Marketing Revolution

Karen Note
When launching a new product, it is important that customers understand what problems your product is solving. You don’t have time to tell a long story so you need to make sure your message is effective in creating a desire to learn more.

This is where context can help. If you are trying to tell a story about your product, context is the background information that helps the scene make sense. Without this context, you leave it up to the customer to figure it out on their own.

Marty Note
Love Karen's note. If you sensed customers NEVER figure it out on their own you match my 12 years of ecommerce experience. Here is how I thought of product page copy when I was an Ecommerce Director:

* Be FACTUAL about specifications.

* Provide scale via visuals (or video)
* Karen calls this defining the problems solved.
* Curate words or phrases from reviews when repeated.

* YOUR context as seller is facts.

* Use reviews for sentiment and emotion.

* Consider using video if products are complex.

* Never refer to something in copy that can't be seen.

We came to understand our role as the ecommerce team was more curators than sellers. To the extent we attempted to sell it seemed baseless, so we stayed factual and created a "Buzz Team" to write reviews and teach us how our customers thought, wrote and felt about our products. We ended up using some of THEIR copy in our campaigns. 

ABOUT Copy
Another important deep pool of context is your About page copy. If you lay out 5 key values in our about copy look for ways to tie any and all copy to one of those values. If we were discussing product X and it had tremendous attention to quality we could share empathy or similar stories to expand the context to reinforce our values.