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E-commerce

Commerce as content: What it is and why it matters for your business

By Alistair Wearmouth

In order to successfully scale their e-commerce business, brands need to think beyond simple listings for individual products on their online shelves. They need to adopt what's known as 'commerce as content' into their marketing approach in order to reach customers at all touchpoints of the buying experience.

1 Min Read

E-commerce organizations have a long list of challenges they’re tackling on a daily basis, from standing out in a noisy, competitive marketplace and identifying their target audiences to keeping up with evolving customer preferences and getting their product pricing just right. The main task at hand, however, is driving conversion and increasing sales.

Having the right tools and technologies to help with this are a must, but there’s another increasingly important strategy for sealing the deal that’s often overlooked by e-commerce brands: compelling stories.

Effectively, efficiently engaging buyers with interesting, thought-provoking stories helps to drive loyalty and create greater awareness of the brand’s values. This is a strategy called commerce as content, which digital-first companies leverage to drive product sales through their online store. It’s all about rethinking a brand’s online retail presence; rather than just directory, it’s a storytelling platform that draws buyers in with impactful messaging tied to the products they’re viewing, all to create an enhanced customer experience so they keep coming back for more.

New Shopify integration with Brightspot

‘Commerce as content’ involves leveraging your commerce assets within the content experience so that you're more likely to catch buyers at different points of their journey and entice them to take action.

With Brightspot’s new Shopify integration, an e-commerce business can embed and feature Shopify products into content management system (CMS) pages, promos, lists, articles, blog posts, listicles, podcasts and every other Brightspot storytelling capability—something functionally impossible to do with Shopify or other e-commerce platforms.

In other words, e-commerce brands can now take their Shopify assets and transform them into a Brightspot content type to feature in their publishing workflow just like any other asset.

Say you have 10 pillows you want to promote for the upcoming fall season, You can turn each pillow into an individual module within the CMS, easily search for them when you want to promote them, and insert each one into any articles, emails, newsletters or other content types that are planned to promote the fall season. CMS users can quickly add them into the content type, so users reading the article can click to buy from where they are.

The Brightspot platform seamlessly integrates with the Shopify platform, which manages inventory, payment processing and more, so it’s a smooth, seamless experience for both the CMS user and the customer.

Commerce as content in action

Here’s what this can look when it all comes together:

• Promos: An e-commerce company launching a new product can add a product promo as a new module to its homepage and/or within any upcoming email campaigns, directly linking back to the company's online store, to increase traffic and ensure no existing or new customer misses the launch. Or, a brand wanting to promote their winter fashion recommendations can easily pull their top 10 jackets and vests into an article or newsletter so readers can complete their purchase while scrolling about the latest trends. 
• Pricing: If the brand wants to lower prices in their directory for those jackets and vests after winter, those price changes are automatically reflected in the content where they’ve been promoted. If a certain piece is out of stock, for example, the team doesn’t need to update each and every place that module appears—the metadata for each item from Shopify will reflect the change, and it updates everywhere where that product is promoted. 
• Personalization: If a brand is targeting different marketplaces, they can leverage translation, personalization and segmentation tools within the CMS to update product modules accordingly rather than having to go through a long, time-consuming process to update each one for each market.

With all the hurdles e-commerce brands need to jump today, making their content shine shouldn’t be one of them. Storytelling should be as easy as possible—and that’s what the Brightspot and Shopify integration does. It enhances creativity for the team, and it increases dynamic experiences for the customer.

Use stories to increase your revenue

Want to learn more about how you can put storytelling at the front of your online store? Check out our new integration with Shopify, plus connect with us here to talk with one of our CMS experts about your specific use case. We’re always happy to discuss commerce as content and how the Brightspot platform is built to help.

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