In a suburban Maryland house the Johnson family lives the content-fueled future of digital commerce. Emily, a 21 year-old college senior plays and replays a video blog by Michelle Phan on the Sephora beauty website. Emily’s mother, Mary, who needs a healthy mid-week recipe, checks kraftrecipes.com and downloads a coupon to buy the ingredients at her local supermarket. And Mary’s husband Tom calculates the project materials and costs for a new deer fence using the Home Depot’s Fencing Project Planner interactive tool.
Here are three ways marketers can use content to grow digital commerce along the entire buying journey.The Johnson family is reaping the benefits of brands that use content to attract, engage and convert digital shoppers. Brands such as these are winning the hearts, minds and wallets of consumers by employing innovative content marketing programs that go beyond the realm of advertising and last mile conversion discounts, noted Kirsten Newbold-Knipp, research director, Gartner for Marketing Leaders.
Offer informative content
Helpful content, and not discounts, should be the centerpiece of awareness efforts to attract targeted buyers to your brand. Well-crafted, persona-tailored content will attract more qualified visitors, differentiate a brand, evoke a lifestyle and even surprise and delight shoppers. The eyewear manufacturer Zenni Optical worked with their content marketing agency to produce helpful how-to content for measuring eyeglass fit that resulted in 60,000 new email opt-ins and a 4.53% commerce conversion rate, easily outperforming the ROI of any of Zenni’s traditional paid media campaigns.
