’ is the popular axiom in e-commerce marketing. There are many reasons why this assertion is true.
For starters, a company’s content regarding its products or services is often the difference between selling and not selling. Your company’s product content forms a direct link with generating and attracting traffic to an e-commerce website.
Analysts believe product content greatly influences consumer buying decisions, behind pricing and product delivery times. To turn lookers into buyers, you must set up a system for grading content quality and effectiveness.
Product content derives its potency from strong descriptions of product information.
Visitors to your eCommerce website are busy and have an avalanche of options. Therefore, the content for your products and services must be concise, understandable, and straight-to-the-point.
Therefore, common sense points to proper product descriptions that meet the mark. These tips can serve as rules of thumb to follow for grading content and writing potent product descriptions:
1. Have a Good Idea About Your Target Audience
The first step to creating a great product description centres on identifying and marking your target audience or market. Knowing your market will help you ascertain the most compelling features of your product. These will attract and keep the attention and loyalty of your audience.
Assessing the buyer’s personas is at the heart of producing an in-depth product description. A buyer persona comprises the natural characteristics of potential and existing clients. As you construct your product description pages, the following questions should shine a light on the buyers you seek:
- How did this potential or existing client reach your product page?
- What are their interests, hobbies, likes, put-offs, etc?
- What aspects of your eCommerce store would attract this buyer and why?
- How do you think this person would describe the product to another individual?
- What features or benefits would interest this person the most?
Keeping these questions in mind enables you to create tailored content that turns visitors into customers.
2. Zoom in on the Benefits of the Product for the Client
Don’t necessarily bombard your audience with descriptions of features and benefits right from the outset. Instead, after an adequate introduction, it’s standard practice to lay out a structured description of your products’ benefits.
You should showcase the benefits as much as possible. Another rule of thumb is to show the buyer how using your product or service will benefit them.
Remember that a product feature is an accurate description of one product feature. This description should provide technical information. On the other hand, a product benefit tells the customer how the product can improve their life.
Before writing product descriptions, outline the product’s features and benefits. Consider how your product or service enhances the pleasure or assuages pain points for your customers.
3. Don’t Cut Corners – Tell a Compelling Story
While this tip contradicts the preceding one at face value, it reinforces the underlying principle. At its most basic, a strong product description should contain relevant details and be persuasive. It should pack an emotional punch. Beyond your choice of words and page set-up, closing the deal means appealing to your customers’ emotions.
Telling a product story connects with potential and existing buyers emotionally rather than on a transactional level. Make your story link with the buyer’s experiences by shining a light on questions they ask. Who invented the product or service? Where did the creators draw inspiration from? What challenges were encountered in bringing the product to reality?
Outlining this scenario vividly shows the product to the buyer beyond what just talking about features and other specifications can do. If the buyer thinks the product meets their needs, you’ll get the sale.
4. Mind Your Language
Your medium of communication matters if you want to make consistent online sales. Your product description should have the tone and feel of conversing with a close friend or family member.
Remember that you are not reading from a prepared script in these circumstances. Instead, your tone is natural as you give the benefits of the product or service naturally.
Often, this friendly talk abhors empty adjectives or sweeping claims; you will dwell on giving a helpful description that focuses on the product’s benefits.
5. Go for Words That Precipitate Action
You must understand that certain words and phrases have the inherent capacity to elicit an emotional response in people. Studies show that once individuals connect with your products emotionally, their chances of buying are higher.
These words, sometimes known as power words, make your descriptions of product attributes jump off the page. They enter the minds and hearts of your target audience. Some of these words include the following:
- Amazing
- Beautiful
- Blissful
- Great
- Magical
- Mind-blowing
- Wonderful
- Wondrous
These powerful descriptions tell your customers your products are genuine and convey that they are getting premium value for their money.
6. Make Your Product Description Easy to Understand
In this millennium, time is of the essence, and as people continue to live life on the trot, you can only afford to have a product description that is easy to scan and concise.
A study reveals that individuals often read only 16 percent of the content on the average product page due to their increasingly shortened attention spans.
So it’s best to capture all the essentials of your product description pages in that readable bracket to stand any chance of connecting with your client and making a sale.
