Ecommerce content marketing is more than a buzzword—it’s a way of life. Brands selling online have produced colossal amounts of content to meet the 50% growth in content consumption in 2020. Yet not all that content is getting seen, despite the demand.
Thousands of brands will put up the occasional blog post and call it a day, but that’s not enough.
In fact, it won’t do much of anything.
Picking apart what content will gain real engagement and produce measurable sales results requires taking a step back. Let’s start by looking at specific content types to understand how to use each—in particular, photos.
Photo content used by ecommerce brands today is essential in meeting new consumer expectations. If potential buyers aren’t satisfied with the quality of product photos (never mind what they contain), they move on without a second thought.
As a result, product photo content has sectioned off its own permanent home in “essential product data.” This is important for brands to understand as they organize product data for the multiple platforms they sell and market on since keeping that data organized is one of the biggest hurdles to modern ecommerce management.
Before diving deeper into his shift, be sure to brush up on your basics in graphic design and photo editing. Then you’ll be ready to follow along to learn what the role of photo content is in the new “essential product data.”
What Is Essential Product Data?
Defining essential product data is…well, essential. Understanding the two types of product data helps paint the picture of how relevant photo content is and also helps prioritize data clean-up.
In the world of ecommerce, essential product data is considered the meat and potatoes of information about your products. Traditionally, essential data includes:
- Your product titles
- Feature bullet points
- Your product descriptions
- Hero product images
- Metadata
- Ingredients (when applicable)
- Warnings (when applicable)
- Contradictions (when applicable)
- Weight, size, and other physical specifications
- Technical specifications (like speed, megapixels, etc.)
The second category of product data is called “enhanced product data,” and traditionally it includes enriched product descriptions (with visuals and callouts), product tours, “view inside” and 360-degree tours, product comparison charts, instruction manuals, and enriched photos and videos.
Why Photo Content Moved Categories
A picture is worth a thousand words, they say. Sure, it’s cliché, but maybe it’s cliché for a reason. With 40.3% growth in ecommerce sales and adoption in 2020 (up from 2019), consumers are buying things they never would have bought online before. Photos have helped fill a gap in the online shopping experience for what consumers used to buy in-store, and now product photos are even starting to enhance the experience past what a brick-and-mortar experience can provide.
The quality, design and use of your photos will make or break product pages and overall marketing. According to research from 2018, product images were the single most influential type of content that smartphone owners considered before making a purchase.
In today’s extraordinarily competitive environment, enriched photos have become such a norm (and requirement) in building consumer confidence that photo content is no longer considered enriched data, but essential product data. For brands that are serious about meeting today’s consumer expectations and even standing out above the rest, photo content will play a central role.
Use these photo content strategies to see what role photo content will play in your brand’s success.
1: Create Photo-Based Infographics
This is one of the simplest strategies to enhance the buyer journey using photo content. Take a high-resolution photo of your product over a white background and then draw lines to specific features you want to highlight. This turns your photo into an instant infographic. Use this to:
- Point to and describe features
- Add descriptions of materials
- Add details about craftsmanship
- Offer tips for use
This clear and illustrative image gives consumers two things: a good look at the product, and a compelling list of reasons why they should buy it.
2: 3D Renders That “Put Products in Their Hands”
3D views of products give consumers the up-close-and-personal look at your products. They also let you capture angles and magnifications that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
An added benefit to using a 3D rendering instead of a live photo is that you can eliminate any imperfections, dust specks or smudges. These awe-inspiring product images are at the heart of iPhone release videos, for example.
3: Photo Content from Every Angle
Photo content is how ecommerce brands give consumers the 360-degree look at products that they would have if shopping in-store.
To that end, not only does that mean product photos from every angle, but special “exploded” and “cutaway” views give an even more in-depth view of products.
For example, for a brand selling a technical product, many of the best selling points aren’t visible to customers (especially inside packaging). An “exploded view” allows consumers to see inside the product to understand what makes it work.
A “cutaway image” is similar but instead trims away layers of the digital renderings to allow consumers to see inside. Just think of a mattress with several layers that work together for maximum comfort. A mattress manufacturer could use cutaway photo content to showcase the different layers of product design.
4: Social Shareability
Photo content is also the single biggest anchor to a successful social media strategy. Posts without images are rarely shareable. In fact, social networks favor posts with photo and video content above all other content types (text-only posts, articles shared, etc.), meaning any content without at least one photo won’t be seen by 99% of your followers.
Social shareability should also encourage user engagement with photos. One of the easiest ways to do this is by offering some kind of incentive, such as a raffle or contest.
Photo editing for social media has some of its own ins and outs, too, so be sure to read up on how it’s done.
5: Shoppable Product Images
New developments across blogs and social media (like Instagram’s “shoppable photos”) have added greater weight to the role of photo content. In what are called shoppable images, products are tagged so that consumers can buy whatever is on display in one click.
This is only just the beginning of shoppable photos, too. Soon, ecommerce consumers will be able to take photos of products in real-life and get instant feedback on where it’s on sale.
It’s developments like this one that are making brands’ libraries of product photos one of the most important assets to sell online.
The role of photo content goes way beyond marketing, too. It’s even about more than shareability and the number of eyes on your products. Today, photo content is the best tool to reach new customer expectations.
Just like a brand’s other essential product data—like descriptions, specs and more—photo content has to be organized and optimized for multiple channels. A sharp cutaway image might be used on three channels a brand markets on, whereas a related product infographic might require different versions, so it can be used as the hero product image on multiple marketplaces. These details and versions easily become overwhelming for brands stuck managing product data in spreadsheets.
Fortunately, product information management software (PIM) is designed to aggregate and organize all your product data (essential AND enhanced) so you can export what you need for the channel that needs it. The cost of not using a PIM has become exorbitantly high for ecommerce brands trying to use photo content with any of these strategies.
Using photo content creatively and consistently across channels will earn an ecommerce brand better conversion rates, greater customer loyalty, and enormous brand capital. Which of these strategies could you try today?
