The Rise of Content

Today’s consumers are interacting less and less with physical products before they make a purchase decision. As a result, compelling content matters a lot more. The image or video on an item page on Amazon.com, Jet.com, or Walmart.com may be the only visual a consumer looks at before making a purchase decision.

The role of category managers, responsible historically for designing the optimal product mix, layout, and pricing for large sections of physical stores, is changing. Algorithms are playing a bigger role in determining which products appear where and when. And speed matters more than ever. Companies used to making product marketing updates once a quarter or once a year simply aren’t executing fast enough to keep up with the speed of e-commerce.

How much is your brand integrity worth to you? One supplier we work with spends nearly $3 billion a year globally to design, market, and promote their brand. Three billion. Yet all too often when the consumer goes to purchase one of this company’s products online, they have a subpar experience. Despite all the money this supplier has invested in promoting awareness of their brand and driving consumers to buy their products, the company’s products are not presented effectively online. The item pages for the company’s products on their retailer partner sites suffer from having outdated product images, low-resolution images that prevent shoppers from zooming in to get a better look at the products, and only one or two images—and sometimes no images at all.

Of course, this company has conducted brand audit s. A group of people in the company’s e-commerce team has the thankless task of going to each product page on Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Target.com, and any number of other sites and noting the issues in a spreadsheet. Among the many challenges this supplier faces in conducting such an audit is that the people responsible for doing the audit simply cannot get to all the products. When they do get to those products, they have to figure out which content to compare to and whether the content on the retailer’s site matches up or not.

The audit process is so time-consuming that they can complete a full brand audit only once every five or six months—if the supplier can even audit their entire catalog. With thousands and thousands of items and more items being introduced every quarter, it’s virtually impossible for the supplier’s team to deliver comprehensive brand audits with high quality, at scale. And the supplier faces a further challenge—how to get the audits done faster. Ideally, the supplier wants audits done on a weekly basis.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Even if the content is great, what about inventory levels? Is the product in stock? Is the data that describes the product accurate? Is it priced right relative to the competition? And who’s selling the item—the retailer or a third-party marketplace seller?

Findability and Shopability

These factors together describe the shopability of an item. These are a few of the many factors a supplier must get right, for every item, for there to be a high likelihood that shoppers will buy an item once they find it.

That begs the question—what about a product’s findability? When a consumer types “jeans” or “batteries” or “diapers” into the search box on Google, Amazon.com, Walmart.com, or any other retailer site, whose products show up first? The only way to know for sure is to type those same search terms in and see what results come up. But it’s nearly impossible to do that at scale, for every relevant search term, every day of the year, by hand.

In the brick-and-mortar world, suppliers spent months designing planograms with their retail partners, then months more rolling them out, and then months after that sending thousands of people in to walk the aisles and see whether the shelves matched the planogram .

The difference with e-commerce is one of speed and scale. Instead of the shelf changing every few months, the shelf changes every day, if not every hour or every minute. Instead of living in a universe of tens or hundreds of thousands of items, suppliers are living in a world of billions of items. That’s why when you look at categories in e-commerce, often the best-selling items in those categories are from smaller brands that you’ve never heard of.

Those brands are leveraging leading-edge techniques to optimize their products for sale online. They apply search engine optimization (SEO) approaches to ensure they have the most discoverable product titles, descriptions, and keywords possible. They take care to use a large quantity of high-resolution images. They follow up with customers directly to get feedback and address any issues—before a negative review gets written. If a negative review does still get written, they use tools such as Content Analytics to make sure they are alerted to it immediately so they can take action right away.

A Generational Change

Today we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in the way consumers buy products. Spending billions of dollars worked great in an era when what mattered was brand recognition as the consumer walked down the aisle and selected a product to buy. Sufficient brand recognition combined with products from that brand being placed right and in stock resulted in a purchase.

In an algorithmic era, brand recognition still matters, but it isn’t enough. If a seller you’ve never heard of does the work to optimize their product listing for sale, that seller’s product is going to show up first in the search results—the online equivalent of being placed at eye level. Even a brand that has spent nearly $3 billion on brand marketing won’t survive long if competitor products are consistently showing up first in the search results.

