Maximise eCommerce Growth With Agile Content Creation

As an eCommerce agency, we speak with retailers every day, and it’s clear just how many of them feel that their content creation process is slow, unorganised and unproductive. You constantly find yourself playing catch-up with competitors who seem to be able to create and publish new content at lightning speed in comparison to your processes. Keeping up with constant demand for fresh and engaging website content is time consuming enough without further complications and slow processes when making it live.

Despite the rapid changes in the eCommerce industry, we continue to see retailers who are still tied to clunky content management software and slow deployment processes involving technical agency time and cost. These methods, however, have proven to be sluggish, rigid and disconnected from what customers really want. Retailers who can’t swiftly adapt to shifting consumer demands and market trends often suffer from a lack of engagement, poor customer experience and, in the end, a blow to their conversion rates and revenue.

Creating engaging and informative store pages that effectively highlight the features and benefits of your products should be at the heart of your content strategy. This can be a significant challenge for eCommerce stores. Ask yourself these questions:

• Does rearranging different elements of your store’s pages or changing the page structure take a long time or is it not possible to do at all?
• Is it difficult to ensure your product images, videos and CTAs are all positioned in the right places to draw customer’s attention?
• Do some or all of your store pages lack mobile optimisation and make you feel like mobile sales are slipping through your fingers?
• Does your team struggle when a large amount of website content needs to be changed or added in a hurry?
• Are you spending money with your external agency on tasks you could do yourself if you had the right tools?
• Are you at the mercy of external partners’ delivery times to make changes just so you can launch a new product range or piece of content for your audience?

If the sound of all this is all too familiar, fear not. Many of our clients were in the exact same position before coming to us. Luckily, there is something that can help with these issues – agile content creation.

Boosting Your Store with Agile Content Creation

In the context of eCommerce websites, agile content creation is all about being able to quickly and efficiently create, update, and optimise your store in a way that is more likely to engage and satisfy customers. This customer-centric approach puts an emphasis on flexibility and collaboration in order to create content that effectively presents your brand and communicates the features and benefits of your products. This, in turn, can lead to increased revenue and customer loyalty. The two elements of an eCommerce store that benefit the most from this approach are the homepage and experience lead product pages.

Your website’s homepage serves as an introduction to your brand as well as a roadmap, meant to help your customers navigate through your store. With the use of agile content creation tools, it’s much easier to introduce frequent updates or improvements to the homepage and change its design. This helps to keep your store fresh and engaging for your customers. It’s also much easier to incorporate video or interactive elements into any area of the homepage, tailoring it to the specific needs and interests of the target audience.

In terms of product pages, what really shines here is testing. Agile tools allow for rapid testing and optimisation to iterate on product page layouts and designs in order to find the most effective templates based on customer feedback and data analysis. What’s important is that once these templates are established, it’s extremely easy to incorporate them across multiple product categories. This results in more user-friendly and effective product pages, and creates a consistent user experience across the store that leads to increased engagement and conversions.

It can also be beneficial for easily adding supplementary content to specific product lines. For example, if you sell age-restricted items, you could simply drop a block explaining how checks and verification work. Is there anything special about how you source the material for a particular product? Explain it on a product page without having to go to your agency to update or create a new product page template.

Next is speed. Did you know that organisations that use agile content creation report an average increase in content speed of 40%?* These businesses create and publish content at a faster rate, allowing them to stay ahead of the competition and quickly capitalise on opportunities.

But how does it happen, exactly?

It’s simpler than it sounds. Agile content creation tools break content creation down into much smaller, manageable chunks that various teams can work on simultaneously, making the process faster and more efficient. The agile methodology encourages collaboration between teams and helps ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page, and that the website is meeting the needs of both the business and the customers. A study by the Content Marketing Institute found that businesses that use agile content creation report a 22% increase in team collaboration compared to those that do not use this approach*. This leads to better quality content and fewer errors.

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Stagnant Content in eCommerce

But is it worth it though? Maybe your eCommerce store is doing well despite not using this approach.

In the rapidly changing world of eCommerce, businesses that have difficulty in responding to market changes are often those that lack flexibility in managing their website content. It’s these businesses that usually end up being outpaced by their competitors and left behind in the race for customer attention. Without a clear plan and methodology, you will often find yourself unable to add engaging content, on time and on budget. These delays in introductions of new content and new products can often have dire consequences to your business’s reputation and bottom line.

One of the most prevalent issues that we see among eCommerce stores that do not adopt the agile content creation methodology is the presence of stagnant and outdated content. There is nothing like a lack of fresh and relevant information that causes customers to lose interest in your brand. Stagnant content can also negatively impact a website’s search engine ranking. Search engines like Google tend to favour websites that frequently update their pages, as it indicates they are active and relevant. As a result, eCommerce stores with outdated, stale and dull content may lose visibility in search results and miss out on potential organic traffic. It’s worth remembering that almost any content published on your website will lose its effectiveness over time, leading to lower conversion rates, fewer sales and revenue loss.

What about growth? Many retailers we talk to struggle with scaling their content production to meet new business needs. As your business grows, it’s essential to ensure that the website can keep up with the increased demand, especially when it comes to new product experiences and informative categories. Without an agile content creation methodology, it can be very challenging to scale up your content production in a timely and cost-effective manner.

Lastly, you may be missing the ability to quickly test and optimise content for conversion rate optimisation and to measure and track performance effectively. This inability to test and track may leave you unable to recognise the most effective content strategies. Without this information, it becomes extremely hard to fix issues that are preventing your store from converting well and understand how different content is impacting your bottom line.

Streamlining eCommerce Content with Agile Tools & Methodologies

How to overcome these challenges? A small way to start is by adopting an agile content creation approach internally. Simply put, this would be to look at the content areas of your current website that you can change, and think about a schedule for updating this content on a regular basis to meet the changing seasons, product launches, promotions and wider content pieces that are within your business calendar. Having the flexibility and speed to change these areas with well planned content will provide a good foundation to build on.

Truly agile eCommerce platforms, headless CMS integrations, or even a combination of the two will expand this strategy further. Software platforms and tools such as BigCommerce or Storyblok are typically more flexible than traditional CMS systems. They are some of the best tools to support new content on your website, built to integrate almost anything quickly and giving you the flexibility in how you create, manage and deliver your website content on your schedule.

With an agile eCommerce platform, it’s easy to make changes to your strategy while continually improving your content to keep audiences engaged and coming back for more. This is probably the most important thing about agile content creation and its biggest benefit – your eCommerce store never stops evolving.

Remember when we mentioned breaking down content into smaller pieces that are easier to manage? Platforms like BigCommerce and Storyblok that support the agile content approach do exactly that, allowing eCommerce stores to produce content that is flexible and responsive to change.

With these platforms, you will be able to start prioritising the customer journey within your content creation strategy, creating relevant and engaging content for different stages of the sales journey. Your website will finally be optimised with fast load times and regularly updated content, with any outdated content removed.

Retailers are moving towards agile eCommerce solutions and adopting a stack of tools that work together seamlessly to integrate huge amounts of content and data in creative ways and scale quickly. A single content platform is a key component of this stack, as it enables retailers to unify their content in one place and distribute it across all channels, resulting in a unified brand experience.

Start today and experience the results firsthand. If you want to learn more about agile content creation and the tools that can help you implement it in your business get in touch today and we’ll be happy to talk you through your options.

*https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/research/