How to Optimize Your Brand Experience for Ecommerce

• eCommerce

The rapid expansion of ecommerce has brought with it a new challenge – that of creating a superior brand experience online. A growing body of research has shown that consumers are increasingly becoming sensitive to brand perception and brands that were previously associated with a product can lose their lustre very quickly, especially now with customers being spoilt for choice given the plethora of competing products in online marketplaces.

“Brand experience”, the new buzzword in online marketing, involves the challenging task of creating an effective brand experience online, akin to or even better than the experience in an offline store, without the touch and feel of the product, all the while building and maintaining brand equity. Positive brand equity and authenticity are paramount in building brand awareness and trust, and with trust, follows loyalty.

The beauty of digital commerce is that everything is trackable and measurable. Brands spend millions of dollars behind strategic brand marketing, but do they effectively monitor their impact at a product level online or derive actionable data insights from these metrics?

‘Brand Governance’ is the single most important factor in the success of your brand on a marketplace, with implications across user experience and delivery of value. When brands are consistent across all channels, including digital channels, they hold more value for customers.

So how can brands create a great brand experience at a tactical level and ensure flawless execution of their brand guidelines?
The short answer is: Consistency in Product Presentation.

Getting a product listed on a marketplace can be a daunting task. And an even bigger challenge is to ensure the smooth distribution and execution of your brand content strategy. When building brand experience online, ecommerce and in-store strategy go hand-in-hand and a brand’s visual content/messaging needs to be consistent across all channels to depict the same brand story.

Consistent presentation of your brand product listings, ensuring the highest product data quality, on search engines is the first step in establishing a stronger standing for your brand on marketplaces.

The three core elements of product presentation:

• Product Title
  Make sure that your product title is accurately described for SEO and that you are competing well for a high ranking on search engine results pages (SERP). You need to not only monitor your SERP rankings vs competing brands in same category but also ensure that your product title had the right keywords that are in sync with your brand guidelines, thus enhancing your product search and discovery.
• Product Image
  The product image online is what captures the buyer’s interest and also differentiates the product and brand. An image that is consistent with your brand style, photography style, graphics and colours make your brand instantly recognizable and helps maintain your brand value. From the number of images to the style of photography to the visibility of the brand logo/badge/icon on the images – all the aspects need to be monitored across all digital channels and should also tie into your offline brand experience.
• Product Details
  The product details page is like your in-store shelf for your product and this is what will set your product apart from competition and drive the purchase. So brands need to constantly evaluate their product details pages and ensure that they are showing the right content about their products which is detailed enough to influence a buying decision and not confuse a customer.

Brand’s today spend millions of dollars in ensuring they generate top-notch content for their products, but generating great content is just one part of the journey; ensuring the content is reflected at all the places it should and is yielding the behaviour response expected is what will lead to measuring the ROI.

Course5 Compete helps Brand’s monitor, measure and improve implementation of their product content strategy using AI technologies like machine vision and text analytics combined with custom-built analytical frameworks.