The trend is only growing. Online spending is dramatically on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans now shop online at least monthly, with 33 percent shopping online every week.¹ Incredible growth in e-commerce drove U.S. web sales up to $341.7 billion in 2015 from half of that just five years earlier. E-commerce accounted for a whopping 60.4 percent of total retail sales growth in 2015.²

For the consumer, online shopping is as much or more about convenience as it is about price. “Parents with children at home are more likely to be weekly online shoppers, driven by the combination of a greater need for supplies for their larger households and limited time for shopping in their busy schedules,” says Billy Hulkower, senior technology analyst at Mintel.

The impact on traditional retail is noticeable. One need not look far to see news of malls closing and retail stores being shuttered. Retail analyst Jan Kniffen expects one-third of malls to close in the coming years, taking the count of enclosed malls from 1,100 down to 700.³

Simply put, the millennial generation shops differently. Some 70 percent of shopping experiences now begin on a mobile device. Advances in mobile technology mean bigger screens and higher-resolution displays. Product videos need to play as well on a mobile device connected to a carrier network as on a desktop computer with a large screen. Comparison guides need to be easy to view on a small screen and on a big screen. One small image and an all-caps product name taken from an inventory management system simply won’t cut it anymore. Today’s shoppers expect a lot more.

Retailers are innovating out of necessity. Amazon now has more than 70 million members in the Amazon Prime program. Prime is essentially the decades-old membership club concept taken online. It solves two fundamental problems for the consumer: the cost of shipping and the desire to receive a purchased product as quickly as possible.

For Amazon, Prime creates an incredibly loyal shopper base. Although it was a loss leader for Amazon at the start, Prime may be one of the best investments Amazon has ever made. Shoppers who sign up for the annual program are far less likely to shop elsewhere when the time comes to make a purchase decision. For Amazon, the Prime program means billions of dollars in up-front cash, which can be used for infrastructure investments, logistics improvements, and generating additional scale efficiencies.

To help it compete, Walmart purchased two-year-old e-commerce startup Jet.com and hired its CEO, Marc Lore, to run both Walmart.com and Jet.com.

Marketplaces

Retailers continue to experiment heavily with marketplaces. Best Buy recently shuttered its marketplace program, while Walmart continues to expand its marketplace program with the goal of having the largest assortment of products possible online. Of the 480 million items listed for sale on Amazon.com, more than 470 million are marketplace items. Retailers who adopt marketplace programs can scale their assortment much faster than their non-marketplace-enabled counterparts. The risk, however, is that it is much harder to ensure quality, product authenticity, and a best-in-class customer experience.

Our bricks-to-clicks clients are learning as much as they can about online marketplaces. Through the data our platform collects, we’re able to give our first-party seller clients unique insights into sales performance on marketplace platforms, including Amazon, Walmart, Jet, and eBay, among others. Bricks-to-clicks clients closely monitor their ownership of the Buy Box —the button on the item page that determines which seller the sale will go to when the shopper clicks the “add to cart” button. We can tell these clients how often they’re winning the Buy Box and, when they aren’t, why they aren’t.

Marketplaces provide an interesting opportunity for online retailers because retailers carry no direct inventory for marketplace sales. By expanding their assortment, they can ensure that products are in stock more often, they can capture more long-tail searches (searches for products that are purchased less frequently), and they can appeal to a broader range of shoppers by selling unique products that may not be available anywhere else. Meanwhile, ­third-party sellers get to take advantage of the shopper volume and brand marketing power of the large retail platforms.

When we first started working with bricks-to-clicks clients, many of them were losing control in the marketplace. Some felt that marketplace sales were simply “not their problem.” If marketplace sellers priced items too high or too low, used incorrect images, or published poor product descriptions, that was their problem. The attitude of the direct (first party, known as 1P) sellers was that they were losing control—and either didn’t care or couldn’t do anything about it .

