E-commerce

3 content challenges to confront when switching from bricks to clicks

Nathan Holmes, product marketing manager at Widen, explains that retailers that are switching from bricks to clicks will face a few content challenges that grow more painful if left unresolved. He offers insight on solving three of these issues.

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September 14, 2020 by Nathan Holmes — Product Marketing Manager, Widen

Brick-and-mortar retail has a long recovery ahead. Recent ABC News/Ipsos polling finds 77% of Americans are increasingly concerned about being infected by the coronavirus. A majority believe the economy is being reopened too quickly rather than too slowly.

But there is a silver lining. McKinsey reports most consumer categories have seen a 15 to 40% increase in online channel user growth. There's plenty of opportunity in e-commerce, especially for brands that once depended on in-store sales.

Of course, marketers that delve into e-commerce will run into challenges. A content strategy that supports in-store sales places different demands on people, processes, and technology than one driving digital sales. Online, the assembly and distribution of product information and content tends to be more complex.

Switching from bricks to clicks presents some content challenges that grow more painful if left unresolved. Let's discuss three of these issues and how to deal with them.

1. The product info from engineering is difficult to organize and changes on us

Marketers have no control over specs, dimensions, sizes, and colors, and so on. The folks in product development and engineering send a spreadsheet with all that data. If the product line is relatively small, the spreadsheet is manageable.

However, at a brand launching several hundred or more products across dozens of e-commerce channels, team members will copy and paste the product info they're responsible for into new spreadsheets. As they make shared folders to store the product data and content for each product, yet more spreadsheets will be created. If engineering sends over updated or corrected specs, it's difficult to track down every instance of the outdated specs. The odds of publishing inaccurate product listings become high.

At this point, every brand with a 100 or more SKUs should be using a product information management (PIM) platform to save time and mitigate risks. Marketers can import data from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into an online PIM platform that their whole team can access (but not edit). Each product gets a master listing inside the PIM platform instead of one row in an endless spreadsheet. The data won't be corrupted there, and if engineers update the specs, someone in marketing updates that one PIM platform and nothing else.

2. Consumers are struggling to understand our product online

Most marketers have heard the old cliché, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole." If you sell a coffee maker, for example, you're supposedly selling rich, steaming coffee, not the machine. In a store, there's only a few coffeemakers for sale, and they all make that quarter-inch hole. The cliché works.

Online though, shoppers are choosing between every single coffee machine they could possibly buy. As a result, discerning shoppers immerse in the drills. Why does this Swiss-designed machine make a smoother cup of coffee? Which one has a self-cleaning mechanism or integrated milk steamer? The coffee maker brands compete with every option at a given price, not just their competitors on the same shelf.

Online, marketers need to educate shoppers about technical product information and its meaning. This calls for more copywriting, more diagrams, and more explainer videos than a brand would ever make to sell an in-store product. As the brand creates and publishes more digital content, the resulting analytics (from social media, emails, browsing, transactions, etc.) will help to pinpoint what shoppers care about. But ramping up content production presents yet another challenge.

3. Creative workflows become too complex and disorganized

At many brands, content creation lives in email chains. Project requests go out by email, proofs come in by email, and approvals grind their way through relentless reply-all chains. The process is slow, and the content remains siloed with the designer, photographer, copywriter, etc. who produced the final draft. Weeks and months later, that creator is still getting blown up with email requests to send files.

Brands ramping up their content production should upgrade to a digital asset management (DAM) system that is either combined or integrated with their PIM system. Top DAM systems include a workflow tool for assigning, proofing, and approving new content. All the proofs and final versions are ingested into the DAM system, where they can be tagged with metadata that enables anyone to quickly search and find that content later.

Most importantly, an integrated DAM+PIM system will attach content from the DAM platform to product listings in the PIM application. That way, they are packaged and ready to be shared with e-commerce sites, distributors, or global teams that translate and localize the content.

Adapt while it's easiest

When you take a brand from bricks to clicks (especially in the middle of a raging pandemic), there's a lot to think about. At every e-commerce brand, there is a complex dance of people, processes, and technology trying to make thousands of product listings appealing and accurate. If you're committed to a future in e-commerce, get your content strategy dialed in early. It doesn't get easier.

Nathan Holmes is product marketing manager at Widen.