Converting more buyers from top social acquisition channels challenges every high-growth ecommerce brand. Those efforts to convert social shoppers to loyal customers fall flat when the social ad directs to an ecommerce product catalog that’s lacking.
Unlocking the rich power of social commerce requires a community presence for your brand, but that is only the tip of the iceberg. Ecommerce brands must also effectively manage their ecommerce product catalog to succeed in social commerce. Polishing your product content with persuasive details and user-generated content (UGC) better supports your social commerce strategy.
How an Ecommerce Product Catalog Fuels Social Commerce
Why is product content important to social commerce? To start, your target audience is likely already active on social media. Find the channels they use regularly, and you can convert prospective customers with the product content you share on those channels.
Social media acts as a form of word-of-mouth marketing and a shorter path to purchase. Conversations about your brand can arise more naturally among customers on the social media platforms they're already on, and opportunities within those platforms to buy your products facilitate sales.
Ecommerce product catalogs drive the commerce aspect of social media sites. Facebook, for example, allows businesses to upload a record of their product items in bulk. This catalog enables them to create Dynamic Product Ads, omnichannel, and personalized ads that show products relevant to one's browsing history.
Businesses can tag posts and stories on Instagram with product details linked to the on-site product page. Moreover, Instagram provides the option to integrate with your Facebook catalog to advertise shopping posts directly from the ads manager.
An accurate ecommerce product catalog enhances the quality of your product posts. They empower customers to find your products better and make informed purchasing decisions when comprehensive and correct. When brands tap into product tagging on Instagram, they witness a boost in sales—especially when those product tags are thorough and precise.
The Social Commerce Content Conundrum
Alongside the numerous benefits of social commerce, there are many opportunities to lose out on sales due to product content-related hurdles.
For one, ads exhibiting incorrect or lacking product content increase campaign costs. For another, using the wrong keyword due to errors in product attributes might fail to showcase the product under the relevant category. When product content is inaccurate, it results in misleading product details on shoppable posts or products for sale on socials. Conversion rates take a hit due to incorrect data.
As for advertising on social media, if there is any inconsistent data between socials and your ecommerce product catalog, it puts potential customers off from converting. For instance, this looks like incorrect pricing or out-of-date promotional information on the ad that differs from that on-site. This leads to lost conversions when visitors find your product page saying something different. Product ad details on social media must be the same as on-site details, or it damages the brand's reputation. Let's dive into one way you can remedy this.
Making Social Content Shoppable On-Site
Social commerce incorporates elements of ecommerce and social media, so you may want to consider adding an aspect of social selling to your brand's website. Take advantage of word-of-mouth marketing on social media by implementing shoppable user-generated content (UGC) onto your site's homepage, product pages, and inspiration galleries through Pixlee.
Brands can bulk upload their ecommerce product catalog with details like price and SKU into the Pixlee platform and, from there, map specific products to individual pieces of customer UGC to display in live galleries on-site. Once a product is assigned to a photo and published, your site visitors can shop directly from social posts shared by people like them, contextualizing your product and producing a simple path to purchase, this time on your website.
Brands like Optimal Print use Pixlee to launch Shoppable Instagram widgets on their sites, which display a badge on gallery photos that indicate a product is tagged in the image. Once a user clicks on that image, they can shop from the various products shown in that post while viewing content from the position itself, like the user who shared it and their original caption. This adds a powerful element of social proof that gives site visitors the confidence they need to purchase.
The Benefits of an Accurate Product Catalog for Social Commerce
Powering up your social selling efforts with in-depth product content offers the following advantages.
- Improved product discoverability through accurate product attributes and organization
- Conversion optimization with reduced resistance to purchase
- Social content enrichment via improved product information
- Customer trust in up-to-date and detailed product overviews
- Product content consistency across your brand channels (social, website, email, etc.)
This last point on consistency is critical to consumers, and that's why having a solution like Pixlee to manage your ecommerce product catalog across your website's social galleries, posts, and product pages are valuable to success in social commerce. Reduce the barrier to combining ecommerce and social with a CRM platform, and create a cohesive shopping experience simultaneously.
Pour your energy into renovating the foundation of your social commerce efforts; optimize your product catalog to get to the root of any instability. Armed with this as a priority, you'll set your brand up for customer satisfaction when they receive a product exactly as they envisioned.
Ceejay Teku is the Founder of Catsy, a product information management, and digital asset management software. He started in the trenches of eCommerce as a software developer and was soon challenged with the complexities of product content that powers eCommerce. This led to the development of Catsy as a product information management system: purpose-built for brands that sell through distributors, retailers, and direct-to-customer channels.
