5 ways to get more out of your ecommerce store's content
Creating content for your store is an important but time-consuming task. And there’s a lot of it! Think about how much content is needed just for a product page, then all the time that went into coming up with ideas, drafting the content, rewriting, photographing, refining, and more before it actually goes live on your site. Then consider that you need to add all the homepage content, FAQs, About Us…the list goes on before you start thinking about blogs and landing pages.
With all that content, wouldn’t it be great if you could get more use out of it? Sure it’s doing its job on the page it was created for…but what if you could make it work even harder for your store?
Today let’s talk about repurposing content. We’re going to look at what kind of content can be repurposed, and some ideas for how you can make your content go further.
Why it helps to repurpose your store’s content
We’ve already mentioned the time and effort that goes into creating any kind of content for your store. Often every piece of content whether it’s a photo or product description or FAQ answer has been created with a specific purpose and goal in mind. For a product description, the purpose is to give customers a summary of what the product is and its benefits, while also adding to that page’s SEO. And often, this content goes through multiple stages before it makes its way to your live site.
Repurposing all that content means that effort you put in goes further. A lot of the content you create for your store can be used across different platforms, in ways that will help improve your content strategy. Instead of creating something with only one purpose, you create content that will serve multiple purposes. You increase your content’s reach, and reduce the amount of time you spend creating so much content for each individual channel.
#1 - Use product pages to create product guides for email
Engaging with your customers via email is one of the most valuable things you can do to encourage retention. Email is a direct line of communication, and is one of the most effective for conversions. It’s also the channel that 60% of consumers prefer for brand messaging and promotions. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy coming up with engaging content to send them, however.
Product pages have a lot of high quality content that’s useful for customers. After all, it’s what they use to decide to make a purchase. You can repurpose this content to create product guides or spotlights to send to customers. For example, if a customer orders a specific product, you can use the product page content to create a sort of use-guide to send them as part of their post-purchase emails. That could be care instructions, an FAQ, and some previous customer reviews. This helps to give them additional info they may have missed, as well as build anticipation for their order. Or you could use the product page to create spotlight emails - these can be sent to customers who may not yet have tried that product, but who may like it based on data you have about previous orders and preferences.
#2 - Use blogs as email topics
Blogs are great for your site - they give customers additional content to browse, more to post to social media, and can be highly valuable to your SEO strategy. They can also act as the basis for some really great email content. Blogs are easy to adapt to an email, it just takes a little bit of time to shorten them and make them easily consumable via email. You could even make use of AI tools to help make this task even easier.
The topics you write for blogs will typically be ones which you’re hoping are of interest to your target audience. That makes them perfect for email content where you’re hoping to engage your customers. For example, if you published a blog about “How to use an aeropress for the perfect cup of coffee”, then you can adapt this to an email. Or if you regularly publish gift guides, then these can be used for gift guide emails in the run up to different holidays like Valentine’s Day and Christmas.
#3 - Use blogs as starting point for video content
Just as blogs adapt well to email, they also adapt well to video content. Part of the challenge of creating video content lies in scripting videos and coming up with ideas. Blogs are already the kind of topics you believe your customers will be interested in and are valuable to things like SEO. That means they can act as the basis for scripting videos.
This can apply to both short-form and long-form video content, and some blogs could be adapted to suit both. For example, if your store sells liqueur and you regularly post cocktail recipes and guides on your bog, then you can create a series of shorter TikToks or Reels for each recipe, as well as a video for YouTube that perhaps has 3 or 4 different recipes. You already have the content from the blog, so with some light scripting it will take much less time than if you were trying to create videos from scratch.
#4 - Use product page content to create videos
Video is by far the most engaging format for content. Sure, customers could just look at product pages, but why not take it a step further and turn those pages into videos? If you’re sceptical of how customers really feel about this kind of content, in one survey 96% of consumers said they’ve watched “explainer” videos to learn more about a product, and 89% said they’d been swayed by a video to make a purchase.
These videos expand the reach of your product pages beyond the original goals you may have had in mind. People who might not be actively looking for products or browsing online stores might instead see your product explainer videos on a different platform. That could be on social media, or on another site if it’s featured elsewhere.
#5 - Reuse product photos for social media and email
If you’ve spent all that time and effort on curating the perfect product shots, then it makes sense to use them across channels. These high quality, product focussed photos are perfect for use on social media as well as in email content.
Depending on the type of content you’re posting or emailing, different types of imagery will suit better. For example if you use renders or a transparent background PNG to use as the primary product photo, then this will be better suited to email where you may use them as part of a product feature. If you sell apparel, then you may have more model and contextual shots used on product pages, in which case these translate well to social media as well as email.
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Any piece of content you create can most likely be repurposed and used elsewhere. This helps to increase the reach of your content, whether that’s a blog or product page. Repurposing content increases the value you get from it, and makes for a smarter content strategy overall.