Efficient Content And Images: Shape Your Perfect Online Store
Have you ever thought about the reason behind the increasing interest of people in the online retail market? The answer is the comfort it offers to them. They can simply purchase their desired products online while sitting back at their home and get them delivered in a few days.
According to Statista, the eCommerce retail sales worldwide accounted for around 4.9 Trillion US dollars, which is expected to grow up to 7.4 Trillion US dollars by the year 2025. In the year 2021, around 2.14 billion people around the world bought merchandise online, which translated into 27.08% of the total world population. The eCommerce retail market is expected to grow up to 22% of the total retail market worldwide by the year 2023.
Do you want to grab a fair share of this promising retail market? If the answer is yes, then you need to take time and make sure that your website offers what digital buyers expect from it. It should be noted that while the eCommerce retail market is a promising industry, it is a highly competitive and unforgiving industry as well. If users are returning disappointedly from an eCommerce website because of any reason, the chances of them coming back are quite limited. Therefore, make sure you are mitigating such a process.
How Can Content Help You Retain Digital Buyers?
You need to prioritize the user experience (UX) on your eCommerce website, and content is the key to an optimum user experience (UX). Hence, you need to make sure that all the types of content an average digital buyer wants to see on an eCommerce site are available on your website. It is only possible when you have the right approach to the creation of content (written and visual) for your website. We have put together a guide to the creation of content and images for your website to help you in this regard. Read on to know more details.
The Types Of Content Suitable For eCommerce Websites
We have put together a list of various content types that should be on your eCommerce website to help you understand the use and importance of all these types. Further details are given below:
Text
The very first type that comes to our mind when we hear the word content is text, and rightly so. You can’t overlook the importance of text! Images and other types of content may help a digital buyer understand the appearance of merchandise, but the text is required to tell them about every single detail of the product. Users might miss plenty of information if you provide them with images only instead of text.
Images
A majority of people around the world are visual learners. They want to see the product from different angles and in different colors before they make their mind to purchase it. Hence, you need to make sure that you have what is substantial to satisfy your buyers. Images are the solution to the requirements of digital buyers coming to your eCommerce website. Just make sure that the images you are using on your website come in high resolution and fulfill their purpose.
Videos
Videos allow you to complement images on your website. You can take assistance from models who can present themselves wearing or using the merchandise offered by you for sale. This will help you make digital buyers understand what they are actually going to buy and how it would look in real life. To showcase the real-life applications of your products, you need to ensure that videos are available in a high resolution. You can also encourage your customers to show how they are using products purchased from your online store through videos.
Infographics
Infographics are specifically designed for people with shorter spans. People of this kind don’t bother reading long descriptions or blogs. However, as a seller, you need to make sure that such people are fully aware of the salient features of your product. Infographics allow you to do so. With the help of imagery and attractive design, you will be able to grab the attention of people with a shorter attention span. Once you capture their attention, the text on an infographic can convey your message effectively.
Carousels
It is a rather new type of content, but it is really effective, especially for the people who want to see pictures and text side by side. Carousels allow you to present your product from various angles and tell buyers about the details of the product at once. If you haven’t used this type of content on your eCommerce website yet, give it a go!
Ideas Regarding Text Creation
Generally, it is quite a tricky task for eCommerce vendors to come up with meaningful text on their websites. It happens because of the lack of ideas. We have come up with a few sources where you can get ideas about the generation of text on your eCommerce website.
Your Target Audience Personas
The first and foremost thing you need to get the idea for the creation of content, especially the written content, is your audience persona. In simple words, the persona of your audience can be described as the universal record of your ideal customers. The idea is to take account of the demographics of your audience, their behaviors, goals, values, the source of information they use to know the details of a particular product, and their challenges. If you are capable of cracking the persona of your audience, you can easily craft tailor-made content, which will grab the attention of your ideal customers for sure.
Your target audience is not just limited to people who are already familiar with your product or service. You can also reach out to new customers by understanding their needs and addressing them in your marketing campaigns. The more you know about your target audience, the better you can serve them and increase sales.
