How to Create Organic Content That Actually Helps Shoppers

Last week, we discussed how brands can use organic content to boost consumer awareness. This week, we examine how brands can amplify their content marketing strategy to reach people in the next stage of the consumer buying journey – consideration.

Think about your last major purchase. What prompted it? How did you discover which products were available to buy? Where did you go to research those options? Why did you decide to buy one product over the others?

If you’re like most consumers, you probably conducted most of that research online, likely on your phone. Thanks to smartphones, consumers have 24/7 access to a growing number of digital media platforms. This access to information has effectuated change throughout the buying journey, especially in the consideration stage when consumers are able to conduct more in-depth research than ever before.

How to use organic content to turn shoppers into buyers

As a marketer trying to convince shoppers to buy your products, it’s important to understand what types of information they need in this stage. Then, you have to be able to deliver.

In the consideration stage, shoppers are conducting specific research about an upcoming purchase and narrowing down their list of options. They’re asking specific questions and expect to find customized answers. This research often includes conducting online searches, watching videos on YouTube and reading in-depth content pieces on both brand and publisher platforms.

The brands that do the best job at delivering the information consumers need are the ones whose products will soar to the top of consumers’ lists. The brands that don’t provide that info will most likely end up on the chopping block.

There’s a variety of ways your brand can leverage organic content to deliver this information. We’ll take an in-depth look at three of the organic content pieces below to give you an idea of how to create the right messaging for shoppers in the consideration stage.

No. 1: Optimizing your product pages for the consideration stage

Product pages on your website are foundational pieces of organic content to help shoppers in the consideration stage. These pages serve several important functions:

• Providing shoppers with the information they need about your products to make a purchase decision.
• Acting as an information hub for all of the content pieces you create about a specific product.
• Improving your search engine rankings for searches related to a specific product.

To get the full value out of the pages, you need to make sure each one of your brand’s product pages is optimized for both shoppers and search engines.

Tips to optimize product pages for shoppers

• Provide all the information a consumer could need including product specifications, descriptions of key features and pricing/buying details. 
• Add images and videos to help shoppers visualize your products and see them in action.
• Optimize the page’s layout to make the copy easy to read and scan on mobile devices.
• Increase the speed of your product pages to keep shoppers from abandoning your site and moving on to the next brand.

SEO tips for product and service pages

• Identify the terms and phrases shoppers use to search for your products and optimize each page’s technical SEO elements based on those keywords.
• Optimize title tags to help search engines understand the main topic of your product pages and grab shoppers attention when the page appears in search results.
• Write impactful meta descriptions with strong calls-to-action to inspire shoppers to visit your page when they see the description in search results.
• Add structured data like Schema Markup to help search engines understand essential information about your products.
• Include alt tags on your product pictures to help search engines understand the images.

No. 2: Creating videos to explain your products

When done right, product videos are becoming an increasingly effective resource for shoppers in the consideration stage.

Videos aren’t just an effective visual to help site visitors understand your products, they also help you spread your message across a variety of digital channels. After creating videos of your products in action, you can upload them to YouTube and promote them across social media channels.

No. 3: Developing long-form content pieces for in-depth details

A particularly powerful tool for B2B marketers, long-form content like infographics, case studies e-books and white papers provide shoppers with in-depth information about your products and showcase how they’ve helped others.

But there’s a catch, long-form pieces usually take more time to create than other organic content. To make sure your efforts don’t go to waste, here are a few ways to aggressively promote and leverage each piece of long-form content you create.

Promoting long-form content on social media

Promote your long-form content pieces on all applicable social media sites. Depending on the topic and format of the piece, it’s important to think beyond the traditional B2B lineup of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to sites like Pinterest, Instagram, SlideShare, etc.

Repromoting long-form content

The organic reach of brand posts on social media has been declining for some time. To combat this drop, try promoting certain content pieces multiple times to reach your followers. For one of our B2B clients, repromoting long-form content like white papers, as well as blogs, led to a significant increase in engagement.

Repurposing content

Creating long-form content pieces leaves you with a plethora of information, data and graphics. Here are a few ideas to help you get the most out of those elements:

• Create animated videos to summarize and promote long-form pieces
• Break e-books and white papers into chapters and publish them as blog posts
• Create blog posts to summarize infographics for added SEO value

For each repurposed piece you create, make sure to include links and/or contact forms for users to download the full long-form content pieces.

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Interested in amplifying your brand’s organic content to reach shoppers in the consideration stage? Contact Mindstream Media Group today to learn how our Content Marketing and Creative Services can Fast-Forward Your Business.