Shoppable Content

How to Make Your Ecommerce Content More Engaging

Engaging content keeps people coming back to your store and improves conversions. Read this succinct guide to make your ecommerce content more engaging!


TLDR

  • Content is king, but engaging content will set your kingdom apart from the others.
  • Three principles for making your content more engaging include knowing your audience, keeping your content regularly updated, and breaking your content up.
  • This article gives specific tactics to do each of these better, so your raving fans stay engaged and new customers are attracted to your content.

INTRO

If you're an ecommerce store, it's crucial to create engaging content that will keep your audience coming back for more. This can include blog posts, videos, and livestreams. This blog post will give you tips and tactics to make your content more engaging for your viewers!

GENERALLY ENGAGING

We will get into specific types of content in a moment, but first, it doesn't matter what medium you are using – whether written, video, or livestream – these foundational pieces will apply to any content you create.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

First, knowing your audience is paramount. If you don't understand what your audience wants or what engages them,your content will likely fall flat. Focus on creating content that is relevant and interesting to your target audience.

This may require doing some research to understand their interests and what type of content they prefer. Once you know your audience, you can tailor your content to match their needs and interests, which will help keep them engaged.

But how do you get to know your audience? I'm glad you asked! Here are some simple ways to get to know your audience better:

Read comments on your posts

Ok, Duh! But here is the point – most CEOs, Founders, and even Marketing Directors have people on their team that are "in the weeds" with social media comments and responses.

But if you are going to understand your audience, you either need to read what is being commented OR take this over periodically for a day or two to "reground" yourself through organic connection with your customers.

Follow some of your customers on social media

Simple, right? Just find a few of your customers that are typical of the ones that spend the most money in your store and follow them on their social channels. Understand their likes, dislikes, and the other types of content they are engaging with and sharing. Take some notes, share what you observe with your team, and try to mimic things they engage with.

Give them free stuff in exchange for honest feedback

Your top customers LOVE your brand or product – they spend dozens or hundreds of dollars on it every month. Create a simple survey (you could use TypeForm or Google Forms) and then email or text the survey to a select list of top customers. Tell them why they are getting it (they are your besties for the brand!) and that you would like to offer them some free stuff (could be a product, a gift card, or a discount code) in exchange for 5 or 10 minutes of their time. Let them know you are gathering this info to hopefully serve them better, as well as find more brand loyalists like them.

KEEP IT REGULAR

The next thing you need to consider when creating content is how often you will make it.

Now, some content proponents can make you feel overwhelmed with the task of creating hundreds of pieces of content every month. (No names here, but one kind of starts with G and ends in *cough*nerchuk.)*

If you have a growing brand or an efficient team – this is achievable. Also, if you can make 3-4 hours per day, this is also achievable.But the reality for most ecommerce stores is creating regular content can be challenging.

Here are some ways to get into (or ramp up) your regular content habit – and these work whether you are a solopreneur, a content creator on a large team, or a founder with your hand in the creative process):

Quality over quantity

When you produce high-quality content, your audience will appreciate your effort and will be more likely to return to your site for future updates. Quality also helps you stand out from the competition, which can be essential for growing your online presence.

Additionally, people will be more likely to share it, and it will be more likely to rank in search engines.

Low-quality content, however, can hurt your brand and cause your most loyal customers to look elsewhere for expertise that your brand already has. It can also lead to lower rankings in search engines and decreased engagement.

When it comes to content creation, quality is always more important than quantity. Quantity can be easy to focus on, but it often leads to low-quality content that no one wants to read, which could drive your most loyal customers elsewhere.

Ultimately, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to content creation. If you want your content to be successful, ensure it is high quality and engaging – EVEN if that means you produce less of it.

(Note – quality references the content's substance and not necessarily the production value. See the next part on documenting over creating.)

Document over create

One thing every brand and creator runs up against is running out of creative ideas. This is why we LOVE the idea of documenting over creating. (Credit where credit is due – we got this from Gary V!)

