New research from L2 Inc and Demand­ware has pro­vid­ed an in-depth explo­ration of the rela­tion­ship between con­tent mar­ket­ing and ecom­merce for 80 glob­al brands. The study shows that the major­i­ty of brands still haven’t stream­lined their con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts to com­ple­ment and fuel ecom­merce dri­ves, and pro­vides invalu­able insights for brands look­ing to con­sol­i­date the two ini­tia­tives.

In many ways, 2013 was the year of con­tent mar­ket­ing. Last year, the chan­nel final­ly sur­passed email, and social media as “the lead­ing focus of mar­keters world­wide”. It has result­ed in an over­all increase in bud­gets devot­ed to the pro­duc­tion of brand­ed con­tent; in West­ern Europe for exam­ple, as many as 56 per­cent of mar­keters plan to “sig­nif­i­cant­ly increase B2C con­tent mar­ket­ing spends” as report­ed in a study by Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Insti­tute. The same study revealed that brand­ed con­tent now accounts for 24 per­cent of total mar­ket­ing bud­gets among North Amer­i­can com­pa­nies.

How­ev­er, while the val­ue of con­tent mar­ket­ing as a chan­nel has been secured, increas­ing­ly the chal­lenge for brands is in unit­ing their con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts with ecom­merce ini­tia­tives in a way that not only rais­es aware­ness, but dri­ves con­ver­sions. This is now a pri­or­i­ty for 51 per­cent of the 80 brands sur­veyed by L2.

For the most part, con­tent per­for­mance is assessed by three met­rics: web traf­fic, social media shares, and time spent on site. Direct sales were named as a KPI for just 44 per­cent of brands, and the over­all fog­gi­ness in attri­bu­tion met­rics cor­re­lates with Axiom Research’s find­ings that one-third of orga­ni­za­tions were unsure whether their con­tent mar­ket­ing invest­ments had increased sales.

The attri­bu­tion chal­lenge for con­tent mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, com­bined with a lack of recog­ni­tion of the need to accu­rate­ly mea­sure this among brands (the report found that only 4 per­cent of brands con­sid­ered attri­bu­tion to being their biggest bar­ri­er to suc­cess) has result­ed in mod­els and process­es which are often skewed or biased towards one extreme.

Con­tent and com­merce are often oper­at­ed by siloed depart­ments, with lit­tle real inter­ac­tion. The result: huge oppor­tu­ni­ties are being missed to pro­vide opti­mal user expe­ri­ences and increase rev­enues.

Elana Ander­son, Demand­ware senior vice pres­i­dent, world­wide mar­ket­ing, explained the need for brands to inte­grate their con­tent and com­merce expe­ri­ence deliv­ery:

“It’s not about con­tent or com­merce; it’s about cre­at­ing the expe­ri­ences that con­sumers desire. To dif­fer­en­ti­ate in today’s com­pet­i­tive mar­ket­place, brands are evolv­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence on-site with con­tent that engages and edu­cates the cus­tomer in a seam­less jour­ney flow­ing from dis­cov­ery to pur­chase.”

Where Are Brands Going Wrong?

The report point­ed to two spe­cif­ic areas where brands are fail­ing to unite their con­tent and com­merce efforts. How can brands start get­ting it right?

1. Avoid Producing Too Much Content

The boom in brand­ed con­tent mar­ket­ing has occa­sion­al­ly giv­en rise to what is com­mon­ly termed “con­tent shock”, used to describe the point at which the vol­ume of con­tent avail­able to con­sumers sur­pass­es their capac­i­ty to con­sume it. From a con­sumers per­spec­tive, there are a lot of com­pet­ing brands pro­vid­ing con­tent about prod­ucts, much more than it is pos­si­ble to digest.

Increas­ing­ly, cut­ting through the dig­i­tal noise means pro­duc­ing con­tent of excep­tion­al qual­i­ty, some­thing of gen­uine enter­tain­ment or use­ful­ness, as well as thought­ful dis­tri­b­u­tion.

2. Reclaim The Competitive Edge

For many brands, enhanced Ama­zon prod­uct detail pages, in com­bi­na­tion with their class lead­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and ser­vice deliv­ery, can offer an incred­i­bly rich over­all expe­ri­ence. Most orga­ni­za­tions will under­stand­ably find it dif­fi­cult to com­pete with Ama­zon on pric­ing or ful­fill­ment.

Con­tent pro­vides brands with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exceed that which Ama­zon is able to offer. Brands, with supe­ri­or knowl­edge and exper­tise of their own prod­ucts, and unique insights about their con­sumers, remain the best resource for con­sumers while research­ing and con­sid­er­ing their pur­chas­ing deci­sions.

The over­rid­ing chal­lenge for brands, then, is unit­ing their con­tent deliv­ery with their com­merce plat­forms, lever­ag­ing flex­i­ble plat­forms to sup­port unique content/commerce inte­gra­tions.

The Content And Commerce Black Hole

The prob­lem for most brands is that they sim­ply slip into their most com­fort­able mod­el, which is biased toward one extreme of either con­tent or com­merce, often based on his­tor­i­cal mar­ket­ing efforts. Name­ly, site invest­ments either opti­mize com­merce by pro­vid­ing a stream­lined push-to-cart and check­out expe­ri­ence; or they pri­or­i­tize rich con­tent resources to enhance engage­ment and build brand equi­ty.

