Storytelling in an eCommerce industry is to portray a compelling narrative of your company, its product descriptions, its goals, and achievements, etc. to your target audience in a simple way, to create a positive atmosphere around the brand.
Compelling storytelling helps to build a strong brand for the company. This brand value will help attract more customers to your products, thus improving your conversion rate.
Many new eCommerce sites and products are being launched in the market, making the competition more powerful. For the success of your digital business, you need to engage your customers by providing them unique content and products.
Once these customers are attracted to your brand, ensure that they are surrounded by the trust factor to gain their loyalty, their repeats, and their references. Read the customer’s mind to strengthen your brand and increase your face value.
E.g., sometimes certain advertisements are remembered for many years, while some are instantly forgotten even after seeing them repeatedly. Why is it so?
The magic for a long-lasting impression of an advertisement is that it is made keeping in view the audience’s mind and need, rather than following the company in mind and advertising the product of the company.
The Magical Power of a Strong Story
The art of successful digital storytelling lies in the 5W’s. They are WHAT, WHO, WHERE, WHEN, and WHY. The path to incorporate and bind these 5W’s in your story to get a secure audience connection paves the way to success.
The content of the story lies in the answers to the questions mentioned below.
- What is the goal of your company?
- Who is your target audience?
- Where is your audience (on which media platform)? Where do they find your product?
- When does your audience search for your product?
- Why do they want/love your product?
The last question: How will they react to your product?
Now that you are aware of the flow of the content of a digital story, write an award-winning novel, which will help you to build up a successful eCommerce empire.
Great Story Telling Tips for Ecommerce Strategy
1. Create a User-Friendly Website
The best user-friendly website can be made by listening to your user’s needs and demands. They wish to see, method of display on the page is essential, rather than what and how you want to display.
In a nutshell, the customer must find the layout impressive, the content of the product mentioned in detail, smooth navigation between pages, etc. which will attract him to use the website due to its user-friendliness.
A simple display of all products category-wise with color options and prices, and simple checkout processes will help repeat customers, as well as add publicity to your website with useful references.
Measure your website’s success by conducting usability tests that check the time users spend on your site, their likes, and dislikes, comments, etc. for further improvements.
2. Create Your Content Marketing Strategy
Different companies have different content marketing strategies to make their businesses work.
This competitive era is like a battle wherein the one who has the best content marketing strategy wins.
Many business people don’t realize the importance of content marketing and hence do not make any strategies for implementation. 86% of B2B marketers confess that their companies use content marketing for effective results.
I am setting goals for business, establishing KPIs, focusing on the target audience by giving them the best content and services, marketing on social media channels, etc. Some of the pivotal steps for an efficient content marketing strategy, which will lead to massive business growth.
It has been noticed that companies with strategically planned content marketing leads to effective conversion rates and better SEO rankings.
3. Connect With the Audience
Connecting with your audience, both physically and emotionally, is an art in an eCommerce business.
Tips for Connecting Successfully
1. Research Your Target Audience
To communicate with your audience, you need to know who your target audience is. Research your customers on social media as well as Google Analytics to know their interests and demands. The age group of your audience, their interests, and their expectations will help to prepare successful e-commerce strategies as well as a website.
2. Focus on Customer Usability
As mentioned before, your site is going to be used by customers who wish to navigate or purchase products. A complex and hard to use website will be abandoned quickly by prospective clients; who will opt for competitors’ products. Make your website so simple that even a layperson can easily understand the menus and functions from start to end and can browse error-free.
3. Interesting and Unique Content
Easy to understand and enjoyable to read content, works in increasing customer base. Give your clients, ample reasons to visit the site by making it attractive, customer-friendly, and colorful. Last but not least, detailed product description in simple words helps them in the selection process.
Give your audience unique content, and not a copy format of another firm. You can hire content writers who can help you with this task. The content of your website is just like writing a story, which has a beginning, middle, and end.
E.g., Content beginning starts with a strong message about the company and its brand, the middle central part would include the products, their uses, its challenges, etc. and the conclusion comprises experiments with products, customer experiences, and feedbacks.
4. Visual Representations
Image Reference: Directive
High-quality images, visuals, graphics, etc. reach the brain faster than alphabets. Hence use of visual images in the promotion of brands helps customers to respond better than text messages.
As it’s honestly said, 80% of the people remember what they see, and hence visuals always win against text in storytelling. Make sure all your visuals are in sync with your branding to maintain uniform content, thus keeping audiences engaged.