Documenting over creating means using your phone to take pictures and videos of what goes on in your ecommerce store throughout the day. New boxes came in with your logo custom printed on them? Snap a pic – that becomes a post with a heart eyes emoji to share with your followers. New product launched? Take a 60-second selfie video telling the story of how you came up with it or sourced it and why you think your customers will LOVE it. Did you just sign a new lease for a 2x larger warehouse? Snap a pic – that becomes a post thanking your customers for all the love over the last months and years, and let them know you are leveling up to serve them better.

In short, go through your day with the lens of your most loyal customers. What things do you see because you are the marketing director, founder, or CEO that you could capture and share access with them, giving them a behind-the-scenes view of their favorite brand?

Batch creation

Batching content creation can help you be more efficient with your time. If you are documenting each day, you should have a store of images and videos to use when it comes time to create the content for posting.

Start by creating a time each week or month that you set aside exclusively for content creation. Then, on your first "batch" time, create a simple content calendar that will help you plan your topics and the timing of your posts. (We use google sheets for this – keep it simple!)

Once you have your calendar created, start drafting your posts. This can help you get into a routine of writing and help you stay on track. Finally, schedule your posts in advance. This will help ensure that your social channels are always up-to-date with fresh content.

Pillar it

Pillar content is a content strategy made popular by Gary Vaynerchuk.** The basic idea is to take a large piece of content such as a 20-minute talk you gave on Zoom to fellow entrepreneurs in your industry, a podcast episode you were interviewed on, or a newspaper article you were featured in – then break that content up into 5, 15, or even 55 pieces of "microcontent" that you can post on your sites and social media.

Microcontent could be things like the behind-the-scenes photo before the interview, and 3 quotes from the talk that you turn into quote graphics, and you could also write (or have a transcriber collect and you edit) 3-5 blog posts from one talk or episode. These few examples represent 8-10 pieces of content from one primary piece of pillar content. (For the full strategy, click here.)

BONUS – Tools and tricks for speeding content creation

Our founders at Stream Sage would be remiss if we didn't include the SAAS and apps we love that only help increase the speed and quality of content creation. Here are some that we use pretty much every day –

Canva for graphics, videos, and social posts – this is our go-to for all things graphic design, social posting, print – you name it, we create it in Canva.

Magisto for video – want to come up with incredible-looking videos using AI and a few directions from you? Magisto is it.

Jasper for writing – what if you had an AI writing assistant that had read 10% of the internet? That's Jasper – it will help you write ANYTHING – emails, blogs, articles, social posts – just faster (and better).

Grammarly for editing – good grammar is sexy. Grammarly keeps it on point.

DALL-E for unique image creation – this is relatively new, and we are still playing around with it, but you can use DALL-E-backed platforms such as this one by craiyon to create unique images using AI.

CUT IT UP

One simple tactic to make your content more engaging is to make it appeal visually with things that break it up and make it easier to digest while at the same time keeping the content consumer engaged.

For written content, this includes things like a TLDR, an outline if it is longer than 1,000 or so words, images and videos in sections to break it up visually, and headers and subheaders to make it visually skimmable.

For video content, aiming to have a transition every 3-10 seconds will keep your viewer subconsciously visually engaged and therefore more likely to stay consciously engaged with your content.

For livestream content, make sure you are moving from step to step or frame to frame often. Viewers may get visually bored, but changing the background, camera angle, presenter, or slide regularly will help here.

Summary

Content is king, but engaging content is what could set your kingdom apart from your competitors. So make sure that you focus resources and attention in this area to maximize your engagement with your customers and attract new raving fans.

Knowing your audience, keeping your content regular, and cutting your content up visually are simple tactics to make your content more engaging.

And by the way – if you are looking for a way to reduce friction in the buying experience for your customers AND reduce lost sales and abandoned carts, why not consider making all of your content shoppable with Stream Sage? Click here to learn more: https://www.streamsage.io

*BTW – We LOVE Gary Vee. If you don't listen to him on a regular basis, you are missing out!

**Shameless third mention of GV in the same post. No, he did not pay us for this.

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