Immersing your target consumers in the most effective journey through the purchase funnel is a vital piece of the ever-evolving puzzle of marketing success. Since there’s no sure-fire way of perfectly formulating your entire digital shelf to hit every single potential customer, it’s important to do whatever possible to maximize your efforts using relevant tips and tricks and by adapting as the industry shifts.
What is the Digital Shelf?
As defined by Salsify, the digital shelf is the collection of diverse and rapidly evolving digital touchpoints used by shoppers to engage with brands and discover, research and purchase products.
Simply put, we’re talking about the different ways a consumer interacts with a brand’s online presence from first touch, all the way to swiping their credit card. There are so many variations of how consumers enter and exit throughout this journey and knowing how to capture the attention of a passerby potential customer can be the difference of a successful eComm strategy, and one with costly leaks in the structure.
When thinking about digital shelf success, one of the first major steps is to break down why emphasizing the optimization of a brand’s digital shelf is important.
3 Reasons Why the Digital Shelf is Important to a Brand:
- Create an endless aisle to build accessibility for your consumers
- Maximize your ability to hit your ideal customer when they’re looking to buy
- Effectively increase your brick and mortar sales
- According to RetailMeNot, 69% of consumers use their smart phones to look at reviews in-store rather than talking to an employee.
In the world of infinite information in our palms, convenience is king. Consumers are processing and researching online while they’re walking the halls of the very products they’re perusing. Creating a convenient experience to make the life of a consumer easy and painless presents an effective strategy when looking to not only grab a new customer’s attention, but to build a loyal customer base.
As a brand, knowing that you should be optimizing your digital shelf is step one. Figuring out how to perfectly optimize the shopping journey to grab the most amount of attention in the most effective way is the next course of action. Most strategies will be subjective to the brand’s specific industry, but there are absolutely ideas that work across the board.
3 Tips for Optimizing the Shopping Journey for Your Target Audience in Marketing Efforts:
- Practice omnipresent marketing and appear everywhere
- Beautify and optimize your PDP eCommerce strategy with relevant, meaningful content
- Inspire confidence during purchase consideration through relevant product reviews
Qualified, trustworthy, and informational product reviews are just as important to a well-defined content strategy as anything else. Consumers are smart and they know that there are ways of bypassing the integrity of a product’s star rating. To combat the decrease in trust in 5-star ratings, brands are getting innovative and utilizing the video review option that most major online retailers offer on their product pages.
Social Media Advertising and the Digital Shelf
In gen.video’s 2022 Quarterly Social Commerce Report, there is data that showcases how consumers are heading to sites like YouTube for product reviews. In fact, 1 in every 5 consumers surveyed listed reviews on social media as their #1 trusted source for product reviews.
By working with influencers to create video reviews that are broadcasted to an influencer’s audience, brands open up the ability to also utilize that real, valuable content to repurpose onto their product pages. This strategy single handedly hits all 3 tips listed above and is an extraordinarily effective method of adapting to the new-aged consumer’s product research methodology.
Interested in learning how you can work with influencers to create video review content for your multifaceted digital shelf strategy? Connect with our team of experts here.