5. Think About Your Mobile Customers
M-commerce or mobile commerce is on an increasing graph. An important m-commerce statistic reveals that 80% of shoppers prefer mobile over desktops/laptops. Make your online store mobile-friendly by optimizing your site for smartphones.
Review Google Analytics to know how many customers use mobiles to visit your site, and later prepare simple navigation with small images for mobile visitors.
6. Maintain Customer Trust
Trust gives you loyal customers. If customers trust your company and its policies, they are bound to return to you again with more references.
Never give false promises to customers and mislead them into buying your products to increase revenues. Wrong return policies, shipping details, or product details will break customer trust, leaving a false impression of your company, losing them, and their faith forever. One wrong word of mouth from a prospective client will damage your business eventually, leaving the loss unrepairable.
7. Humanize Your Business
Online payments are risky deals. A customer paying online is worried about his sensitive information falling in the wrong hands. He is also risking a product purchase online, which he has not even seen or felt.
The user is just reading the specifications of the product before placing an order. He needs to know that the company is run by genuine entrepreneurs who understand his needs.
Hence, it’s essential to humanize your business for building up the right level of trust to get a loyal customer for life.
Humanizing Can Be Done By:
- Engaging your audience with appropriate content
- Transparency in company operations
- Sharing of customer feedback
- Highlighting your actual brand image
- Utilizing Social Media Platform for relationship building
- Show photos of your staff with their designations on the “About Us” page
- Make your employees your brand promoters
- Personalize your marketing strategies
- Send appreciation letters to loyal customers
- Ask for customer feedback for improvisation
Make Customer Service a Priority
Customers may face some problems related to the purchasing of products and maybe dissatisfied at times. In some cases, the product needs to be replaced, but in some others, some issues need to be solved permanently.
After addressing these issues, talk about the efforts you made to solve the problem, as well as the preventive measures taken so that the problem doesn’t pop up again.
Share a story by putting yourself in the customer’s shoes to understand what they feel and experience about the problem. Ensure that they read the content, thinking about how you solved their problem personally, giving them a specialized feeling.
Graphics: The Art and Science of Digital Information
Engage your audience with unique never before content, and graphics, which depict your company’s progress. Eye-opening numeric figures and statistics in graphical formats are enough for the audience to know that the company is genuine and making progress.
Storytelling is not only about words, but also about visuals that customers easily connect to. An example is shown below.
Image Reference: WordStream
Offer Discounts to Make Happy Customers
Festival discount offers or any other seasonal discounts help increase sales and profits too. Customers tend to shop more when offers are launched; in fact, they wait for offers to gain benefits. This makes them happy and, in turn, prospers the company’s revenues.
Simple Checkouts With Multiple Payment Gateways
Customers love a simple checkout process, and they tend to shop more often. You can lose potential customers if there are limited payment options.
E.g., a customer wishes to shop, but due to selected payment options, they are unable to do so and hence abandon the site. This is the last thing you would wish for. Always give them multiple payment gateways for a satisfactory shopping experience.
Share Your Story Across Multiple Media Platforms
Multiple ways to tell a story works best for multiple types of crowds. Customers are using various media platforms for various searches. So, the best deal works when your company’s story reaches out to all these platforms i.e., on blogs, on websites, on social media pages, emails, etc.
Unique and diversified content on these platforms works wonders in boosting your eCommerce strategy and ultimately improving sales figures. Review the performances of your sales channels regularly to compare the overall performances.
Convert Your Employees Into Brand Promoters
Invest in employees and make them feel positive about your brand and company. Once they are satisfied with the company’s products, it’s easy to convert them into brand promoters.
The strength of ‘word of mouth’ is mighty. When these employees tell positive stories about the company to others, they unknowingly keep on increasing potential customers.
Display an SSL Secured Site for Gaining Trust
Customers play safe when it comes to online shopping. They will never trust unsecured sites to give their personal information for any online product purchase.
SSL certificates serve as security guards for the website and display the symbols like HTTPS in the address bar and a green padlock in the URL when installing on sites.
Image reference: Make A Website Hub
For example, install a wildcard SSL certificate of a reputed brand to secure all your domains and sub-domains, keeping your site safe from hackers.
Conclusion
All the above options will give the customer a memorable eCommerce experience. As you are now well versed as to how to incorporate a successful story in digital content marketing, start writing and boost up your eCommerce business.
