Technology gets more and more integrated into our daily lives. It has dramatically changed our buying behavior as well, and the vendor comes in only after the buyer informs himself about the product and decides to buy. With so many tools at their disposal, companies are aiming to create an omnichannel experience, converging their content with eCommerce platforms to boost and nurture their sales. Customer support, salespeople, and marketers today need to pursue one holistic approach to creating value with content + commerce.
Building a Content + Commerce Platform
There are several patterns for creating a digital platform, such as:
- Single eCommerce platform
- Single Web CMS
- Hybrid solution
- Web CMS with commerce features/modules
- eCommerce platform with Web CMS features/modules
Solutions like Magento, which quickly took the spotlight in the eCommerce platform market, are designed to help its users improve their user experience. It is a cloud eCommerce platform that comes equipped with personalization extensions, tools for promotion, staging and previewing, SEO, and social integration. Magento enables you to integrate different approaches to selling, marketing, and serving customers, and create an omnichannel experience for them.
An important thing to know is the difference between a multi-channel and omnichannel experience: not all multi-channel experiences are omnichannel, while all omnichannel experiences integrate multiple channels. If all your channels don’t work together (e.g., a well-designed website and social media campaigns), they can’t be omnichannel.
What Kind of Content Does a Customer Need?
A customer wants active and high-value content. How do you pull a customer into your sales process? What kind of material is the most effective for this purpose? Customers don’t want content that’s commercial. They don’t want to be tricked with pages irrelevant to your ad’s headline or image. Clickbait is death for conversions, so avoid making your content highly sales-focused early on in the funnel. You need to deliver value and make your way toward “the ask.”
The customer needs to go to less commercial and more informational destinations. They look for content on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.) and other platforms, not just on the e-store. As for the store, it should evolve into a more informative and content-rich experience where the product value and benefits are emphasized more than the price.
If the Content and the Commerce platform are disjointed, it’s tough to enforce a simple and streamlined user experience to nurture online leads. Think about different types of content, such as educational content, guides, reviews, and testimonials. However, when based on one single platform and operated via an integrated interface, Content + Commerce solutions will provide a flexible and unified user experience. The content you create can also be pushed into other channels,
The story you tell and content you create needs to deliver value. Rethink the buyer journey, consider their every step, and make sure that you’re doing everything to lead them towards purchase.
Contact Drupalgeeks for help in eCommerce design and development. If you don’t have a roadmap or a strategy in place to improve user experience, boost engagement, and increase conversions, we can help you strategize, discover, develop, deploy, and customize your content and commerce business solution.