While content marketing is key to building brand awareness, lead generation, and conversions, it’s just as important to have a separate product content strategy. Where we’re talking about product descriptions or sales pages, product content is unique.
For this post, we’re talking about things like user interface text, button text, notifications, interactive walk-throughs, and product guides. Product copy can also be found in training manuals, support documentation, and customer forums.
The Importance of Product Content
Product content is a crucial part of the user experience and customer journey, shaping a customer’s impression of your product and brand. It’s the content that users experience within and around the product itself, which is why it needs to be well-crafted, helpful, and engaging.
1. Build Relationships Across Departments
When disconnected departments have no product content strategy or process, product information is scraped from various corners of the company with no consistency. Departmental silos can cause a wide range of problems, including:
- Duplication of work across disconnected teams.
- Time wasted trying to solve problems someone else could help with, or has already solved.
- A lack of creativity in problem solving.
- Poor decision-making.
- Inferior content that is not customer-focused.
Website engineers, designers, content managers, and anyone creating customer-facing content should work together to create a consistent content experience throughout the customer journey.
2. Ensure Product Content is Complete and Consistent
People from different departments often use language that suits their own understanding of a product, ignoring the end user. To ensure customers are receiving consistent information at every stage of the buying cycle, ask your team the following:
- Are call-to-action links and text within buttons consistent?
- Are error messages that pop up consistent?
- Are specific product features explained using the same words?
- Do product specifications include the same data at every stage of the buying cycle?
- Does a product demo video use the same language as a product brochure?
The growth of mobile and social commerce has made the consistency of product data across all channels even more important. Just one bad customer experience created by confusing messaging – such as price or promotion details – can weaken your credibility and cause consumers to switch to another brand.
3. Create a Product Content Style Guide
The best way to ensure consistency is to create a product content style guide that includes some of the following:
- Basic grammar and punctuation rules, such as when to use the Oxford comma.
- Style and tone of language.
- Key brand messages that support your unique selling proposition.
- Key customer pain points.
- Acceptable terms and phrases, and jargon to avoid.
- Your target audience and key buyer personas.
- Acceptable content formats for text, images, and graphics.
When you have an accessible content guide, it leaves less to chance and means each department can work independently, but in harmony.
4. Define Your Buyers
Researching buyer personas is an important part of developing product content. A definition of your key customer groups can be incorporated into your content style guide and will benefit team member for years to come. It will clarify your brand’s tone of voice, minimize inconsistent language, and give even tiny sections of content more purpose.
5. Align Content and Design
Both content and design should work in harmony to improve the user experience. For example, if you’re working on a product comparison chart to explain the benefits of a product, is the data clear and accessible to even beginner users of your product? Do the colors help communicate the information?
Words explain how to navigate and accomplish goals within products; design helps to streamline the process. For this reason, copywriters and designers should work together to define what they want customers to accomplish at each stage.
If a blog post mentions one of your products, is there a link to that product page? If a product description includes a statistic or review, is there a link to the article source or review page?
By making connections between related product content, you’ll increase the authenticity of your products, prove the relevance of your content to search engines, and positively influence purchase decisions.
7. Create an Accessible Product FAQ Page
A clear FAQ page that is accessible at various points in the sales process will make the buyer’s journey more frictionless. Think about common questions customers have before they make a purchase and answer them clearly to minimize doubts.
8. Hire a Copywriter to Create Unique Content
In today’s search engine landscape, it’s virtually impossible to achieve high search engine rankings with duplicate product pages.
Unique content is crucial from an SEO perspective, but it’s also good practice for maximizing conversions. It’s more engaging, encourages users to stay on your pages, and differentiates your brand from the competition. Hiring a copywriter will ensure your content is unique, engaging, and persuasive.
9. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Many techniques that web content strategists use also apply to product content. Like any content strategy, the key is to listen to consumers and adapt your content to meet their needs.
Listen to product feedback, visit industry forums, and read social media comments to create the most crowd-pleasing content across all online channels. Ultimately, good product content is just as important as customer service, because it speaks to your customers before you do.