Content is a powerful medium that can be leveraged to inform, educate, and entertain audiences. No matter the form of content, whether a blog post, landing page, banner, or video, it can significantly influence the customer’s buying decisions. Globally, e-commerce business opportunities are booming, and there is a significant surge in shoppable content online that allows customers to make their purchases with a simple click. With a rise in young customers and the pandemic enabling a digital push, online shoppers globally have grown. This gives a massive opportunity for publishers to tap into the booming e-commerce business through commerce content.
What is Commerce Content?
The strategic partnership between brands and publishers to create unique and personalized shopping experiences for customers is known as commerce content. Publishers create editorial content to educate and empower customers to make more informed buying decisions. About 70% of marketers invest in content marketing to increase brand awareness and conversions.
For every purchase, whether it’s a new pair of hiking boots or a gift for a loved one, customers most often spend time doing some research to find products that are highly recommended or merely to explore options. They conduct this research by looking at trusted resources such as editorial reviews from their preferred e-commerce sites. Thus, publishers such as Buzzfeed, Vox Media, Vice, CondeNast, etc. purposefully produce commerce content such as editorial articles, holiday guides, reviews, and how-to guides that influence the customer’s purchase journey. In 2020, Buzzfeed grew e-commerce sales by 67% through commerce content.
Changing e-commerce landscape
With about 76% of adults in the US shopping online, global e-commerce sales are expected to hit $5.5 trillion in 2022. The rapid adoption of technology, the ever-evolving digital landscape, and the pandemic are some of the driving factors that have resulted in an online shopping boom. In addition to this, the Indian e-commerce industry is projected to surpass the US to become the second-largest e-commerce market globally by 2034.
This growth in the e-commerce sector will continue to expand with the customer at the center of it all. Likewise, customer shopping behavior has evolved. Customers now prefer developing relationships with the brands they love instead of merely being sold to.
Customers choose to research products before purchasing from a brand as they are inundated with advertisements everywhere, from television to social media platforms. Rather than letting brands dictate what they should buy, customers are well suited to decide for themselves.
Today, brands compete not only on price but also on their relationships with their customers.
New revenue streams for publishers through commerce content
Commerce content enables brands to deliver a highly contextual, non-disruptive, and helpful customer experience.
There are no one-size-fits-all experiences, and people do not always purchase for the same reasons. Hence, brands need to personalize customer experiences. Advancements in technology and AI-enabled tools have pushed brands to reinvent their online marketing strategies through the personalization and positioning of content. Brands usually think of personalization in terms of email marketing, which is a conventional and easy method. But the next big step forward is hyper-personalization, personalizing offers and messaging based on past purchases, geolocation, and other factors. It will build customer loyalty and retention and is also guaranteed to drive incremental sales and improve conversions for publishers.
How can publishers achieve this?
Partnering with smart solutions like SitePlug can generate monetization avenues for publishers and brands through commerce content.
Leveraging commerce content
An easy plug-and-play solution, Site Discover – a SitePlug product – identifies commerce content in the existing article universe and automates the process of monetizing it.
The Site Discover advantage for publishers:
- Does not disturb current monetization
- Hassle-free code implementation
- Customisable, unintrusive, and native shopping widgets added to pages
- No changes in CMS
- No change in page load speed
- Better user experience
- No change in page layout
- No adverse effects on SEO
Conclusion
With the constantly evolving e-commerce landscape and the rise in online shoppers, publishers need to reinvent their online marketing strategies. Publishers can partner with content partners like SitePlug and leverage its product Site Discover to help identify commerce content and automatically monetize them. Thus, enabling publishers to capitalize on the advantage of content commerce, gain a competitive edge and improve conversions.
Watch this space to know more about how Site Discover’s commerce content helps publishers.
References:
https://www.bigcommerce.com/articles/headless-commerce/content-and-commerce/
