‘Content is king’ is the popular axiom in the eCommerce marketing space. There are many reasons why this assertion is true.
For starters, a company’s content regarding the goods or services it offers is often the difference between selling and not. Your company’s product content forms a direct link with generating and attracting traffic to an eCommerce website.
Analysts believe product content has a great influence on consumer buying decisions, behind pricing and product delivery times. You need to set up a system for grading content quality and effectiveness to turn lookers into buyers.
Product content bears its potency from strong descriptions of product information.
Visitors to your eCommerce website are not only busy, they have an avalanche of options. In effect, the content for your products and services must be concise, understandable and straight-to-the-point.
Therefore, common sense points to the need to have useful 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 centers 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.
At the heart of producing an in-depth product description is assessing the personae of the buyer. 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 the buyers you seek:
- How did this potential or existing client reach your product page?
- What are his or her 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 turn 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. Rather, after an adequate introduction, it’s standard practice to lay out a structured description of your products’ benefits.
You may want to showcase benefits as much as possible. But 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.
Start writing product descriptions by outlining the product’s features and benefits. Think about 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 at face value this tip seems to stand at odds with the preceding one, it reinforces the underlying principle. At its most basic, a strong product description should contain relevant details and possess the power to convince. 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 on an emotional plane, rather than 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. Rest assured, 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 having a conversation with a close friend or family member.
Remember that in this circumstance, you are not reading from a prepared script. Instead, your tone is natural as you give the benefits of the product or service in a natural manner.
Often, this friendly talk abhors empty adjectives or sweeping claims; rather you will dwell on giving a helpful description that focuses on the benefits of the product.
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 once individuals connect with your products emotionally, chances are higher they will buy.
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 power descriptions tell your customers your products are genuine. They also convey the idea that they are getting the 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 due to increasing shortened attention spans, individuals will often read only 16 percent of the content of the average product page.
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 further boost your sales, you must get a hang of using search engine optimization (SEO) to give mileage and visibility to your products. The bottom line is that SEO is an effective means of attracting new clients to your page, which is the very first step in convincing an individual to buy your products.
SEO revolves around the use of keywords, especially the kind of words that search engines like Google index as a response to inquiries from online visitors and customers.
8. A good image drives sales.
A great addition to accentuates great product description writing is a rich image. Why you ask? Recent studies reveal over 63% of customers consider digital assets, such as photos, accompanying a product as the primary purchase influencer.
More often than not, vivid photos will show the customer all or most of the key features about your product. They will also appeal to the mind’s eye of the client, allowing them to imagine having this product as a part of daily life.
The above tips are part of the arsenal you need grading content to boost your online sales.
Grading Content
At its core, grading content looks at the means and processes you can take in ensuring that your marketing content passes necessary assessment tests on both qualitative, and to a lesser degree, quantitative levels.
Grading, in a sense, equates to evaluation, and as a business owner, you would need to shine the light on what works continually or not, concerning product sales.
Questions that readily come to mind for online businesses should 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 comprises taking steps and implementing measures, based on observable market trends and expectations. The ultimate aim is finding the right mix for product content and marketing strategy that leads to sales and repeated transactions.
The following ways are good points for grading content to drive sales:
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 all that it says it will do and so much more.
The latter “so much more” can mean a number of things. To some, the value might be a comic rendition on 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 takeaway from the transaction.
In another sense, the value derived from your product content should comprise any material any unique, original, or exclusive content or information that your target audience cannot get anywhere else.
So a good strategy is sitting back and taking an overview of your business, to determine ways by which your product can satisfy your customers on many fronts.
Go For the Right Context
Have you noticed that there are periods you experience super bumper sales, while at other times, transactions seem to trickle in a dime a dozen? Well, 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 book, hence they are better able to pay more attention.
In another scenario, using a comedian to play up 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. In a nutshell, 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 appropriate moment. Context marketing also weighs heavily on the specific traits and personality of your target customer.
So successfully grading content should lay sufficient emphasis on providing the appropriate, time-based context.
Meeting Expectations is Key
Your product content should set realistic goals, so that the customer can look forward to achieving their objectives of using the product or service. Your product features should do what they say they will – and on a consistent basis.
You must understand that customers have numerous choices for their online shopping needs. It’s essential to deliver a customer experience that meets expectations, and pushes customers to shop with you – and it all starts with your product content.
Embrace Originality
Again, this tip wants you to focus on the areas that your product content can open new doors and give new experiences to your existing and potential clients. Originality can hover anywhere from creating a new type of product or service, churning out a creative design for something that already exists, or presenting a unique mix of two everyday things or ideas or concepts.
If a product offers something new and off-the-chart, customers will often engage in word of mouth advertising to achieve two things: tell of their pleasant experience using the product and make actionable recommendations to other individuals to try out your product.
Raise the Standards for Quality
In the immediate analysis, product content quality involves factors such as eliminating typographical errors and ensuring images are vivid and purposeful. Other considerations will look at the ease with which your business pages load and present information when queried.
If your medium of communication is full of errors and your site is slow, customers may think your products will perform just as badly.
Therefore, you should note that consistent, compelling, engaging and qualitative content increases brand loyalty, minimizes shopping cart abandonment and reduces the number of complaints and returns. Ultimately, a product is deemed just as good as the information given alongside it.
Find a Balance as to Length
At every point in your advertising campaign, you will have to 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 wants, temperament of the customer should determine how long or how brief your post should be.
If your audience wants to learn a 3-second trick to folding shirts faster, then your educative material should not put them through a 45-minute video tutorial. If people need just some 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 how long your product content should be is looking 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 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.
Clarity is King
From the outset, jumbled, disjointed product content increases the chances your customers will leave your site. At the very minimum- for the sake of clarity, visuals should complement – and not compete with text; ideas should have the property of easy identification, and design should embrace intuitiveness.
You can avoid enemies of clarity and precision such as using illogical and incomplete arguments, industry jargon, metaphors as well as 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 have the essential trait of being believable; otherwise, you may find that your customers may leave your pages altogether. For instance, promising users will shed 30 pounds in days taking a weight loss pill is lying.
However, providing referrals from trustworthy sources and using original, unedited images isn’t. Alluding to the possible is the right place to start in building credible content.
Be Guided by a Rubric
To derive the most from your product content regarding boosted sales, you would need to create a framework to oversee your posts. According to workable global standards, specific content and the form of the rubric depend on associated factors.
Your target audience and client base, including consumer search preferences and behavior, all matter. You also need to keep your content marketing strategy in mind.
Reviewers can help 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 capitalization errors?
- The right length?
- Clear and easy to understand?
An essential part of your rubric will center on making provisions for reviewers to leave feedback and suggestions for improving your product content pages, to help bolster sales.
Grading Content to Drive Sales Success
A lot can come from grading content, and for every eCommerce business, sales is one thing that crowns the efforts. Content really is king, and if you have read through this article, you should understand how true this is.
Always remember 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 to them.
Always look for areas to improve your product content and 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.