7. Search Engines are Your Friends
To boost your sales further, you must learn to use search engine optimisation (SEO) to increase your products’ mileage and visibility. SEO effectively attracts new clients to your page, which is the first step in convincing an individual to buy your products.
SEO revolves around using keywords, especially words that search engines like Google index in response to inquiries from online visitors and customers.
8. A Good Image Drives Sales
A rich image is a great addition to accentuate excellent product description writing. Why, you ask? Recent studies reveal that over 63% of customers consider digital assets, such as photos, accompanying a product as the primary purchase influencer.
Vivid photos will often show the customer all or most of the key features of your product. They will also appeal to the client’s mind, allowing them to imagine having this product as a part of daily life.
The above tips are part of the arsenal you need to grade content to boost your online sales.
9. Grading Content
At its core, grading content examines the means and processes for ensuring that your marketing content passes necessary assessment tests on both qualitative and, to a lesser degree, quantitative levels.
Grading equates to evaluation, and as a business owner, you need to shine the light on what works continually or not, concerning product sales.
Questions that readily come to mind for online businesses include the following. “Is this ad, blog post, or social post good enough to share?” “Will this marketing strategy or channel increase my revenue base?”
Grading content often involves taking steps and implementing measures based on observable market trends and expectations. The ultimate aim is to find the right mix of product content and marketing strategy that leads to sales and repeated transactions.
The following are good points for grading content to drive sales:
10. Place a Premium on Value
Your product content can only go so far in boosting your financial bottom line when customers feel and believe that your product description will do everything it says it will do and so much more.
The latter “so much more” can mean several things. To some, the value might be a comic rendition of using the product, a free sample of designer perfume, or a helpful tip on purchasing a home.
The bottom line borders on the customer leaving your eCommerce platform satisfied with the thought that they received some added value from the transaction.
In another sense, the value derived from your product content should comprise any unique, original, or exclusive content or information your target audience cannot get anywhere else.
So, a good strategy is to review your business and determine how your product can satisfy your customers on many levels.
11. Go For the Right Context
Have you noticed that there are periods when you experience super bumper sales, while at other times, transactions trickle in a dime a dozen? It could be that you have not given much thought to the issue of context in your product content marketing efforts.
No two customers are ever the same, and each comes to the marketplace for different reasons.
Some instances will suffice at this point. For some people, ad campaigns are more meaningful when there are no distractions, like an exciting boo; hence, they are better able to pay attention.
In another scenario, using a comedian to promote the efficacy of a diet plan may shore up purchase numbers, even as your customers enjoy the laughter.
These scenarios collapse into a term known as context marketing. Content marketing involves timing your product content communication. You want it to reach your target audience when it’s most necessary.
In other words, your product content provides the appropriate content to the right audience at the most suitable moment. Context marketing also considers the specific traits and personality of your target customer.
Successfully grading content should emphasise providing the appropriate, time-based context.
12. Meeting Expectations is Key
Your product content should set realistic goals so customers can look forward to achieving their objectives of using the product or service. Your product features should do what they say they will, and consistently.
You must understand that customers have numerous choices for their online shopping needs. Delivering a customer experience that meets expectations and pushes customers to shop with you is essential, a nd it all starts with your product content.
13. Embrace Originality
Again, this tip wants you to focus on where your product content can open new doors and give new experiences to your existing and potential clients. Originality can range from creating a new product or service to churning out a creative design for something already existing or presenting a unique mix of everyday things, ideas, and concepts.
Suppose a product offers something new and off-the-charts. In that case, customers will often engage in word-of-mouth advertising to achieve two things: tell them about their pleasant experience using the product and make actionable recommendations to other individuals to try out your product.
14. Raise the Standards for Quality
In the immediate analysis, product content quality involves eliminating typographical errors and ensuring images are vivid and purposeful. Other considerations will examine how easily your business pages load and present information when queried.
If your communication medium is full of errors and your site is slow, customers may think your products will perform just as poorly.
Therefore, consistent, compelling, engaging, and qualitative content increases brand loyalty, minimises shopping cart abandonment, and reduces complaints and returns. Ultimately, a product is deemed just as good as the information given alongside it.
