Start offering your visitors more than just persuasive product descriptions
The aim of writing your product descriptions is to sell products, with persuasive copy to encourage the visitor to buy. The copy focuses on the product's benefits and how it fulfils visitors' needs. However, you can offer more.
Create Engaging content
As well as creating persuasive content on your product descriptions, you should consider creating additional engaging content. There are four reasons you should make the effort:
- This content reassures visitors that you know your products. It's well documented that when customers buy, price is not always the deciding reason. Think like a customer; if you have taken the time to supply this information, it shows that you have good product knowledge.
- A boost in organic traffic. Creating resourceful information will produce extra traffic. No matter what you sell visitors will always have questions:
- How do I use it
- Which product is the best
- Attracting external links. If you can create quality content over time, other sites will link to you. My advice here though is to be careful about too much self-promotion.
- Increase returning visits. If your customers know that you offer advice and guides on how to use your products they will return.
Tip: Once you have published your content, upload the photos and videos to social media sites.
Some examples of engaging content
Buying guides
Create guides to help visitors choose the products that best suit their needs and answer frequently asked questions. Look at how John Lewis offers visitor's guides, for example. Here's their sewing machine buying guide. It goes into detail about what types of machines are suitable for specific projects, details on each machine type and their benefits and a clear breakdown of jargon.
How to guides
Supply detailed step-by-step information on how to use products. For some products, you might think this is a waste of time as it's obvious how to use them or the product comes with an instruction manual. Have you taken the time to read your product's instructions? If you have, can you improve on them?
Downloadable instruction manuals
I have lost count of the times my wife's thrown away (sorry, placed safety) my instruction manuals. Or I've been cocky enough to think I don't need them! When this happens I pop on-line and search for a downloadable PDF.
Tricks and tips
Does the product do something not documented by the manufacturer? Can you offer tips on how to use the product more productively? How much product knowledge do you have within your business that isn't in your content?
Tip: always try to include images or photos. Don't be camera-shy, sometimes videos are even better.
I can hear you now...
People say, "why should I create content for people that didn't buy from me?" The answer is because they didn't! Your new content will attract new visitors that didn't buy and even those that didn't visit your site. Make sure your content includes some way for visitors to subscribe to your mailing list. Don't hide it away, put it at the top and give them a reason to sign up. If they sign up you can now regularly put your business in front of them.
Planning what to write
Knowing what to write can sometimes be a difficult task. What products do you do first? What to write about? Here are some simple ways to get you started.
Ask your staff
Shame on you if you are not already doing this! What products do customers ask questions about? What are the most commonly asked questions? What terminology are customers using when they talk about the product?
Ask your customers
Using simple surveys ask them what they want to know. You can add extra fields to your product review form. There are so many ways to get this information.
Allow customers to ask questions
Add a feature directly on your product pages where visitors can ask questions and read your answers. Their questions might spark inspiration.
Look at the keywords in your analytics
While writing this post I looked through the keyword data in 10 of our ecommerce sites. Every site had keywords that included the words 'how to', 'guide', 'manuals' and 'instructions' followed by product names. Within Google Analytics you can use filters to create a keyword exports; search over large date ranges. This information is gold. When visitors are researching for these types of search phrases they will dig deep and go through 2, 3 and even more search result pages to find what they are looking for.
Select products that you want to sell
This is a no brainer; write content around products that you want to sell!
Don't believe me?
Still not convinced? Then hear it straight from the horse's mouth, as Matt Cutts, Google's search guru demonstrates a similar view, in his roundabout sort of way.
Time to hire some more staff and a new server
Only kidding, but you never know! Do the work and get it right you will see an increase in sales and customer loyalty. And at the same time, you might even learn something about your products!