Gone are the days of rifling through catalogues and circling your favourite products. The rapid growth of shoppable content is changing the landscape for advertisers and ecommerce brands dramatically. Anybody that doesn’t keep up will find themselves cast adrift.
So, what does this mean for your ecommerce business? And how can you make the most of this revolutionary trend?
Unstoppable shoppable
Shoppable content is any online content that provides an instant purchasing opportunity for the consumer – either by allowing the consumer to purchase the product directly from that page or redirecting them to the product page.
In the past, you might have watched a video for a clothing brand, loved a featured product, then visited the brand’s online store to locate it. A process which was once so normal, is now archaic.
Shoppable content makes life easier for online shoppers. They can seamlessly move from the content to purchasing the product – so no secondary websites, redirects or endless searching. Just instant, direct sales. This cuts out any “thinking time” and targets impulse purchase shopping.
For example, you can currently tag your organic Instagram posts with any product featured, which is a great way to generate more sales from the platform. However, this feature is currently not available for pay-per-click advertisers. Alternatively, you can use Google AdWords (soon to be Google Ads) to create a TrueView for shopping campaign – which is a fantastic way to make videos interactive by tagging in products.
Here are examples of the different types of shoppable content:
Text
In Net-A-Porter’s editorials, “Shop the Look” anchor links have been included under each image, giving the reader the opportunity to buy the featured product from a pop-up on screen.
Images
Many websites and social platforms feature shoppable images. In this example from Crate & Barrel’s blog the reader can click on image’s product tags and a pop-up for the ‘quick buy’ option is shown.
Videos
A recently developed option is to include direct product links within a video advertisement. For example, Ted Baker has included shoppable videos on their website. The viewer can click tags to display more product information and – if they are interested – can be taken to the exact product page.
Shoppable AR:
Snapchat have recently announced their plans to introduce shoppable AR filters, wherein the user can, with their head movement, choose to be taken to a brand’s website to browse the advertised product.
Bridging the gap between selling and buying
In the past, ecommerce was simply about being online. Today, with an increasingly competitive playing field, brands are turning to content marketing for an edge. After all, content is still king, right?
The idea being – if you push products further using emotive and persuasive personal stories, then you can marry context with your content. Perhaps that means context is now queen…
You can now watch a stay-at-home Dad’s recommendations for nappies, find out why your favourite celebrity loves a certain brand of mascara and join forums to discuss retro trainers.
There’s an extensive amount of content for every product you can imagine.
Unfortunately, this is still a problem with this approach. From selling to buying, there’s a disconnect. All of this content connects people with products and builds desire using an emotive narrative, but they don’t instantly convert it into a sale. There will always be a gap, unless people can directly shop from your content…
Shoppable content bridges the gap
What if every image or video you see online contained a direct link to the product in question? What if you didn’t have to visit a different platform to make a purchase? What if the number of pages between seeing a product and buying it was cut down dramatically?
This is exactly what shoppable content can do.
Ready to embrace shoppable content?
Whether you want to liven up your ecommerce site with some shoppable images or turbocharge your blog with shoppable videos, we can help at Fluid Digital. We specialise in both Magento ecommerce and PPC advertising, making us the ideal partner to take full advantage of this revolutionary new trend.
For more information, contact us today.