No matter your retail marketing strategy, its success depends on how well you create content. We’re long past the days of people calling a customer service hotline to find out more about products or ask questions about a business. So it’s time to improve your retail marketing asset.
Consumers turn to content more than anything to learn about brands and the products they offer. They’re exploring blog posts, engaging with social media content, watching product and brand videos, and so forth.
Although it’s essential to put out a lot of content, it must be high-quality and captivating to convince consumers to engage with it and move forward with a conversion. Here are a few tips to create content that elevates your retail marketing strategy.
Tips to create high-quality content
Find Out What Kind of Content Your Audience Wants First
Whether you’re launching a campaign on social media, starting an email series, or working on content for another marketing channel, it must cater to your target audience and their interests.
Dive into the customer data you’ve collected thus far. Analyze insights that would be particularly helpful in content creation. Do VoC research to determine your target audience’s pain points and passions.
For example, look at where your customers are located to create content around products most helpful where they are. Study the content they’ve engaged with the most and focus your creation efforts on those topics or media types.
You can find customer data via your in-store analytics tool like Flame analytics. Check the built-in analytics tools on your social media and email marketing platforms. You can also lean into social listening tools, and the comments and messages you get to gain insight into your audience’s content likes and dislikes.
Find out what content your audience wants and give it to them.
Create Compelling Visual Content
According to Venngage’s annual survey on visual content marketing, 51.4% of marketers said 91-100% of their content had some kind of visuals in it. This is smart, considering how consumers are becoming more attracted to visual content over written content.
Retail businesses, specifically, can thrive with visual content because seeing how products work can be more impactful than reading about it. It’s more of an immersive experience for consumers.
You should create compelling visual content for all of your marketing channels. But start with social media if you’re not sure where to begin. If you can master consistently publishing compelling, dynamic content on ever-evolving social media platforms, the others will come easily.
Each piece of visual content should have a goal attached to it, like increasing organic traffic to your website. Consider the platform you’re posting on. For example, if you’re posting on TikTok, create short-form video content. Or, if you’re posting on Instagram, create reels and image carousels.
Ensure you’re providing value to your audience. Most importantly, humanize your content. Show your brand’s personality. Share behind-the-scenes content and who the people are behind your business. Ensure that each visual has the potential to emotionally connect with your audience.
Use Long-Form Content in More Ways Than One
With all of this talk about how short human attention spans are these days, you may be shocked to see a tip about long-form content in this post. But the advice isn’t so much about how to create long-form content as it is about how to change it into other things.
Adapting long-form content to other types of marketing content, such as infographics, short videos, or ads, can save you money on marketing. It can also save you time and energy on content creation that you can use in other parts of your business.
First, identify the main points of the piece. This will help you narrow down what kind of content you can create using this piece of long-form content.
For example, let’s say you’ve written a 2500-word blog post about the value your latest product provides. You identify six main features you talk about in the post. You could create an infographic and a product demo video for each feature.
Once you’ve determined how you can break down the piece into smaller bites of information and the content you can create with it, detail how you’ll execute the new content and when it’s due.
Giving yourself deadlines and following a step-by-step plan ensures you finish creating the content and publish it at the right times.
Your main retail marketing asset
One of the best retail marketing asset you have in your retail business is your content. When created with authenticity and quality at the forefront, content can take your marketing from mediocre to stand-out, igniting consistent engagement and conversions.
Give your audience the compelling content they want with the tips above, and you’ll be closer to retail marketing success.
