Content & Commerce: 3 Ways Brands Can Boost Revenues, Conversions

Most brands haven’t stream­lined their con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts to com­ple­ment and max­i­mize sales. How can brands con­sol­i­date these ini­tia­tives?

Pat Hong By Pat Hong from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 0 comments

New research from L2 Inc and Demand­ware has pro­vid­ed an in-depth explo­ration of the rela­tion­ship between con­tent mar­ket­ing and ecom­merce for 80 glob­al brands. The study shows that the major­i­ty of brands still haven’t stream­lined their con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts to com­ple­ment and fuel ecom­merce dri­ves, and pro­vides invalu­able insights for brands look­ing to con­sol­i­date the two ini­tia­tives.


In many ways, 2013 was the year of con­tent mar­ket­ing. Last year, the chan­nel final­ly sur­passed email, and social media as “the lead­ing focus of mar­keters world­wide”. It has result­ed in an over­all increase in bud­gets devot­ed to the pro­duc­tion of brand­ed con­tent; in West­ern Europe for exam­ple, as many as 56 per­cent of mar­keters plan to “sig­nif­i­cant­ly increase B2C con­tent mar­ket­ing spends” as report­ed in a study by Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute. The same study revealed that brand­ed con­tent now accounts for 24 per­cent of total mar­ket­ing bud­gets among North Amer­i­can com­pa­nies.

How­ev­er, while the val­ue of con­tent mar­ket­ing as a chan­nel has been secured, increas­ing­ly the chal­lenge for brands is in unit­ing their con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts with ecom­merce ini­tia­tives in a way that not only rais­es aware­ness, but dri­ves con­ver­sions. This is now a pri­or­i­ty for 51 per­cent of the 80 brands sur­veyed by L2.

For the most part, con­tent per­for­mance is assessed by three met­rics: web traf­fic, social media shares, and time spent on site. Direct sales were named as a KPI for just 44 per­cent of brands, and the over­all fog­gi­ness in attri­bu­tion met­rics cor­re­lates with Axiom Research’s find­ings that one-third of orga­ni­za­tions were unsure whether their con­tent mar­ket­ing invest­ments had increased sales.

The attri­bu­tion chal­lenge for con­tent mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, com­bined with a lack of recog­ni­tion of the need to accu­rate­ly mea­sure this among brands (the report found that only 4 per­cent of brands con­sid­ered attri­bu­tion to being their biggest bar­ri­er to suc­cess) has result­ed in mod­els and process­es which are often skewed or biased towards one extreme.

Con­tent and com­merce are often oper­at­ed by siloed depart­ments, with lit­tle real inter­ac­tion. The result: huge oppor­tu­ni­ties are being missed to pro­vide opti­mal user expe­ri­ences and increase rev­enues.

Elana Ander­son, Demand­ware senior vice pres­i­dent, world­wide mar­ket­ing, explained the need for brands to inte­grate their con­tent and com­merce expe­ri­ence deliv­ery:

It’s not about con­tent or com­merce; it’s about cre­at­ing the expe­ri­ences that con­sumers desire. To dif­fer­en­ti­ate in today’s com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place, brands are evolv­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence on-site with con­tent that engages and edu­cates the cus­tomer in a seam­less jour­ney flow­ing from dis­cov­ery to pur­chase.”

Where Are Brands Going Wrong?

The report point­ed to two spe­cif­ic areas where brands are fail­ing to unite their con­tent and com­merce efforts. How can brands start get­ting it right?

1. Avoid Producing Too Much Content

The boom in brand­ed con­tent mar­ket­ing has occa­sion­al­ly giv­en rise to what is com­mon­ly termed “con­tent shock”, used to describe the point at which the vol­ume of con­tent avail­able to con­sumers sur­pass­es their capac­i­ty to con­sume it. From a con­sumers per­spec­tive, there are a lot of com­pet­ing brands pro­vid­ing con­tent about prod­ucts, much more than it is pos­si­ble to digest.

Increas­ing­ly, cut­ting through the dig­i­tal noise means pro­duc­ing con­tent of excep­tion­al qual­i­ty, some­thing of gen­uine enter­tain­ment or use­ful­ness, as well as thought­ful dis­tri­b­u­tion.

2. Reclaim The Competitive Edge

For many brands, enhanced Ama­zon prod­uct detail pages, in com­bi­na­tion with their class lead­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and ser­vice deliv­ery, can offer an incred­i­bly rich over­all expe­ri­ence. Most orga­ni­za­tions will under­stand­ably find it dif­fi­cult to com­pete with Ama­zon on pric­ing or ful­fill­ment.

Con­tent pro­vides brands with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exceed that which Ama­zon is able to offer. Brands, with supe­ri­or knowl­edge and exper­tise of their own prod­ucts, and unique insights about their con­sumers, remain the best resource for con­sumers while research­ing and con­sid­er­ing their pur­chas­ing deci­sions.

The over­rid­ing chal­lenge for brands, then, is unit­ing their con­tent deliv­ery with their com­merce plat­forms, lever­ag­ing flex­i­ble plat­forms to sup­port unique content/commerce inte­gra­tions.

The Content And Commerce Black Hole

The prob­lem for most brands is that they sim­ply slip into their most com­fort­able mod­el, which is biased toward one extreme of either con­tent or com­merce, often based on his­tor­i­cal mar­ket­ing efforts. Name­ly, site invest­ments either opti­mize com­merce by pro­vid­ing a stream­lined push-to-cart and check­out expe­ri­ence; or they pri­or­i­tize rich con­tent resources to enhance engage­ment and build brand equi­ty.

