Brands work all summer and fall to prepare for the holiday season, but their work isn’t done when Christmas is over. There is a second major wave of holiday shopping to prepare for: Cyber Week II.
Cyber Week II begins on Christmas Day when shoppers flood the market to nab online deals with their newly received gift cards. In fact, for general shopping queries (such as “shopping near me” or “store hours”), there are an incredible 34% more searches on Christmas Day than on Black Friday.
Improving online product content can help brands and their retailers ensure Cyber Week II shopping goes off without a hitch, and can help them make the most of one of the highest shopping periods of the year. Here are three key parts of a successful Cyber Week II strategy:
Win online search
Studies show that most clicks go to the first three results that appear for a given search. So, if a brand’s products aren’t appearing in those top results, they’re virtually invisible to today’s shoppers. The best way to achieve great search rankings is to create product content that is both descriptive and optimized for search.
To do that, brand managers should check what shoppers are searching for in their categories, create optimized product descriptions, keywords and other attributes, and then submit that content to each retailer. That’s a lot of work—but if done using the proper workflow automation tools, the process can be efficient and produce increased sales.
Brands should also look to optimize for voice search. When shoppers ask devices like Alexa for shopping recommendations, the device may only recommend the first search result. That makes it even more important to work on improving product placement in search results.
Update the right content
For brands that have thousands of products, it may not be possible to update every one of them before the holidays. With this in mind, here are three key parts of the product line to prioritize:
- Best sellers—Providing rich content ensures these products remain at the top of search.
- Page two up-and-comers—With a little work, these products can get onto page one, boosting sales in the process.
- New product launches—These items present the ideal opportunity to get things right from the beginning by releasing them with the very best content possible.
In terms of what types of product content to optimize, brands should focus on descriptions, images and videos:
Descriptions. Great product descriptions bring products to life. With more and more shopper journeys starting online, reaching shoppers with informative product descriptions matters more now than ever before. Accurate product descriptions also help reduce returns by ensuring that the products shoppers receive in the mail are the ones they actually expected to get.
Savvy brands are now delivering unique product copy to each of their major retailers. Search engines like Google look for unique content and hide duplicate search results. If a brand submits the same content to every retailer, only the one that published that content first will get listed in Google for that product. Competitors will take the other search result slots, which means lost sales for brands.
Images. Some retailer sites used to support only one low resolution image. These days, most support multiple high-resolution images. As a result, small package shots are no longer enough. Today’s shoppers expect to see high quality images that clearly show a product from all different angles. While high quality images won’t help with search results, they can increase conversion rates and reduce returns.
Videos. Videos are a form of rich media that can showcase products in real-world situations. Many brands already have video content available from ad campaigns. Others are tapping into user-generated videos, which are created by real people using a brand’s products. Many of today’s shoppers consider these user-generated videos to be more authentic, so brands are embedding them on product detail pages. While not all sites support video, Amazon, Walmart and Target do, making it worthwhile to invest in this type of media.
Use the right tools
Tracking down search terms, organizing and distributing content, and then monitoring the results is hard work and time consuming. Additionally, it can be difficult to learn the nuances of each retailer’s system and content requirements.
To solve for these challenges, brands should look to invest in robust software that can automate the syndication and monitoring processes and track each retailer’s requirements. By leveraging these tools, brands can create scalable, repeatable systems for delivering high quality, consistent product content across all retailers and channels.
Winning This Holiday Season
This holiday season, more shoppers than ever will be starting their shopping journeys online. By focusing on search results, updating products with great content, and leveraging the right ecommerce tools, suppliers can deliver the best results—not only online but in-store as well.
David Feinleib is the CEO of Content Analytics, Inc.