When every brand has a content strategy how do you stay ahead of the game? We see shoppable content as content marketing on steroids. Embedding metadata at the front end significantly increases engagement – just look at the figures:
• Hovering over the shoppable content increases eyeball seconds by 67% on average
• Shoppable content generates an average 10% CTR (Click Through Rate) – compared to 0.25% for banner ads.
Here are our five key steps to upping your content marketing game:
Inspire with shoppable content
Make sure your products are promoted in the right context. Behavioural economics research concludes that we’re not as logical as we like to think. We all make many of our key buying decisions with our intuitive animal brain.
Customers respond to visual stimuli, inspiring personalities and engaging stories that tap into their personal values. Aligning your products with online experiences that trigger feel-good emotions and hormones makes it much more likely people will want to interact with your brand.
Trigger action from shoppable videos
Consumers must be able to act on these inspiring experiences. That means introducing an interactive layer on top of your marketing content. Marketers need to make the conversion from engaged user to customer as seamless as possible.
The best way to trigger action is by creating shoppable videos. There are several good examples possible. Watch the best shoppable video examples here.
Listen to your audience
When people think about content marketing they tend to focus on the creative side. But effective content marketing is a blend of creativity and data. Data analysis is an active way of continuously listening to your customers’ needs and optimising the content you send out.
Develop one-to-one campaigns
AI provides new, efficient ways of doing what marketers of luxury brands have always done: track, measure, assess and learn from customer behaviour to tailor product offerings and communications. With the right data and insight, any brand can target segmented audiences with personalised, customer-centric content.
One-to-one marketing is now cost effective for everyone. AI makes quick work of the huge amounts of data generated by content marketing activity. Fast moving brands can deliver innovative, relevant experiences that boost customer engagement, conversion and retention, at scale.
Create innovative videos
This is the only way brands can stay relevant. AI is being introduced into society in all kinds of ways. There are apps that will tell you what kind of flower you have just photographed with your smartphone. Some brands are already harnessing AI to improve customer interaction.
Online personal stylists can analyse customer information and feedback to improve future recommendations. Cosmetics brand, Sephora, has a Virtual Artist that allows customers to ‘try on’ make-up and provides product suggestions. ASOS Virtual Search makes personalised recommendations based on pictures taken on a smartphone – the AI identifies shapes, colours and patterns, cross-references with ASOS stock and suggests relevant products.
Customers expect their favourite brands to be similarly innovative. They will be loyal evangelists of those brands that are early adopters of innovation.
We’d love to hear your thoughts!
