Let’s try out a small exercise! On your phone, tablet or computer, type in the name of your product, merchandise or services. Chances are you will find tons of other products or services similar to yours that appear on your search result. To make matters worse, the content that we write for our products, services and business is like a drop of water in a vast ocean, floating on the web with tons of other similarly written content.
The decision to invest time and resources into content marketing is evidently important, but merely investing resources in content marketing is no longer enough to stand out, we need to go beyond and begin exploring elements that truly spice up our content marketing. Especially in this world of “New Retail” creating engaging content can truly separate yourself from the competition. So what are some of the essentials we can use to spice up our content you ask? Well let’s take a look at the 3 essentials needed to spice up our content marketing in this new era of retail!
Content Marketing: 3 Essentials To Spice Up Your Content
- Think and search like your customers
- Don’t judge a book by its cover … But Cover Sells Books
- Everything is about content
Think and Search Like Your Customers
This may sound simple enough yet tons of retailers miss out on this! Take my previous retail experience as an example, we would often put promotion, sale and discount as our main keywords whenever we post our products, thinking it would attract customers since customers get excited by promotions. To our dismay, it did not yield much results. Fortunately, we finally decided to try searching the keywords we used, that was when we realized where we went wrong! We were bombarded by tons of other products instead. To make matters worse, some of our competitor products appeared before our products appeared!
We decided to optimize the keywords for our products in line with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it turns out just from a change of keywords and word usages, the amount of engagement as well as click rate tripled compared to the previous method! Not only that, but we managed to increase our sales for mid range and premium products too! In New Retail, it becomes important to not just include words that attract customers in our content marketing strategy, but crucial for us to think from the perspectives of customers searching for our products and services. Only then will our content be seen and appear at the top of our customers’ searches.
Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover … But Cover Sells Books
I believe most of us have heard this phrase, but the latter stands true as well! With so much content out there and so little time to filter through, an enticing title or an intriguing visual that sparks interest could be the difference between our content being looked through or completely ignored. As a consumer myself, I noticed I would oftentimes mindlessly scroll through social media to look for something interesting or even type in titles of content I’d like to read and pick one that has an eye-catching title!
I remembered the most interesting content that caught my eye, was one about low calorie ice-cream! They included a picture of typical ice creams (900-1200 calories) and their brand of ice cream (250-340 calories). The picture alone caught my attention instantly. As a foodie and someone who is trying to diet, it was extremely attractive and I instantly ordered 2 pints. After I ordered from them, I scrolled through my social media and realized that I have actually followed them for quite some time but never had that strong attraction to buy or engage in their posts until then!
To truly excel in content marketing and creating hot topics, we need to dive into New Retail and truly integrate data collected both offline and online into our content marketing to better suit and attract both existing and potential consumers out there! After optimizing keyword search, the next step we should take would be to create attractive visuals as well as titles to attract consumers.
Everything Is About Content
Ever heard the term content is king? Well it is the absolute truth! It matters not how attractive our title, visuals or the usage or correct keywords if our content does not keep our consumers hooked! The type of content we pick as well as the content of our marketing strategy is a key component and requires us to truly understand our target audience and consumer! When we first started to do content marketing for my previous store, we focused mainly on the products and services we offered as well as some important and relevant content such as ways to prolong product usage and quick hacks to solve product issues.
However, we did not garner much engagement. So we decided to switch a different strategy! Utilizing tiktoks, memes and gifs about hot topics or current topics to attract a larger audience. The result? It worked, we had tons of engagement from our audiences. Although we managed to garner high engagement, it was merely a sudden influx and increase but it was not consistent enough. That was when we sat down and thought of how we can combine both or utilize both methods to achieve the best effect. Once we figured out the balance, we had a consistent increase in engagement with audiences while also being able to convert some of them to our customers!
Ultimately, it is important to find the perfect balance between sensational topics or contents and lasting topics or contents. To curate a hot topic and hot content, we need to start by making sure we appear on the top of our customers’ searches, attract their attention with enticing visuals and titles to finally lead them to read through or consume our interesting, helpful and relevant content. That is the essence of how we can begin to spice up our content in the ultimate journey of achieving true new retail marketing.
Beyond these essentials, there are tons of other strategies including creative content management, Essential P’s in the retail landscape and many others all found within new retail marketing. Interested to find out what this new retail marketing is? Want a more in-depth breakdown of the strategies personalized according to your business? Wait no further! You can check out our Professional Certification in New Retail Marketing. If you’d like to check out our other programs, feel free to click here.
Written by Bryan Law Chu Zheng,
SHRA Corporate Trainer
Bryan is a member of the SHRA trainer team. He is a major in Psychology with a retail background. He has a deep passion for human interaction and personal development.
You can catch him dancing or playing the uke on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
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