“Dedicated resourcing and accountability in the organization are required to measure content effectiveness. From a people standpoint, it’s also critical for brands to identify who’s accountable for content effectiveness.” — “Defining Content Effectiveness: How Content Maturity Can Help Brands Better Meet Shoppers’ Needs”
Content effectiveness is what happens when brands go above and beyond these foundational aspects to create content that truly stands out. Brands at the content effectiveness stage understand how to create content that targets their end customer, resonates with them, and consistently converts.
The goal of content effectiveness is easy to get behind — after all, you want everything you do on the digital shelf to be effective.
What can be more challenging to grasp is exactly how to achieve content effectiveness. What does effective product content look like? What steps should brands take to achieve effectiveness? And how does a brand go about measuring content effectiveness?
At the Digital Shelf Institute, we recently worked with Profitero to pose questions like these to several ecommerce executives. Their answers form the basis of our new report, “Defining Content Effectiveness.” Here’s a summary of the insights they shared.
The Three Stages of Content Management
One of the report’s biggest takeaways pertains to the effort it takes to create effective content: Achieving content effectiveness, our ecommerce executives agree, is generally the result of years of gradual work. The report identified three successive stages of improving content management: content compliance, content completeness, and content effectiveness.
1. Content Compliance
In the content compliance stage, a brand’s approach to content revolves around retailer requirements. Here, brands focus on creating the content a retailer needs and then gathering and syndicating it efficiently. It’s important to master these basics while recognizing that the work at this stage is far from the kind of innovative content creation brands need to boost sales.
2. Content Completeness
The content completeness stage is characterized by optimizing content to meet best-in-class guidelines. Brands in this stage know how to tailor content for retailers’ algorithms and create assets that are on par with the quality of their competitors’ content.
3. Content Effectiveness
Content effectiveness is what happens when brands go above and beyond these foundational aspects to create content that truly stands out. Brands at the content effectiveness stage understand how to create content that targets their end customer, resonates with them, and consistently converts — all while maintaining retailer compliance and algorithm success.
Brands that achieve content effectiveness do so because they’ve mastered the compliance and completeness stages first. Once they have, they can more easily synchronize their teams to create truly effective content that outclasses competitors.
The 5 Pillars of Content Effectiveness
According to the “Defining Content Effectiveness” report’s contributors, there are several organizational factors that, when optimized, act as the pillars that hold up content effectiveness capabilities. These five pillars are:
1. People
Having the right people working on product content greatly impacts a brand’s ability to achieve content effectiveness.
That being said, many stakeholders across several different teams need to be involved for successful product content production — which can make things complicated. Bringing your people together in cross-functional alignment is a key part of enabling content effectiveness, as is establishing clear accountability so everyone knows how they can best contribute.
2. Data and Systems
Data — and the technologies used to manage that data — underpins every aspect of ecommerce content. Without accurate and complete data, brands will struggle to achieve content compliance, precluding any chance of reaching content effectiveness.
That means brands need strong data governance. They need to ensure all team members understand the importance of accurate, coherent data, both when they’re first entering it and when they share it with retailers. Documentation that outlines “golden rule” processes for both IT and business teams can help here.
3. Process
Knowing the exact processes that teams will follow to develop product content — from data creation to publication to measuring content effectiveness — is critical to effective content production.
Creating these processes, though, requires careful investment in process development and education. Retailers frequently set deadlines for content delivery, and strategic brands create processes that work backward from these deadlines, giving their teams ample time for each stage. Communicating the importance of each deadline to teams then helps establish buy-in for following these processes.
4. Measurement
Measuring content effectiveness is the only way to know for certain whether you’ve actually achieved it at all.
The first step to successful measurement is defining what metrics are most important to your brand. You can assess share of search, for example, to learn whether your SEO strategy is working. At the same time, conversion rates are the most important metric you can track to see how specific actions impact sales.
There are several other metrics to consider, as well, many of which we explore in our report. Whatever metrics you focus on, you should measure content effectiveness regularly and use the results to refine your content.
“The challenge of content effectiveness is that it’s both an art and a science, requiring brands to balance more factors than just the content itself.” — “Defining Content Effectiveness: How Content Maturity Can Help Brands Better Meet Shoppers’ Needs”
5. Retailer Collaboration
Retailers and brands have different priorities and approaches, but there’s one key factor of utmost importance to both: the shopper. By keeping the shopper front and center, brands and retailers can collaborate to give them better experiences.
For this reason, some executives suggest discussing product content in joint business planning sessions. Some even recommend holding “digital aisle walks” on competitor sites to identify opportunities together.
By making retailers your partners in content refinement, you can give yourself more opportunities to enhance your content usage on the digital shelf.
Achieve True Content Effectiveness
Content effectiveness is a multifaceted, elusive concept. But it’s also an essential concept to understand for success on today’s digital shelf. By shoring up each of the five pillars — and prioritizing shoppers’ needs as you do so — you can help your brand move through each stage of content management to achieve true content effectiveness.
Download the report “Defining Content Effectiveness” for more insights on how your brand can enhance your product content.
