A blog about ecommerce marketing, running an online business and updates to Shopify's ecommerce community.

Great Peg Corwin Insight

Creative ways that ecommerce sites are using content marketing:

 - Make how to videos

 - Answer FAQs in clever ways

 - Use photos 

 - Get a blog and be a media outlet

 - Stay in the know

Quote: "Content. It’s the material you create to inspire existing customers and the audience you hope to reach (your next customers are out there somewhere!) Ecommerce sites across the web are taking advantage of content’s power."

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Marty Note
When I was a Director of Ecommerce I LOVED #contentmarketing, but it rarely loved us back (lol). An ecommerce site is divided between right brain creative (buy) and left brain engineering (Q&A, content marketing).

The more content we put on a product page the worse it converted. Video and reviews were the single exceptions and videos took some serious tweaking until we got it right (short, product as hero, VO narration, show the product working and bring in review summary from our Buzz Team).

Never forget the first 5 minute video we testing with a hard rock score that was WAY too loud. I could watch conversions tank in real time (advantage of having 14,000 unique visitors a day). That video lasted less than a day, but it taught us to shorten and quiet our content.

Eventually we found a formula that put new life in best sellers and rocketed any product with momentum. Video wasn't a miracle worker. When we tried to rehabilitate a product long gone from the Best Seller list video alone wasn't sufficient.

Big Trend Train Running - CONTEXT
As I was leaving Ecommerce three years ago context was starting to play an increasing rule in the increasingly visual language we needed to speak. Saw a great example of this in the DWR.com catalog.

The Design Within Reach Catalog features a Food Truck with DWR chairs, shelving and lighting. Amazing how much more interesting these "high design" products looked in a real world setting.

DRW.com is so Bauhaus WHITE it hurts the eyes and the pretension can be a bit much. Buy mixing high and low art the FUN factor goes up 10x and their products LOOKED LIKE something you might want in you home (instead of an operating theater lol).

One of the BIG implications of our visual marketing trend is more relevant context like DWR's food truck meets the Bauhaus two page spread. BIG MISS by DWR for not sharing that print spread online. MISS by Fox Restaurants creators of the wood fired pizza food truck called the ROCKET (picture above) too since a page about their DWR shoot would have earned social shares, praise and UGC (User Generated Content).

A cool food company like http://www.foxrc.com should know better!