In approx­i­mate­ly half of orga­ni­za­tions, the ecom­merce team owns con­tent cre­ation, focus­ing on using the chan­nel to improve con­ver­sions, accord­ing to the report. In the oth­er half, con­tent was owned by a mar­ket­ing or edi­to­r­i­al team, tasked pri­mar­i­ly with build­ing brand aware­ness. These rep­re­sent com­pet­ing objec­tives that ulti­mate­ly cre­ate rifts across site expe­ri­ences, and impact the qual­i­ty of con­tent being cre­at­ed.

The lack of cohe­sion cre­ates a bit of a black hole in the over­all user expe­ri­ence. Increas­ing­ly, retail brands that can weave togeth­er con­tent and com­merce will be the biggest win­ners.

Branded Fashion Content Outperforms Other Industries

In a telling dis­cov­ery, the report revealed that fash­ion indus­try brands proved to be the high­est per­form­ers in their con­tent mar­ket­ing con­ver­sion rate. The fol­low­ing graph illus­trates the esti­mat­ed con­tent con­ver­sion rate for the 80 sur­veyed brands in the report: Brands such as Estee Laud­er, Clar­ins, and Clin­iqe, hit­ting a 4 per­cent con­ver­sion rate, go some way in prov­ing the effi­ca­cy of brand­ed con­tent. As the study states, “brand­ed con­tent has the great­est impact on con­sumer pur­chase intent for low-con­sid­er­a­tion items, cre­at­ing a lift in pur­chase intent of up to 125 per­cent­age points.”

In this con­text, brand­ed con­tent out­per­forms even third-par­ty con­tent types, includ­ing expert con­tent such as arti­cles and reviews, and user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent in the form of con­sumer reviews.

3 Ways to Streamline Your Brand’s Content And Commerce

A clos­er look at fash­ion brands shows us how con­tent and com­merce can be com­bined to max­i­mize rev­enues and con­ver­sions. Here are three ways suc­cess­ful brands are tack­ling con­tent and com­merce chal­lenges.

1. Address Content Ownership; Encourage Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Many brands assume a mod­el in which con­tent is the sole remit of either the ecom­merce, or the mar­ket­ing and edi­to­r­i­al team. The way for­ward for brands will be to encour­age col­lab­o­ra­tion between the two, using con­tent to both raise aware­ness, and dri­ve con­ver­sions, bridg­ing pur­chase jour­neys and stream­ing over­all user expe­ri­ences as a result.

2. Define Content Objectives; Integrate Content With Your Ecommerce Platform

Many brands still don’t embed con­tent with­in their ecom­merce sites. Com­merce inte­gra­tion is often incon­sis­tent, vary­ing based on the type of con­tent and where it sits on the site. Ulti­mate­ly, brands are con­tin­u­ing to pub­lish con­tent that’s dif­fi­cult to find, suf­fo­cat­ing the abil­i­ty of the con­tent to impact the bot­tom-line.

Cole Haas and DVF are two exam­ples of fash­ion brands who have instilled con­tent right through their ecom­merce plat­form and nav­i­ga­tion. Edi­to­r­i­al and video are browseable native­ly on prod­uct pages, and rapid shifts in con­sumer sen­ti­ment between aware­ness, research, eval­u­a­tion, have been made pos­si­ble, mas­sive­ly empow­er­ing the per­sua­sive­ness of the site and prod­ucts.

3. Scale And Manage Content Globally Across Territories

The study revealed that a major­i­ty of brands con­tin­ue to approach con­tent cre­ation with a “U.S. first” mind­set. It often results in weak­er per­for­mance in Europe and Asia with brands suf­fer­ing from decen­tral­ized site man­age­ment, and frag­ment­ed plat­forms.

Clar­ins were the best per­form­ing brand on aver­age across all ter­ri­to­ries. The brand uti­lizes it’s glob­al ecom­merce plat­form to con­sis­tent­ly exe­cute, show­ing the val­ue tech­ni­cal ecom­merce ini­tia­tives can add to large­ly edi­to­r­i­al con­tent.

Unite Content And Commerce To Optimize User Experiences

Ulti­mate­ly, the key objec­tive for brands must be to opti­mize the over­all user expe­ri­ence for con­sumers. Unit­ing con­tent and com­merce is ben­e­fi­cial to brand rev­enues and con­ver­sions, in that the stream­lin­ing of the two enti­ties pro­vides gen­uine val­ue to online shop­ping expe­ri­ences.

Elana Ander­son of Demand­ware sum­maris­es:

“As with every­thing in the dig­i­tal age, the best user expe­ri­ence is an effort­less one. Engage­ment should require very few clicks. In the con­sumer con­sid­er­a­tion phase, con­text reigns supreme. Prod­uct con­tent – video, looks, tuto­ri­als – helps the con­sumer make the men­tal leap from browse to buy.”

You can down­load the full L2 Inc. and Demand­ware Con­tent and Com­merce 2014 report here.