15. Find a Balance as to Length
At every point in your advertising campaign, you must decide how long or short your engagement with your client will be, especially in this age of Google crawlers and SEO. And in most cases, the customer’s wants and temperament should determine how long or brief your post should be.
If your audience wants to learn a 3-second trick to folding shirts faster, then your educational material should not include a 45-minute video tutorial. If people need contact information to help make a decision, they should reach their goal in one or two clicks on your web pages.
One effective means of assessing the length of your product content is to look at the demographics of your existing and potential client bases. Are your customers always on the move, viewing pages and placing orders with their mobile phones?
If that is the situation, you should obtain additional metadata such as the times spent on each page and the information searched for. The knowledge gleaned from these sources should help you craft the most appropriate product content strategy regarding the length of your posts.
16. Clarity is King
From the outset, jumbled, disjointed product content increases customers’ chances of leaving your site. At the very minimum, for clarity, visuals should complement and not compete with text; ideas should be easy to identify, and design should embrace intuitiveness.
You can avoid enemies of clarity and precision, such as using illogical and incomplete arguments, industry jargon, metaphors, and business buzzwords.
The simple premise for achieving clarity is keeping your message straight-to-the-point and straightforward, so your customers see only the most relevant material on your product pages.
Temper Your Content with Credibility
Your content must be believable; otherwise, your customers may leave your pages altogether. For instance, promising users will shed 30 pounds in days, taking a weight loss pill is a lie.
However, providing referrals from trustworthy sources and using original, unedited images isn’t. Alluding to the possible is the right place to start building credible content.
17. Be Guided by a Rubric
You must create a framework to oversee your posts to derive the most from your product content regarding boosted sales. According to workable global standards, specific content and rubric form depend on associated factors.
Your target audience and client base, including consumer search preferences and behaviour, all matter. You also need to keep your content marketing strategy in mind.
Reviewers can provide a third eye, providing objective analysis for increased efficiencies and performance. These reviewers will grade your product content against the following inquiries:
Is the product description…
- Appropriate to the product?
- Free of factual mistakes?
- Filler and marketing copy, or authentic and valuable?
- Free of spelling, punctuation, and capitalisation errors?
- The right length?
- Clear and easy to understand?
An essential part of your rubric will involve allowing reviewers to leave feedback and suggestions for improving your product content pages to boost sales.
Make Use of Technology to Improve and Evaluate the Quality of Your Content
To boost sales, you should focus on managing and scaling your content appropriately. Technology significantly affects this process. Properly using tools helps you handle, observe, and enhance your product content for better success.
A PIM System Helps You Keep Your Content in One Place
A PIM system makes it easier for businesses to look after, update, and distribute information about their products using a single platform. You need this tool to manage the sales of several products in various stores.
Thanks to PIM global, your team will always have those elements in the same way in all your retailers. There is less chance of mistakes, you no longer need to do much manual updating, and you gain more time. If you’re a member of PIM or simply part of a startup, the system ensures your content is high quality and your brand is trustworthy.
A DAM System can Help You Boost the Value of Your Assets.
A visual component is just as valuable as the text in communication. A digital asset management system, or DAM, is designed to assist you in organising your images, videos, and documents of products. You can easily access your files from different people or teams on other platforms.
With a unified DAM and PIM system, you can merge information with great images. This way, your content can work more efficiently and accomplish more. Clear, high-resolution images with correct specs make it easier for customers to understand the product, which leads to more sales.
Make Content Similar and United in Every Channel You Choose
Consistency builds genuine trust. Ensure that your product’s descriptions, details, and images are the same on all websites and platforms you use. A PIM DAM system helps ensure consistency in your messages, which supports your brand and enables you to become more loyal to your customers.
Grading Content to Drive Sales Success
A lot can come from grading content; for every eCommerce business, sales is one thing that crowns the efforts. Content is kin; if you have read this article, you should understand how true this is.
Always remember that the number of customers you attract is as high-quality as the effort you put into your product content. Grading your content will go a long way toward showing customers you care by giving them content that matters.
Always look for areas to improve your product content; sales can only climb. Grading content tells you what content to toss, what to keep, what to fix, and what to build from.
Now that you know why grading content is key to growing eCommerce sales, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.
