Your ecommerce store requires a wide range of tasks and people to complete the tasks. As your online store grows, you start to realize the need for marketing people, customer support reps, and designers. Dozens of other responsibilities are required, some of which might be filled by you, freelancers, or full-time employees. Regardless of your setup, content collaboration is key to a successful workflow.
Take product descriptions, for example. These are essential parts of your sales process, providing information, images, and storytelling tactics to show customers how your products can solve problems in their everyday lives. Well, a product description requires quite a few elements, from creative writing to graphics, and videos to the actual specifications of the item.
These elements come from different sources such as designers, writers, manufacturers, and marketers. As you link those pieces together and send feedback, it becomes difficult to collaborate and keep the conversation flowing through something like a long email thread.
Therefore, the productivity and effectiveness of your content creation process rely on a few factors. That's why we want to outline some of the must-follow best practices for content collaboration in ecommerce.
Find a Powerful Content Collaboration Tool
As most ecommerce professionals quickly realize, email is no place for team collaboration. It's nice for some coordination and receiving communications from outside sources, but when it comes to internal dialogue, email becomes far too cluttered and tedious. The same can be said for the many other communication methods. This includes texting and calling, and even having meetings where people are more likely to forget what was talked about and there's no way to save and talk about files such as images and videos.
This is where a content collaboration tool comes into play. There are several excellent content collaboration tools on the market, many of which allow you to get on the same page with other workers and establish a solid workflow for certain projects.
For instance, you might be compiling ideas and media for an upcoming blog post. In order to do this, your collaboration tool should provide options for establishing a timeline and outline. You also want options for uploading media such as GIFs and videos.
After that, the collaboration tool lets everyone in your project group access and edit the items in question. You'll also want the ability to send feedback and talk about the next steps needed to get that blog post written, edited, and published.
Figure Out What Your Customers Want
Once you have a collaboration software, it's time to hammer down what your customers are like and what they are looking for in terms of content. This is slightly different from your customer profile for sales, but you're still considering things like demographics, personal lifestyles, and purchasing tendencies. However, you now need to establish how these traits relate to content like YouTube videos, product descriptions, and blog posts.
It all starts by creating broad descriptions of your ideal buyers. You might already have this for your sales side of the operation, but now it's time to relate these descriptions to your content. How do these customers find their information online? Is it through blog posts, YouTube, or Instagram?
What are your customer's goals before and after purchasing one of your products, and is there information you can share with them that might either help them making the purchasing decision or while using the product?
Establish Several Content Types for Variety
It's easy to decide on one content type and stick to it. For instance, making a blog with mainly text-based articles is a go-to in the ecommerce world. However, you're missing out on potential customers by not expanding your reach. Not only that, but you're removing the necessary step of testing your content options.
Therefore, we suggest choosing three to four content types that you would post on your blog, social media accounts, email newsletters, and website. This way, you can understand which ones work well and potentially stick with all of them if they seem to resonate with users.
Some of the types of content that boost sales include:
- Infographics
- Memes
- Videos
- Guides
- Reviews
- Lists
- Interviews
- Case studies
- Podcasts
Outline Your Projects Before Diving In
A quality blog post could be the result of a writer starting with nothing and coming up with ideas on the fly. But you're not guaranteeing success.
A better route is to include suggestions from your entire team, compiling an outline through the content collaboration software.
Outlines like this may only take you ten minutes to complete, and they are bound to improve the quality of your posts.
After that, the outline serves as the basis for the actual content being shared, from source links to images, and videos to infographics–all of which can be uploaded to your collaboration software.
Make Sure There's a Valuable Process for Feedback
Collaboration is nothing without feedback, so it's important to ensure that each piece of content you create for your online store goes through its respective feedback process. The key is to keep this feedback in the same place as your outline and content collection. This way, someone can take a look at a line of text, or an image, and immediately see what needs to be changed or what someone else isn't fond of.
Assign a Person or Group to Work on SEO
This is another area where your content collaboration software comes into play. You must have a person in your organization who takes the finished content and optimizes it for search engines. Yes, writers should also incorporate keywords into articles, but there is more work to be done, regardless of the medium.
YouTube allows for keywords in titles and descriptions. You can include hashtags in social media posts for better discovery. You'll especially want your product descriptions and blog posts to get the green light in terms of keywords, readability, and more.
Are You Ready to Improve Your Ecommerce Content Collaboration?
The first step is to find that perfect content collaboration tool. After that, you're able to create a better environment for outlining, planning, sharing, and giving feedback.
If you have any questions about improving your ecommerce content collaboration, let us know in the comments section below.
This is a sponsored post for Dropbox. All opinions are my own.
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