Increase your content marketing strategy with shoppable features. Drive sales from your posts. Adjust your efforts to the attention span drop. Make your content shoppable thanks to interactive tools.
Exit links make exploring the web intuitive and fast. It’s changed our content consumption behaviours. We are lazy people now. We find something interesting and we want to buy in a second. Without unnecessary searching. Time has come to make content shoppable. Not only educational, useful, and lead nurturing. Content can be an efficient seller. Without loosing its quality.
What Makes Content Shoppable
You already know how to drive sales from Instagram to your e-commerce (if not please check out this guidebook). Before we focus on driving sales through different kinds of content let’s lay down what content shoppable term actually means. Defining Shoppable Content report (Thank you guys from Styla and Smartzer for a great job) describes it as:
… any type of content (i.e. videos, articles, images, etc) that provides a direct purchasing opportunity and allows consumers to either add products to cart directly from what they are viewing or be taken to a product page and continue to shop from there.
That definition is promising. It means that your possibilities are limitless. Check out your media. All of them: earned, owned, paid, shared. Almost every article, post, or picture can be a seller. When making it shoppable try out to enriched them with a few of these elements:
- interactive content – quizzes, polls, assessments, surveys – great features to build engagement and convert viewers into customers. Check out this example below. Learn how to entertain your audience and give them a chance to become leads;
- rich media tags – allows you to add details and implement narrative elements directly to your images and videos;
- video tutorials – people love to see how things work. Add links to your videos and make navigation from videos to products pages easy. Educate, entertain and sell solutions;
- social hubs – add a social page on your website which allows you to gather all that user-generated content. Link all that content with your products or services. Extra value of social proof and short way from finding something to payment;
All that types of content can be used to drive sales. Actually, here appears the challenge. How to create and manage content that sells without mentioning it directly?
How to Create Content For Different Kinds of Buyers
Content marketing is known as:
a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
In this Content Marketing Institute definition appears forgotten truth – content marketing should drive profitable customer action. Modern marketers often focus on other advantages of content marketing – SEO value, building the authority, educate and entertain the audience. They are important parts and benefits of the content marketing. But they are not ultimate goals. Your efforts should be action-oriented. This is the way you need to enrich your marketing strategy with tools that make your content shoppable.
When creating your campaigns remember that you have two types of targeting groups. Quick buyers and leads who needs to be nurtured. You still stand by inbound methodology. But you have to shorten the buyer’s journey for the first group and deliver valuable content to the second team. Interactive content solutions (described above) allows you to take care of both potential kinds of customers.
Decided ones can leave their contacts, navigate to e-commerce or click shopping cart. Be sure that you make a use of the right moment. With others, you will have to go through the whole inbound process. From strangers to visitors, from visitors to leads, from leads to customers and from customers to promoters. Some of them may be ready to buy your stuff earlier than you think. At any stage of the funnel, you can deliver shoppable content.
Content marketing works. Allows marketers to generate leads, nurturing them and converting into customers. But due to the instant evolution of our shopping behaviour, even the best marketing solutions need development. Now it’s time to make content shoppable.
#content marketing #Drive Sales #eCommerce #interactive content #online sales