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“You have to look a little bit deeper at those internal and external factors when you think about really driving effectiveness.” — Kathleen Harrington, Vice President of Digital Merchandising, Hasbro
Content can make or break consumers' digital experience, which is why more brands are now focused on improving content effectiveness and optimizing their content supply chain.
To give brands a roadmap for developing the best content strategy, the Digital Shelf Institute (DSI) and Profitero, an ecommerce analytics and intelligence platform, conducted extensive research and in-depth interviews with digital shelf leaders about how brands can use content to drive conversions.
During a recent webinar, “You Have Best-In-Class Digital Content, BUT Is It Effective?,” leaders from L'Oréal and Hasbro discussed how their organizations are managing and measuring their content maturity and detailed how other brands can adopt a similar framework to enhance their content effectiveness. Here are their insights.
While there isn’t one widely accepted definition of content effectiveness, it could be described as the process of creating compelling, relevant product content that accelerates the path to purchase for consumers.
There also isn’t one way to measure or achieve content effectiveness, but the DSI and Profitero’s research identified four stages of maturity.
To progress through each of these stages, brands have to prioritize and effectively align five essential things:
During the webinar, digital shelf leaders from L'Oréal and Hasbro discussed how their organizations are tackling a few of these fundamental pillars, including people, processes, and data and systems.
Kathleen Harrington, vice president of digital merchandising at Hasbro, says that to gauge both internal and external content effectiveness, the company asks several important questions:
Internal Questions
External Questions
“You have to look a little bit deeper at those internal and external factors when you think about really driving effectiveness,” Harrington says.
L'Oréal has evolved its definition of content effectiveness as its commerce and content ecosystem has evolved, says Shazer Baig, the company’s ecommerce director.
“Our definition is evolving from simple content that converts to content that drives and fuels shopper desires across the shopper journey,” Baig says. “When you actually start to work on every touch point on a platform, you understand the role is different and hence the content type needs to be different.”
In just a year, L'Oréal has created an ecosystem that can deliver various touch points with different content messages. It has largely accomplished this by implementing what it calls “Golden Rules.”
L'Oréal views content as an entire value chain and has focused on bringing teams together to drive content effectiveness across this life cycle.
“With this definition evolving, we are very clear that if we want to win with content in today's day and age, the first thing that we need to do is de-silo the teams from marketing, global, down to the platform leads to the merchandising teams executing content,” Baig says.
L'Oréal has trained teams across its content value chain, which has helped it establish a common language, operating processes, and a framework for better collaboration.
A set of “golden rules” guides the work of this cross-functional team. To create its golden rules, L'Oréal reviewed internal and external data about what triggers shoppers’ actions at different touch points, Baig says. Triggers vary on each retailer’s platform and PDP, but they often factor in things such as the platform’s distinct content requirements and what messages resonate most with shoppers on that touch point.
Baig adds that L'Oréal’s golden rules cut across both written and visual content and are both macro and micro, spanning from the optimal number of words to include in product descriptions to the placement of images.
Even more importantly, data guides these best practices, which gives L'Oréal the agility to enhance its content processes as new information emerges.
Hasbro has also focused on breaking down silos to create a more integrated content organization.
The company has a centralized digital merchandising team that builds all of its PDP content to serve all markets across its brands. The markets then execute locally.
Harrington says nothing is “getting done in a siloed environment.”
“We partner directly with key sales and marketing teams at the regional and market level, as well as the global brand teams,” she says. “That really helps to make sure that we stay informed of retailer strategy or expectations and we're all driving towards that same PDP content goal.”
This strong collaboration and partnership across its teams has also allowed Hasbro to optimize content from the very beginning of its content development process. A brand writing team, which is composed of search engine optimization (SEO)-certified content professionals, is part of Hasbro’s digital merchandising team.
The team is involved in both packaging and copy development and produces a PDP outline “that becomes the roadmap for any copy or visual development for the PDP,” Harrington says.
Downstream, the team produces a PDP guide that lays out a visual vision, including the placement of hero images, the order of the carousel, and what below the fold will look like.
With this approach, Hasbro has not only increased its content effectiveness but also its efficiency.
Developing effective feedback loops is crucial to developing the best content strategy.
Harrington says Hasbro does a lot of testing and learning. Its teams also read reviews to understand what customers are saying about the product. It then relays this information to Hasbro’s product development team.
“It’s leveraging that PDP for today's content and tomorrow's content,” Harrington says.
L'Oréal ’s feedback loop involves reviews and ratings from its commercial teams, activation teams, and content creators. Baig says these feedback mechanisms are crucial because L'Oréal ’s commerce ecosystem is so complex, as some markets often work with multiple agencies.
“The first thing if you want to create an effective feedback loop is to simplify the entire ecosystem of content management, the entire value chain.” — Shazer Baig, Global Ecommerce Director, L'Oréal
As L'Oréal and Hasbro both demonstrate, improving content effectiveness requires an intentional strategy — one that embraces cross-functional collaboration and effective process and change management.
Harrington and Baig both say it also takes creating a vision and using data to showcase progress and results. L'Oréal actually calculated the cost of content inefficiencies across its value chain.
It also used leading markets to benchmark content effectiveness internally, making the case that if the company scaled these leading markets with the right tools and measurement approach, it could generate a significant uplift in potential sales.
“When you put numbers against pain points, you see people start rallying behind it,” Baig says.
And when that happens, there’s no limit to the levels of content effectiveness a brand can reach.
To hear more of the experts’ insights on developing the best content strategy and driving content effectiveness, listen to the full episode.