In approx­i­mate­ly half of orga­ni­za­tions, the ecom­merce team owns con­tent cre­ation, focus­ing on using the chan­nel to improve con­ver­sions, accord­ing to the report. In the oth­er half, con­tent was owned by a mar­ket­ing or edi­to­r­i­al team, tasked pri­mar­i­ly with build­ing brand aware­ness. These rep­re­sent com­pet­ing objec­tives that ulti­mate­ly cre­ate rifts across site expe­ri­ences, and impact the qual­i­ty of con­tent being cre­at­ed.

The lack of cohe­sion cre­ates a bit of a black hole in the over­all user expe­ri­ence. Increas­ing­ly, retail brands that can weave togeth­er con­tent and com­merce will be the biggest win­ners.

Branded Fashion Content Outperforms Other Industries

In a telling dis­cov­ery, the report revealed that fash­ion indus­try brands proved to be the high­est per­form­ers in their con­tent mar­ket­ing con­ver­sion rate. The fol­low­ing graph illus­trates the esti­mat­ed con­tent con­ver­sion rate for the 80 sur­veyed brands in the report: content-and-commerce-brands Brands such as Estee Laud­er, Clar­ins, and Clin­iqe, hit­ting a 4 per­cent con­ver­sion rate, go some way in prov­ing the effi­ca­cy of brand­ed con­tent. As the study states, “brand­ed con­tent has the great­est impact on con­sumer pur­chase intent for low-con­sid­er­a­tion items, cre­at­ing a lift in pur­chase intent of up to 125 per­cent­age points.”

In this con­text, brand­ed con­tent out­per­forms even third-par­ty con­tent types, includ­ing expert con­tent such as arti­cles and reviews, and user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent in the form of con­sumer reviews.

3 Ways to Streamline Your Brand’s Content And Commerce

A clos­er look at fash­ion brands shows us how con­tent and com­merce can be com­bined to max­i­mize rev­enues and con­ver­sions. Here are three ways suc­cess­ful brands are tack­ling con­tent and com­merce chal­lenges.

1. Address Content Ownership; Encourage Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Many brands assume a mod­el in which con­tent is the sole remit of either the ecom­merce, or the mar­ket­ing and edi­to­r­i­al team. The way for­ward for brands will be to encour­age col­lab­o­ra­tion between the two, using con­tent to both raise aware­ness, and dri­ve con­ver­sions, bridg­ing pur­chase jour­neys and stream­ing over­all user expe­ri­ences as a result.

2. Define Content Objectives; Integrate Content With Your Ecommerce Platform

Many brands still don’t embed con­tent with­in their ecom­merce sites. Com­merce inte­gra­tion is often incon­sis­tent, vary­ing based on the type of con­tent and where it sits on the site. Ulti­mate­ly, brands are con­tin­u­ing to pub­lish con­tent that’s dif­fi­cult to find, suf­fo­cat­ing the abil­i­ty of the con­tent to impact the bot­tom-line.

Cole Haas and DVF are two exam­ples of fash­ion brands who have instilled con­tent right through their ecom­merce plat­form and nav­i­ga­tion. Edi­to­r­i­al and video are browseable native­ly on prod­uct pages, and rapid shifts in con­sumer sen­ti­ment between aware­ness, research, eval­u­a­tion, have been made pos­si­ble, mas­sive­ly empow­er­ing the per­sua­sive­ness of the site and prod­ucts. content-and-commerce-fashion

3. Scale And Manage Content Globally Across Territories

The study revealed that a major­i­ty of brands con­tin­ue to approach con­tent cre­ation with a “U.S. first” mind­set. It often results in weak­er per­for­mance in Europe and Asia with brands suf­fer­ing from decen­tral­ized site man­age­ment, and frag­ment­ed plat­forms.

Clar­ins were the best per­form­ing brand on aver­age across all ter­ri­to­ries. The brand uti­lizes it’s glob­al ecom­merce plat­form to con­sis­tent­ly exe­cute, show­ing the val­ue tech­ni­cal ecom­merce ini­tia­tives can add to large­ly edi­to­r­i­al con­tent. clarins

Unite Content And Commerce To Optimize User Experiences

Ulti­mate­ly, the key objec­tive for brands must be to opti­mize the over­all user expe­ri­ence for con­sumers. Unit­ing con­tent and com­merce is ben­e­fi­cial to brand rev­enues and con­ver­sions, in that the stream­lin­ing of the two enti­ties pro­vides gen­uine val­ue to online shop­ping expe­ri­ences.

Elana Ander­son of Demand­ware sum­maris­es:

As with every­thing in the dig­i­tal age, the best user expe­ri­ence is an effort­less one. Engage­ment should require very few clicks. In the con­sumer con­sid­er­a­tion phase, con­text reigns supreme. Prod­uct con­tent – video, looks, tuto­ri­als – helps the con­sumer make the men­tal leap from browse to buy.”

You can down­load the full L2 Inc. and Demand­ware Con­tent and Com­merce 2014 report here.

Pat Hong

Written by Pat Hong

Editor at Linkdex/Inked, Linkdex

Pat covers the SEO industry, digital marketing trends, and anything and everything around Linkdex. He also authors Linkdex's data analysis and reports, analysing the state of search in various industries.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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