But over time, our bricks-to-clicks clients have evolved their strategy to take control back. With careful monitoring of marketplace sellers, they can go back to their retailer partners with input on content quality and pricing of products sold by third-party sellers. If third-party sellers provide poor product descriptions or inaccurate images, that leads to a bad overall site experience for the shopper, which in turn leads to a higher likelihood the sale will go somewhere else. What’s more, products with inaccurate information—such as inaccurate technical specifications—lead to higher rates of return and dilution of brand equity. Therefore, retailers and suppliers must work together to ensure that regardless of who supplies the product and marketing content, the shopper experience is a good one.

Our bricks-to-clicks clients are also reasserting control through a better organizational approach to e-commerce. Upstart online-only sellers have dedicated their entire companies to optimizing their online sales. But lower-performing bricks companies have relegated e-commerce to a one-person team or assigned it as part of the existing responsibilities of national sales or marketing managers who are already overworked and understaffed. Higher-performing bricks-to-clicks companies such as P&G, Clorox, and Levi’s have implemented dedicated e-commerce staff both at the national/global level and within their individual retailer sales teams.

A Focus on Scale

Although many factors contribute to success in e-commerce, one consistent theme across the highest-performing bricks-to-clicks companies has emerged: an unparalleled focus on scale. They are constantly looking for ways to automate, streamline, and scale their operations because they know that 10 percent of total sales coming from e-commerce is just the tip of the iceberg. With more than 60 percent of growth in retail coming from e-commerce, they know that their existing systems and processes simply won’t scale to meet the size and speed of e-commerce. They are getting ahead of the curve by learning as much as they can and getting new technologies and processes in place while they’re still relatively early in the scaling cycle.

The bricks-to-clicks companies implement scalability in three forms.

• Scalable insight

• Scalable organization

• Scalable action

Scalable insight means having the data necessary to make informed decisions across the entire enterprise. Scalable organization means implementing an organizational structure that supports the fast-growing needs of e-commerce. Scalable action means being able to take action at scale—automating complex processes so they can be run automatically and reliably.

We help our clients overcome the multiple Big Data challenges they face when trying to gain scalable insight. First, they have data stored in separate systems and in separate parts of the organization. Inventory information is in one system, while assortment is in another. Dimensions and regulatory information reside with supply chain, while product titles, images, and descriptions reside with marketing.

They want to aggregate all that data and present it in one place but find it increasingly hard to do so. Second, a significant portion of the data our clients need to operate their businesses is available on the Web, but they have no easy way to collect, aggregate, and present it. When they try to aggregate that data manually, they run into issues of data reliability and resource constraints. Third, the legacy business intelligence (BI) systems some of our clients do have were not built for the unique needs of e-commerce.

Many of those BI systems were designed to be generic analysis and presentation tools. They can’t trigger an alert when key events occur, such as a product going out of stock or a price changing. They can present the data only after the fact—too late to be useful. Moreover, those systems that were designed for retail were not designed for e-commerce. They are costly and difficult to customize, and many still require on-premise software, making it difficult to update them quickly to keep up with the dynamic nature of e-commerce.

Business Dashboard

The bricks-to-clicks companies implement the Content Analytics e-commerce Dashboard to gain insight into their e-commerce business metrics. They customize the Dashboard to their specific key performance indicators (KPIs), bake in business rules like share of voice targets, and report to their leadership about progress on the KPIs they’ve defined. Integrated goal planning enables them to set goals right within the Dashboard and track their progress toward reaching those goals.

Using our Dashboard, our clients are able to track changes on an hourly, daily, and monthly basis. They can review their comps on a month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, and year-over-year basis. They gain the business insight they need for annual planning while at the same time being able to spot sudden market shifts and respond accordingly. Many of our clients use the Dashboard for their year beginning meetings (YBMs) and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) with their retailer partners while also using the same Dashboard for their daily and weekly internal sales and brand management meetings.

Because the Dashboard is extensible, we’ve worked with our supplier customers to add in more key metrics over time, incorporating not just online metrics but in-store metrics as well. By aggregating previously disparate sources of information into one easy-to-access interface, we’ve given our clients a single place to measure their business performance end to end. As one supplier put it, the Content Analytics Dashboard is “the control center for our entire business operation—both in-store and online .”