Content of Your Competitors
Another important source of ideas for the generation of content is your competitors. As we all know, eCommerce is a highly competitive industry where every vendor wants to generate more sales. This objective requires the generation of quality content to entice digital buyers. You can check the content of your competitors to get an idea about the text that should be on your website. Make sure you take account of all the positives and negatives in the content of your competitors. All you need to do is implement the positives in your content and avoid the negatives. However, it should be made sure that you don’t get over-influenced by the content of your competitors. The uniqueness of your content shouldn’t be compromised. A plagiarism checker can help you do that easily.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is not only going to help you increase the visibility or ranking of your website upon embedding important keywords in your content. Successful keyword research also helps you understand what your targeted audience wants from you. You can craft content based on your keyword research and provide answers to FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) as well. Just make sure that the keywords and content based on the keyword research are highly relevant to the products you are offering for sale.
Meaningful Product Descriptions
Here are some important things you need to consider while creating product descriptions on your website.
Above the Fold Approach
Many eCommerce vendors overlook this factor, but it is as essential as anything else. You need to make sure that the product you are displaying on your website comes with a product description that follows the above-the-fold approach. You need to make sure that a digital buyer who comes to your website to purchase a particular product doesn’t scroll down to see important details about the product. These important details include the name of the manufacturer, price, and the name of the product. This approach will help your customers make their minds regarding the purchase of products immediately.
Reduced Noise
This factor relates to the aforementioned one; you need to make sure that the page displaying your product along with its description is free of any noise. By noise, we mean the clutter that can easily distract the customer. The presence of too much clutter will confuse the customers, and there is a high probability that they would forget the actual reason why they were on the page, and it would lead to a near-miss. Hence, make sure the page with product images and its description is free of any other type of content that is capable of causing distraction.
Unique Descriptions
Another thing that you need to be careful about while writing descriptions for your products is to ensure that they are not similar to the ones written by your competitors. Ignoring this factor may lead to penalties by search engines. Hence, make sure you check your descriptions using a free plagiarism checker. You can find plenty of plagiarism tools available on the internet. Use them to check for the plagiarism of your product description. If you find your description matched to any other source, make it unique.
How To Use Images?
Images play an important role when it comes to enticing digital buyers for purchase. Therefore, you need to make sure that you are using images in the best way possible on your website. Here are some tips and tricks regarding the use of images on your eCommerce website.
Multiple Angles To Showcase Your Product
Showcasing your products from multiple angles is necessary for eCommerce sales. The reason is they can view and feel the product without any restriction while purchasing. You can place multiple images of a product that capture the view of a particular product from various angles.
No Duplicates
Make sure that the products you are using are not used elsewhere. This will affect the reputation of your online store and create a bad impression. The best way to avoid such a situation is using a reverse image finder that allows you to search similar images. Simply upload the image you are using or planning to use on the utility and click on the search button. The reverse image search will come up with search results in a matter of seconds. Make sure that the image you are planning to use on your website is not used by any other eCommerce seller.
Get Ideas From Competitors
Your competitors can be the biggest source of inspiration for you. If you are finding it difficult to find the best way of presenting your products, a quick look at the images displayed on the website of your competitor can help you. You can understand the psychology and tactics of your competitors this way and then use the same methodology to showcase your products.
Benefits Of Having Useful Content
Here are some benefits of having useful content (text and visual) on your eCommerce website.
- Your website will offer an optimum user experience (UX).
- Useful content will compel users to make a purchase from your online store.
- Useful content encourages better engagement and understanding of digital buyers.
- Meaningful content of all types can help you increase the search engine visibility of your eCommerce website.
- It results in increased conversions.
- Useful content can help you build a trusted relationship with your audience.
How To Manage Efficiently Your Product Content
The eCommerce industry is growing more than ever before. If you want to secure a considerable share in this market, you need to step up your content creation tactics. Your content creation approach should be a balanced combination of text and visuals, including images and rich content.
Apart from the vague content creation process, retail players often face other significant challenges with product data management. Primary, it is the need to make product content adjustments to the external eCommerce shops’ requirements they want to be present on. As far as e-stores usually have different product data structures (taxonomy), it becomes a headache for businesses to manually edit product data sheets and automate their delivery to retailers. Thus, brands & retailers’ dilemma appeared around the questions of who should be responsible for the ongoing data update and distribution. In this case, a PIM system with advanced syndication capabilities help to solve this problem:
- Product content management in a central easy-to-navigate database;
- Flawless communication between the content, sales, and product teams;
- High-quality error-free content which is always up-to-date;
- Faster time-to-market and decreased hours spent on content adjustments;
- Automated product content exchange with a variety of sales channels.
We hope this information will help you shape your online store as per the needs of your audience and generate a better number of conversions resultantly. We wish you luck with your online store!