How ecommerce benefits from content strategy

by Sally Bagshaw on October 6, 2011

I went to the Online Retailer Expo in Sydney last week. I didn’t go to the main conference (but will next year), instead I attended Martin Newman’s Optimisation Masterclass.

It was excellent, and refreshing to mix with a bunch of online retailers looking for the best way to optimise content to help sales.

It got me thinking about the role of content strategy within this industry. In a way, a content strategist working for an online retailer has an advantage over one working for a corporate. Why? Well for many of us, selling content strategy in an organisation can be hard. A lot of the benefits seem intangible. It may be tricky to convince management it’s important.

But for the retail world, good content strategy can be linked to sales. There’s a clear dollar benefit of doing it well. And who doesn’t want more sales?

So what would be some good content strategy deliverables for an online retailer? Here are some thoughts:

  • A well thought out taxonomy that’s used across all products.
  • Clear processes for creating and maintaining content for product descriptions.
  • Structured content which can be used for multiple purposes.
  • Strong messaging which is carried across all channels.
  • Editorial strategy reflected in visual merchandising as well as other rich content.
  • Smart use of metrics and testing to see what’s working and what isn’t.
Do you work in a business that sells products online? I would love to hear how you manage some of these things.

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A little gem from the Content Strategy Forum

by Sally Bagshaw on September 8, 2011

If you’re like me, the past few days have been spent watching the twitter feed from the Content Strategy Forum in London. So much content strategy goodness shared.

A BIG thanks to Martin Belam for live blogging many of the sessions, then publishing this awesome iBooks compilation Notes from the 2011 Content Strategy Forum. If you didn’t keep up with the tweets, then download the iBook for your iPad.

For those who did follow (or attend) – what was your favourite session?

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Context, Contents (the magazine), and CS Forum London

2 September 2011

I’m catching up on my reading—which is hard to do as the #contentstrategy hashtag on Twitter seems to be a constantly moving stream of insight at the moment. I came across an interesting article on context and content management on the Forbes website. While I don’t agree with everything Tom says (second guessing visitor’s motives [...]

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Content governance, structure and testing – everyone’s been talking about it

25 August 2011

There’s so much content strategy goodness circulating around the web at the moment. What’s really great is that it’s covering all different aspects of the discipline. Whatever your interest, smart people are thinking hard about it and are being very generous with their thoughts. Here are some of my favourites from the past week or [...]

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Confab 2011 – some thoughts

24 May 2011

Well. Wow. Whoa. It’s been almost two weeks since Confab 2011 finished. And it’s taken me that long to feel like I can write this post. What a conference. What a great bunch of smart and generous people sharing a few fantastic days in Minneapolis. Experiences were swapped, ideas discussed, and cake (a whole lot [...]

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Content governance for government

23 March 2011

I’ve got something to admit. I worked for the government. As an employee. For years. Just over eight years to be exact and, while I’m not an employee now, I still have  a keen interest in how governments manage online content. So when I read Natalya Minkovsky’s excellent post Putting the “Gov” in Web Content Governance”, [...]

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