Competitive Insight

Bricks companies have for years analyzed the competition—many through very manual processes. Bricks-to-clicks companies are using automation to understand how their products are performing across multiple retailers (internal competition) and how they’re performing against the competition (external competition).

Figure 2-1 shows an example of the Content Analytics Competitive Insights Dashboard .

Figure 2-1. Competitive Insights

We’ll drill into how bricks-to-clicks companies are gaining competitive insight in more detail later in the book.

Product Information Management

Bricks-to-clicks suppliers don’t stop there. The bricks-to-clicks suppliers implement a Dashboard that tells them how they’re doing. But they go a step further—they implement a cloud-based product information management (PIM) system to store their brand assets for easy access and updating.

In the case of Content Analytics, that is our Master Catalog, which not only stores brand assets but also outputs prepopulated forms necessary to update content on retailer sites. In some cases, the system even goes a step further, updating content directly on the retailer sites, without the supplier having to deal with any forms in the middle. Product names, descriptions, images, videos, and item attribute data are all stored within the Master Catalog PIM and easily updated via automatically generated templates or direct connections to retailer web sites.

Why has this capability to store and update brand assets become so important for the bricks-to-clicks companies? The answer is: content at scale.

For today’s shopper, content matters more than ever before. Shoppers are interacting with physical products far less before making purchase decisions. They’re interacting with images, videos, product descriptions, and online reviews a whole lot more. Given this, the ability to find, manage, and update brand content has taken on a whole new level of importance. In the chapters ahead, we’ll take a detailed look at how to set up a PIM system that will meet your needs in e-commerce. But first, let’s look at the kind of content you’ll want to make sure every single one of your products has.

High-Quality Content: What to Look For

A number of vendors, including Content Analytics, will create web-optimized product descriptions and web-friendly product names along with high-resolution images and videos for you.

Product names, descriptions, and images are referred to as core content—they appear “above the fold” on item pages on retailer web sites, and they’re what search engines like Google use to generate their results. Here’s what to look for in core content:

• Multiple high-resolution images, with a minimum resolution of at least 1000x1000, preferably 3000x3000.

• Product descriptions of at least 150 words in length containing your brand name, the name of the product, keywords that identify your product, and unique content that has not been used elsewhere.

• Product names that include fully spelled out words and your brand name. To work best on mobile devices as well as desktop browsers, product names should be less than 70 characters in length; longer product names often don’t display well on mobile devices.

• For international manufacturers, the ability for content creators to create content in your country. Rather than having to ship your items to a U.S. location, some content creators can receive your product samples locally in virtually any country. Such support can significantly reduce online time to market for your items.

In addition to the content itself, look for vendors that can create content directly in the form your retailer partners require. That means the following:

• Images named properly according to retailer-specific instructions

• Content populated in retailer-specific item/content maintenance forms, portals, or interfaces

Bricks-to-clicks companies are coupling best-in-class content creation with modern, cloud-based PIM platforms to manage and organize their brand content. For example, the Content Analytics system can do the following:

• Output content maintenance forms and images in the necessary template format and naming conventions required by Amazon, Walmart, Target, and many other retailers

• Provide web links (URLs) for images and videos for retailers that require those to be used in your submissions

• Check to ensure that images meet the minimum size/resolution requirements and image file type for each retailer

• Check to ensure that videos meet the proper video type requirements (e.g., MP4) and automatically convert between desktop and mobile videos so that your product videos will play well on both desktop and mobile devices

• Resize images so the exact image you submit is what appears on the retailer site (rather than hoping retailers will crop your images the way you want them)

• Import your content from many different sources such as CSV, XLSX, and XML files as well as from a variety of digital asset management systems

• Convert that content to retailer-required formats and between different formats (so if you have all your images named according to Amazon’s requirements, the system can convert those images so they’re ready for delivery to Walmart and Target as well)

• Alert you when the content you’ve submitted has gone live on a retailer web site or, if it has not gone live, within a specified period of time

• Store your content in one centralized location for easy access

• Show you a history of the content you’ve created and delivered to your retailer partners

In addition to core content, you may also want to invest in enhanced content (also known as rich media) to further showcase your products online.

