Why you should combine content and commerce

One of the major benefits of integrating a CMS with your eCommerce solution is a more seamless user experience across your digital experiences. But another advantage is to make use of content in order to improve your customer journey.

Consumers simply expect more today than in previous decades. According to LawnStarter, 61% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after just one bad experience. The time has therefore come to first and foremost help people instead of operating your online store as usual.

The change is to move away from pushing products to providing a complete, integrated customer journey—not only to build awareness, but also to maintain continuous customer delight. In addition to a CMS, great editorial content can be one of the chief drivers behind this trend.

Commerce type dictates content type

Different types of commerce will require different types of content. Buying a new car or upgrading your bathroom differ considerably from buying food or new clothes in terms of customer journey length, pricing, and consideration.

For instance: With Tesla, customers are ordering an expensive commodity with a configurator, with content supporting one single theme (“buying an electric car”) every step along the way. This includes not just dry spec sheets, but also stories, images, and videos, all working together to guide the customer through a smooth experience.

On the other hand: With product pushers, like iHerb or Amazon, there are multiple types of items and thereby multiple types of content to cover each area. Some products, like make-up, can make use of video tutorials, while other products, like a holiday travel package, can make use of user testimonials.

Structure your content with atomic content design »

End to end customer journey

In order to not only attract new customers, but also to keep your existing customers, you need to eliminate all friction—all bad experiences from your customer journey. While a considerable part of this equation relates to technical functionality, user experience, and core web vitals, another vital part relates to content.

A problem for many customers is that they are not getting the right content at the right time, whether it is informative, helpful, inspirational, enticing, or goading. Content can help your customers to understand the next natural steps in a buyer’s process, be inspired to try out new solutions, or get enough information in order to make an informed buyer decision.

Granted, omnichannel customer experiences surely add to the complexity, but by making content reuse possible—by utilising structured content—you can kill several birds with one stone.

Read more: How your CMS can enhance the customer journey »

Differentiating your store

While you might think your store is unique, the fact is that there are several other competitors in your industry—and the consumers may have difficulties in differentiating between you all. Creating a strong and reliable brand is an important step in differentiation, and aside from long standing business confidence and a clear, visual profile—content can really help make you stand out.

You can use Wepik to create and edit designs for your content images, which will help you build a strong visual marketing strategy. This reputation-building approach takes advantage of how people process information. With Wepik, you can easily create stunning designs that capture the essence of your brand and message. Additionally, you can further enhance your designs and edit your images by using a powerful image editing tool like Picsart. This will help you create unique visuals that stand out and make a lasting impression on your audience.

Whether it is building a theme with relatable characters, actions, and settings, creating snappy recipes, shooting beautiful videos, recording fun and interesting podcasts, or writing clear and helpful guides, content can build a sense of identity all while helping your customers solve tasks. Find your tone of voice, your niche, your themes, your stories—and get started creating content.

Driving traffic

Another reason for combining content and commerce is generating more traffic through search engine optimization. SEO is certainly no unfamiliar term to eCommerce, but expanding a pure product offering with articles, news, guides, tips, case studies, testimonials, features, quotes, and more will drastically increase traffic.

If done right, the influx of content will also increase visits from the right people. Delivering the right content to the right people at the right time can be one of the desirable effects of a thorough and quality-minded SEO strategy. You should therefore be mindful of SEO if you decide to combine your online store with more editorial content.

First published 30 June 2021, updated 6 October 2022.

Photo by Joshua Rawson-Harris on behalf of CouponSnake.