How to Uncomplicate Your Product Content Strategy in 4 Easy Steps

Product page content can seem difficult. You sell, perhaps, thousands of items, across multiple categories, across all your retail partners.

With the limited resources and budget you have, how can you possibly make all that product content visually and textually perfect? The simple answer is: You can’t. While having brand consistent content is ideal, it’s just not practical for most brands.

So I recommend this four step process that will allow you to be more focused and efficient.

1. Prioritize the products with the biggest “conversion” problems

Group products into three buckets using a three-part scorecard:

1. Which have availability issues? (e.g. out of stocks or Buy Box losses to third-party sellers on Amazon). Content won’t help here.
2. Which have traffic issues? (i.e. not receiving enough visibility and clicks via search). Content has some impact on traffic — having compelling titles and primary images can help shoppers choose an item out of a packed search results page — but content is not the major driver of traffic. Search results are.
3. And, finally, which have conversion issues? These products have good traffic and good in stock rates, but they are still not driving optimum sales. These will be most helped by a) strategically optimizing content, and b) boosting review counts and addressing negative reviews.  

Now, you have the products you want to strategically target with content improvements — conversion boosters.

2. Benchmark best sellers and competitors in your category(ies)

Once you’ve identified products that might need content help to boost conversions, you need a basic understanding of content expectations for your categories. What are best sellers doing? How are your competitors presenting themselves?

There are two simple reasons:

First, categories are different. Granola bars and faucets involve different levels of shopper research and engagement — a product might be seriously hampered in conversions without 5+ images and a video in faucets, which might not be the case with granola bars (although you might be surprised at the high level of content among best sellers even in all categories on Amazon).

Second, you want to imitate those brands performing better than you. These benchmarks can serve as a diagnostic to help you understand the sales performance of other brands.

(Profitero monitors Amazon best sellers daily and presents basic benchmarks in free, syndicated FastMovers reports and detailed benchmarks in every single customer account.)

3. Focus on products that aren’t converting well: add A+ content, videos, images

At this point, you’ve identified those products that have conversion issues, and you understand how successful brands are presenting their products.

Now, make the changes you need to boost conversions. In addition to category benchmarks, we’ve analyzed content factors that drive conversions (and, ultimately, sales).

1. Start with A+ content on Amazon and enhanced content sections on other retailers. The reason? Products in the bottom 25% percentile for conversions saw a 25% boost in conversion percentile after adding A+ content on Amazon. (Compare that to all other products, which saw no conversion percentile increase, on average, after adding A+ content.) If a product is already converting highly, you might add A+ content for the sake of brand equity, but don’t add it to boost your conversions.
2. Next, try videos. Products converting in the bottom 25% percentile saw a conversion percentile increase of 12% after adding video on Amazon, according to our data. (Other products in higher conversion percentiles saw conversion boosts of just 1-2%.)
3. Finally, add more images. Our analytics on Amazon show that you can get a 10% conversion percentile boost just by moving from one to three images. 

4. Measure the results, and let that information inform your tactics

You’ve made your changes. Now, monitor impacts to conversion and, ultimately, sales. Did it work? What was the ROI?

For example, one Profitero customer – a global CPG company – aggressively improved its Amazon content; it boosted its products with A+ content from 35% to 47%, nearly doubled the number of products with video (from 28% to 45%), and added an average of one more image per product.

The result? This company grew sales on these items 66% faster than the category.

Give it a try

It’s simple. Streamline your efforts by aggressively targeting products with conversion issues. Depending on your category dynamics, strategically improve content and measure the results. Use these results to plan the rest of your strategy.

Contact us to get started with a 30-day free trial of Amazon analytics, which includes a FREE customized assessment of your content performance by our eCommerce experts.