Enhanced content includes media such as videos, 360-degree views, how-to guides, and PDFs. Amazon.com (where rich media is known as A+ content) and Walmart.com support enhanced content natively, meaning that no third-party rich-media-specific solution (such as Webcollage or SellPoints) is required to add rich media to your item pages on those retailers. While enhanced content may not help get more visitors to your products’ item pages, it has been shown to drive significantly higher conversion rates once shoppers do land on your product’s page.

The largest bricks-to-clicks suppliers also partner with retailers to create brand-specific custom landing pages. Big sites like Amazon.com and Walmart.com will create custom pages to showcase your brand and its products. Amazon, for example, will create showcase pages in the form of A+ content customized specifically for your brand. That can be a great way to educate consumers about new products or new technologies. Walmart.com and Samsclub.com will both create custom pages to highlight your products and their benefits. These kinds of pages are especially important if you’re bringing a new offering to market that you’ll need to educate shoppers about, such as curved televisions or a new line of specially formulated cosmetics.

All that said, core content is what will drive more visits to your item pages. Google and the search boxes on retailer web sites use core content to figure out which items to display in search results by evaluating the product names, descriptions, and attribute data. And core content is what appears “above the fold” (that is, without the user having to scroll the web page) when users browse to your items. Thus, it’s critical to get core content right or the rest of what appears on your item’s landing page won’t matter.

Sponsored Products

If there’s one more area that brands are using to take back control, it’s paid media on retailer web sites. When improving your content and increasing your sales through organic approaches isn’t enough and you want to take things a step further, you can invest in paid media.

On Amazon.com, suppliers can directly purchase ads that will appear on the retailer’s web site via Amazon’s Sponsored Products offering. Similar to Google AdWords, Amazon’s Sponsored Products offering is a keyword-based advertising mechanism. You simply create ads and input the relevant keywords for which you want your ads to show up. Ads don’t cost you anything until a shopper clicks them. Sponsored Products can help boost sales when organic improvement isn’t enough. The nice thing about Sponsored Products is that it works with both larger agency and brands as well as in self-serve form for smaller sellers.

On Walmart.com, suppliers can buy ads through Google AdWords (rather than directly on Walmart.com) or through Triad Retail Media, a media agency. Many suppliers work with Triad to execute sponsored content campaigns and to include sponsored products above the organic search results. Similar to Amazon Sponsored Products, such placements can greatly help boost sales. Bricks-to-clicks suppliers employ a combination of organic (content) and paid (advertising) approaches to drive the most visits to their products.

This has an interesting effect: in online retail, the more units a product sells, the higher it appears in the search results. That’s because sales are one of the key elements that factor into how high an item is ranked in on-site search results. The more an item sells, the higher it is likely to rank, so long as it is a relevant item—as determined by matching between the keywords and the product content. Think of it like getting a book on the New York Times’ best-seller list. Getting a book on the list is extremely hard, but in a sort of virtuous cycle, once a book gets on the list, it’s likely to sell more copies because of the increased visibility it gets from being on the list. That’s a lot like the way search results work on retailer sites—getting on page 1 of the results is hard, but by virtue of being on page 1, an item receives a lot more visibility and therefore receives more sales.

Bricks-to-clicks suppliers have found that it’s worth the investment in paid media to boost sales of their items. The higher an item is ranked, the higher it’s likely to stay ranked. For items that are on page 2 or 3 of search results, bricks-to-clicks suppliers have found it worthwhile to invest in paid media as a quick way to boost the rankings of their items.

Summary

So far we’ve taken a look at how the bricks-to-clicks companies are taking back control through three primary mechanisms—scalable insight, scalable people, and scalable action—so that they can operate at the speed and scale e-commerce requires.

Next up, we’ll look at how to build out your e-commerce Dashboard and the key metrics to track to optimize your business for e-commerce success.