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“Dedicated resourcing and accountability in the organization are required to measure content effectiveness. From a people standpoint, it’s also critical for brands to identify who’s accountable for content effectiveness.” — “Defining Content Effectiveness: How Content Maturity Can Help Brands Better Meet Shoppers’ Needs”
Content effectiveness is what happens when brands go above and beyond these foundational aspects to create content that truly stands out. Brands at the content effectiveness stage understand how to create content that targets their end customer, resonates with them, and consistently converts.
The goal of content effectiveness is easy to get behind — after all, you want everything you do on the digital shelf to be effective.
What can be more challenging to grasp is exactly how to achieve content effectiveness. What does effective product content look like? What steps should brands take to achieve effectiveness? And how does a brand go about measuring content effectiveness?
At the Digital Shelf Institute, we recently worked with Profitero to pose questions like these to several ecommerce executives. Their answers form the basis of our new report, “Defining Content Effectiveness.” Here’s a summary of the insights they shared.
The Three Stages of Content Management
One of the report’s biggest takeaways pertains to the effort it takes to create effective content: Achieving content effectiveness, our ecommerce executives agree, is generally the result of years of gradual work. The report identified three successive stages of improving content management: content compliance, content completeness, and content effectiveness.
1. Content Compliance
In the content compliance stage, a brand’s approach to content revolves around retailer requirements. Here, brands focus on creating the content a retailer needs and then gathering and syndicating it efficiently. It’s important to master these basics while recognizing that the work at this stage is far from the kind of innovative content creation brands need to boost sales.
2. Content Completeness
The content completeness stage is characterized by optimizing content to meet best-in-class guidelines. Brands in this stage know how to tailor content for retailers’ algorithms and create assets that are on par with the quality of their competitors’ content.
3. Content Effectiveness
Content effectiveness is what happens when brands go above and beyond these foundational aspects to create content that truly stands out. Brands at the content effectiveness stage understand how to create content that targets their end customer, resonates with them, and consistently converts — all while maintaining retailer compliance and algorithm success.
Brands that achieve content effectiveness do so because they’ve mastered the compliance and completeness stages first. Once they have, they can more easily synchronize their teams to create truly effective content that outclasses competitors.
The 5 Pillars of Content Effectiveness
According to the “Defining Content Effectiveness” report’s contributors, there are several organizational factors that, when optimized, act as the pillars that hold up content effectiveness capabilities. These five pillars are:
1. People
Having the right people working on product content greatly impacts a brand’s ability to achieve content effectiveness.
That being said, many stakeholders across several different teams need to be involved for successful product content production — which can make things complicated. Bringing your people together in cross-functional alignment is a key part of enabling content effectiveness, as is establishing clear accountability so everyone knows how they can best contribute.
2. Data and Systems
Data — and the technologies used to manage that data — underpins every aspect of ecommerce content. Without accurate and complete data, brands will struggle to achieve content compliance, precluding any chance of reaching content effectiveness.
That means brands need strong data governance. They need to ensure all team members understand the importance of accurate, coherent data, both when they’re first entering it and when they share it with retailers. Documentation that outlines “golden rule” processes for both IT and business teams can help here.
3. Process
Knowing the exact processes that teams will follow to develop product content — from data creation to publication to measuring content effectiveness — is critical to effective content production.
Creating these processes, though, requires careful investment in process development and education. Retailers frequently set deadlines for content delivery, and strategic brands create processes that work backward from these deadlines, giving their teams ample time for each stage. Communicating the importance of each deadline to teams then helps establish buy-in for following these processes.
4. Measurement
Measuring content effectiveness is the only way to know for certain whether you’ve actually achieved it at all.
The first step to successful measurement is defining what metrics are most important to your brand. You can assess share of search, for example, to learn whether your SEO strategy is working. At the same time, conversion rates are the most important metric you can track to see how specific actions impact sales.
There are several other metrics to consider, as well, many of which we explore in our report. Whatever metrics you focus on, you should measure content effectiveness regularly and use the results to refine your content.
“The challenge of content effectiveness is that it’s both an art and a science, requiring brands to balance more factors than just the content itself.” — “Defining Content Effectiveness: How Content Maturity Can Help Brands Better Meet Shoppers’ Needs”
5. Retailer Collaboration
Retailers and brands have different priorities and approaches, but there’s one key factor of utmost importance to both: the shopper. By keeping the shopper front and center, brands and retailers can collaborate to give them better experiences.
For this reason, some executives suggest discussing product content in joint business planning sessions. Some even recommend holding “digital aisle walks” on competitor sites to identify opportunities together.
By making retailers your partners in content refinement, you can give yourself more opportunities to enhance your content usage on the digital shelf.
Achieve True Content Effectiveness
Content effectiveness is a multifaceted, elusive concept. But it’s also an essential concept to understand for success on today’s digital shelf. By shoring up each of the five pillars — and prioritizing shoppers’ needs as you do so — you can help your brand move through each stage of content management to achieve true content effectiveness.
Download the report “Defining Content Effectiveness” for more insights on how your brand can enhance your product content.
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