More than ever consumers are relying on review content from peers when considering a purchase. To get that they’ll go to the channels they’re most comfortable with, for content that they’re inspired by, from the people they trust.
As the number of digital channels grows and becomes more commerce-oriented – with Instagram’s ‘Shops’ and Pinterest’s ‘Shopping Ads’ extending choice – the customer journey has become more distributed. Consumers are demanding the ability to purchase regardless of where or when that impulse hits them.
This expectation of a frictionless purchase journey extends to brand-owned channels in the modern funnel. While creating and maintaining content that inspires and converts is time-consuming and expensive, finding, moderating and amplifying influential reviews from social is – or can be – simple. Keep in mind that consumers are 6x more likely to purchase a product if the page they’re on includes UGC.
E-commerce brands contribute an estimated $18 billion annually in lost potential sales revenue due to cart abandonment, so it’s important to make sure that web strategy focuses on keeping people engaged up to and beyond their purchase.
The key to this is ensuring that the social-commerce experiences people are familiar with continue on owned channels. That means content has to be personal, contextual and shoppable.
How do you make imagery shoppable at scale?
Making owned content shoppable is simple, and always has been. Content on brand websites almost always include a call-to-action in some form.
The missing link between content and commerce is the leveraging of dynamic UGC. When this is present it’s proven to be as impactful, if not more, to a consumer’s path to purchase than brand content. It’s native to the social experiences people are familiar with, easy to source and moderate, and the volume and quality of content makes it incredibly valuable to the modern marketer, especially when it’s driving users to, or complementing their product pages.
With the majority of entry points to owned channels, people expect to be able to engage with immediately relevant content, personalised to their interests or geography. Most importantly people expect to be able to buy it there and then.
Deploying shoppable content at scale can be a challenge, but once implemented it will boost web engagement, reduce the risk of losing brand interest, and deliver more conversions. Using StoryStream makes it incredibly easy to manage.
Overview of StoryStream
The StoryStream Platform enables brands to:
- seamlessly filter through the volume of UGC being created every day
- manage the usage rights for all content
- deliver digital experiences at scale to consumers at any stage of their online buying journey.
Leveraging the huge volume of highly engaging, authentic and visual content created by customers, fans and influencers all around the world delivers results: reduced cost per asset; increased organic brand traction on traditional review sites and social media; better search engine results.
The StoryStream platform’s AI-powered content filters highlight the best quality content most likely to convert. Intelligent product matching from a live catalogue allows calls-to-action to be added in seconds. Visual matching automatically suggests products at the point of tagging, or will enable you to find product variants using the search bar.
StoryStream’s proprietary Aura AI gains accuracy with each call-to-action added, resulting in an always-learning model that becomes even more efficient over time.
Dynamic content modules (‘Storyboards’) show relevant collections of live content on category and specific product pages, taking into account language, market and even stock availability. You can choose from a variety of layouts that showcase content with the correct ‘Add to basket’ buttons, creating a more contextual and engaging experience the further a consumer goes down the funnel.
With native tap and swipe functionality Storyboards are mobile-first. The eCommerce content experiences they enable are tailored for the huge (and growing) number of conversions happening on devices, connecting content to commerce on any owned-channel touchpoint regardless of where their journey began.
To find out how StoryStream can help you turn content into commerce, reduce clicks to purchase and drive revenue with shoppable content, get in touch here.
Learn more about how Boden is using StoryStream to engage customers across over 60,000 product pages.
