Now more than ever, brands need to do everything in their power to facilitate buying behavior, and that means controlling every detail about the consumer experience – from product discovery to final delivery. Starting at the beginning of that journey, here are three incredibly important product details that brands need to start monitoring more closely throughout their seller network if they hope to thrive in lean times.
"Brands must monitor product titles across their retail networks."
Generally speaking, brands work hard to find pithy ways to make rather fine distinctions between their many product offerings. Still, it's not uncommon to find product titles on Amazon or another retail channel that provide long product names. Some may even supply detailed specifications and dimensions.
In some situations, these distinctions are necessary. For example, consider shopping for a pair of headphones. If a customer wants Bluetooth, waterproof workout earbuds with a microphone and volume control, she might use those search terms. Granted, that's a lot of information up front, but particularly with consumer electronics, these distinctions are important. However, it's also important to not get too carried away. Overly long or complex product titles risk confusing customers, especially if they're casual buyers. You don't necessarily want to make their heads spin.
For the more specific product details, there are product descriptions. The purpose of these blurbs is to provide shoppers pertinent information needed to make buying decisions. That means putting the most important details and specifications – including brand differentiator – toward the front of the description.
Specifications, technical details, and product dimensions can be listed in bullet points, according to Forbes. This will make the information more scannable. Likewise, it helps to use bold font to highlight standout product features. But don't get too crazy with formatting (or exclamation points, for that matter).
As for verbiage, use a lot of action words. Write short sentences. Be concise, but impactful. Identify product components by their proper names to improve search engine optimization (SEO). And when the opportunity arises, highlight a product's utility in everyday life.
"An image is sometimes the first product content a shopper encounters."
Before the days of e-commerce, brands relied on packaging design and aesthetics to influence a customer's decision to purchase. And while package design is certainly still important, the more immediate thing that online shoppers want to see is product imagery. This is partially for the purposes of building consumer confidence. Having the feeling of seeing a product before putting money down is important to most customers, regardless of what they're purchasing.
In many cases, an image may even be the first product content a shopper encounters. For example, they come across a banner ad promoting a brand's product listing on a retailers website. Maybe they've conducted an image search on Google. Perhaps they stumbled upon a brand's imagery on Facebook. Whatever the case, that image is the first impression that a consumer may have of that product – or maybe even that brand.
The problem that brands have faced in the past is that imagery is even more difficult to monitor than text on a product page. This is because picture files are a form of unstructured data, which is much harder (though not impossible) to analyze. Brands would need to consider resolution, blurriness, graininess, distortion, hue, saturation, brightness and contrast, angles and countless other factors as they audited their retail network for unsanctioned brand imagery. This, of course, is in addition to verifying that retailers are using the correct product titles and descriptions.
To help simplify the search for non-compliant brand imagery, PriceSpider has spearheaded new research. We have already incorporated some of our image-recognition and analysis capabilities into a new tool, Brand Monitor, and are still working to push the limits of that capability. Additionally, Brand Monitor acts as a single portal for all product content, including product title and description.
Because now more than ever, every little detail can make or break a sale.