How e-Commerce can get More Customers with Visual Content Marketing
Visual content marketing can draw more customers to your e-commerce site by engaging your target audience. Traffic plays an important role in e-commerce businesses to generate revenue. Traffic depends on the type, quality, and uniqueness of the content of your marketing. If the content is lucrative enough, who knows the visitors can turn into customers.
There are many reasons to go for visual content marketing, such as:
Visual content has the greatest impact on customers' minds as people remember what they see more than what they read
User testimonials with relevant information and pictures enhance the chance of conversion to a great extent
Visual content marketing via audio-visual means like a product video is more eye-catching than anything else
It is way less expensive than traditional marketing methods
Conversion rate is higher in visual content marketing
It helps in building brand awareness, brand perception, and brand knowledge
Content marketing can help you interact with your customers and make you understand the expectations of the target customers
To do so, a content marketer must keep the following things in mind:
1. Provide Value to Your Target Audience
The latest CMI research suggests that 90% of the most successful B2B content marketers prioritize customer needs.
Before highlighting your features and benefits one must understand what the customers want from that site. If the customer finds value in the content, then only he/she can be engaged. The promotional message, activities should match the requirements of the target customers. While selecting target customers it is important to keep the concept of trade-off in mind. It is barely possible to attract people from all demographics. Try to understand and cater to a particular segment of customers first.
2. Development of the content
Visual marketing can be highly fruitful if the content is rightly made. Right designing, graphics, images, videos, memes, and presentations help people understand the brand message and brand personality. The customers try to associate with it, hence they buy from that particular site. The home page draws the attention of the customers in the first place. Creative videos on the home page have proven to have a better impact. Nowadays, live streaming from social media sites can entice a pool of customers. Sometimes such videos become viral. Well, all sorts of publicity are good publicity if it can beguile customers.
There are many visual marketing tools to build attractive content, like Canva, Snappa, Pixlr, Adobe Creative Suite, Iconfinder, etc. Few of the software used for graphic designing and animation are Adobe Illustrator, Bonus Tips, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Adobe Dreamweaver, etc.
3. Use Different Video Content for Different Channels
The content should be unique for one particular channel. Different channels should be captured by differentiated and interesting contents.
Video Marketing: Video Marketing is the latest trend. Video marketing is the easiest way to tell your customers about the products. Myntra is using video marketing for almost all the fashion brands they sell. Photographs have its demerits as people has to zoom, flip, rotate and see the minute details of the product, but the videos are self-explanatory and more useful. The length of the video is also important as it should fit correctly to the requirement of the platform. People tend to skip after a while, so the promotional message should be crisp and kept in the starting of the video.
Infographics: The use of infographics has increased several folds this year. Infographics have more shares than pictures or texts on social media. Informative but funny infographics are the biggest hit.
Email: The age of email marketing is not gone; in-fact email marketing can draw serious attention of the customers. Sometimes customers forget to check the cart and leave it like that. Email marketing can be a solid reminder for the customers. Corporate workers tend to check emails a lot via email marketing, you can provide more elaborative and descriptive attributes of the products as well as details about your loyalty programs, discount schedules, user-tips, guides, and other information
Podcasts: Popularity of podcasts are increasing every day. Insightful podcasts can influence the customer and useful tips shared in podcasts can add value to the customers’ lives. Podcasts can be posted in web-platforms like iTunes
4. Create Innovative Content With Unique Ideas
Research suggests that 88% of top B2B content marketers value creativity & craft in content creation & production. Dedicate a special team to come up with innovative ideas. One must keep one thing in mind while doing this that creativity is also a part of the process of content building and marketing. Remove non-value adding activities and emphasize the uniqueness which can be built. Motivate the creative team to come up with something spectacular.
5. Content Should be Succinct
Content should be to the point and crisp. Excessive information can confuse customers. First, identify your target groups and build the content accordingly. You cannot provide everything; trade-off has to be done to attract a particular group of customers. Try to do market research on the consumer behavior of your target group of customers. You can do your own survey and reach people. Otherwise, you can take resources of SurveyMonkey or other such tools. You can run an online content audit too in order to develop the best content strategy.
6. Offer Freebies and Rewards
Free gifts are always the best way to make your customers happy.
Sephora uses this strategy to build loyalty among customers.
Take this Sephora example:
The famous makeup brand regularly sends out attractive visual email templates that include impressive offers like discount coupons or free gifts on special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, etc.
Several competitions are built and displayed in various platforms to engage customers. For loyal customer-reward system, customization works well to keep them loyal for a longer period. Competitions in various social media platforms can draw the attention of youngsters which in terms can increase brand awareness as well as the traffic at the site.
7. Leverage Advanced Technology
Use of latest technology is obvious nowadays. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used by all e-commerce platforms to provide a better customer experience. Sephora uses Sephora Virtual Artist App to provide an exceptional experience. Almost all the eCommerce sites have chatbots to help the visitor. Better and suitable use of technology can do wonders for the growth of your eCommerce store.
To further personalize your customer service, you can segment your email list and then accordingly send out customized emails that align with your target audience. However, proceeding with your email marketing campaign, it’s important to check your email list with an email list verification software to reduce bounce rate and garner maximum ROI.
Summing it Up
The role of visual content marketing to enrich customer experience is invaluable for e-commerce business. The key to success depends on how you tell your brand-story and moreover, how ingeniously you tell it. Try to cover all the touchpoints, as it will undeniably help you to expand your brand awareness. Invest generously on the content development team to build the best and unique content. Use SEO/search algorithms and technology to enhance your visibility. Most importantly understand your customers. Interact with your customers and understand their actual needs, expectations and pain points. Cater the issues in an innovative way, that’s your key to success.
