Content commerce

Promoting your eCommerce store is essential to increase conversions and drive revenue. Yet brands today have discovered that customers don’t necessarily want to be sold to. Instead, they want to be educated and entertained about their products and services. Merchants must blend the power of content with commerce to create content-driven eCommerce experiences that convert and retain more customers.

This article will explore:

• What is content commerce

• The benefits of content commerce

• How to implement content commerce

• How to drive content commerce with headless architecture

What Is Content Commerce?

Content commerce is the process of publishing, promoting, and distributing content in order to drive eCommerce sales —essentially content marketing for eCommerce. Brands strategically combine content with their commerce efforts to provide a better customer experience and ultimately increase conversions and sales. 

Why does content commerce matter? Well, much of that has to do with just how critical content marketing is to success in the modern eCommerce market. According to Semrush’s State of Content Marketing 2022 Global Report, 97% of respondents cited content marketing as an important part of their overall marketing strategy. 

Ecommerce is no exception. eCommerce brands must deliver high-quality experiences across devices that capture people’s attention, builds trust, and converts. The best and most scalable way to do this is by creating content. 

Benefits of Content Commerce

There are several advantages that eCommerce brands can gain by combining content and commerce. Here are just a few of them:

Differentiate Your Brand 

The eCommerce landscape is growing more competitive by the day. Content commerce provides a way to differentiate your brand as you can use content to tell a story about your brand. Everything from what inspired you to launch your eCommerce store to the deeper purpose behind why you sell what you sell can help your brand to stand out from the competition. 

Lower Customer Acquisition Costs

Content allows you to lower the costs of acquiring new customers. When potential customers come across high-quality content on blogs, social media, and other channels they visit often, they may be more inclined to find out more about your store and the products you sell. Using these inbound marketing tactics can decrease how much you need to spend on paid ads and other high-cost marketing tactics. 

High-Quality Customer Experience

Brands that successfully combine content and commerce can create a high-quality customer experience. The primary goal of content commerce is to arm customers with helpful information. Nowadays, potential customers enjoy doing their own research about a brand and its products. They look at what the competition is doing, the deeper meaning behind what a business sells, and whether or not it aligns with their own beliefs. Delivering content experiences that enable potential customers to find these answers faster and at various touch points throughout the customer journey helps to improve their overall experience. 

Improved Customer Relationships & Loyalty

Providing customers with great content helps to strengthen the relationship between them and your brand. These customers can be loyalists who promote your products by word of mouth, helping to entice additional customers to make purchases. 

Higher Conversions

Many eCommerce brands today want to provide a better experience for their customers, but at the end of the day, the purpose of any business is to drive sales and revenue. Luckily, by adopting content and commerce, it is possible to turn more visitors into paying customers, many of whom can become loyal advocates that keep coming back for more. 

6 Ways to Implement Content Commerce

Now that you understand what you can gain through content commerce, it’s time to start implementing it. Here are a few tips for doing just that:

1. Video Marketing

From social media channels like TikTok and Instagram to YouTube, video continues to grow in importance. According to Statista, digital video advertising spending will increase to $78.5 billion by 2023 in the US alone. Today’s top brands are using video to market their products through unboxings, product descriptions, and more.

However, you can also use video marketing to offer a behind-the-scenes look at how a product gets made, how you source the raw materials or showcasing a customer or brand advocate putting the product to use. 

2. Educational Blogs and Interviews

Since consumers love to do their own research, another way to combine content and commerce is through educational blogs and interviews. Long-from guides that combine text, images, and videos can perfectly explain how a product or service works. Also, interviews with experts in your industry or at your company can be beneficial for positioning your brand as a thought leader who people come to when they want to know where they should be spending their money. 

3. Personalized Recommendations

When you produce a lot of content, it’s important that you don’t give your potential customers anything they don’t want. Otherwise, your brand will turn them off, and the hard work you did to produce that content won’t give the results you were looking for. 

Delivering personalized content to your customers is one way to get the most out of content and commerce. Consider a prospect’s purchase history or the location where they’re buying from to personalize product recommendations. For example, if a prospect has recently purchased an appliance for their kitchen from your eCommerce store, you can suggest additional products to help complete the entire set. 

4. Case Studies and Testimonials 

Who do potential customers trust the most? Usually, other customers who have already interacted with your brand. Conduct interviews and collect testimonials from happy customers and use them to create case studies that can be used to showcase how good your product is at solving customer problems. 

You can even combine other ways to implement content commerce like video marketing to create more engaging testimonials. 

5. Quizzes

An innovative way to create more content for your eCommerce website is with quizzes. In a world driven by social media, users can share interactive quizzes quickly and easily to promote your brand. Quizzes are also a valuable way to collect research about your potential audience and create products and other content that interests them. 

6. User-Generated Content

Another way to implement content commerce is by encouraging user-generated content. Ask your customers to create videos, images, and more about your products, and then use that content to help promote your eCommerce store. You can reshare the best videos on social media and hope to go viral by adding a hashtag or getting assistance from an influencer. 

In Conclusion

Content Commerce is a powerful eCommerce strategy that can help you to boost your conversion rate. These tactics are successful because content commerce creates entertaining experiences for customers which creates a positive impression on the brand and product, increasing the likelihood of conversions and repeat customers alike!