content26 Guest Blog: Content for Amazon Baby – A Failure to Thrive?

By Mark White, Founder and President at content26.

As the media loves to remind us, pregnant women and new parents are extremely valuable to brands.

And as Keith Anderson showed in a recent webinar on the baby category that I participated in, the market for diapers and baby food alone are estimated to be $59B according to Nielson. Indeed, new and expecting parents perform twice as many searches on Google than non-parents.

I personally lucked out in marrying a woman with a doting, extended family that showered us with gifts during and immediately after her pregnancy. My main role, aside from remaining employed, was to recycle all the Amazon boxes that arrived at our house.

And on the rare occasion when we had to do our own shopping, it was my job to offer opinions on the short list of products that my wife had researched.

When we looked at the product options, it was the full range of product-detail content that ultimately persuaded us: the product images, technical details, description, and user reviews. No amount of due diligence was enough for our children. We devoured the content like we were in the midst of the most important buying decision we would ever make in our lives. Because we were!

New Parents Want Content that Delights, Informs

Our children were born just as mobile was starting to factor into eCommerce. Desktops are more forgiving of poorly executed content than mobile devices. With mobile being today’s primary shopping tool, it’s more important than ever to get your content right.

When you think about your content, although it needs to give your customer the information that they need, don’t simply think about it as purely “informational.” Think about it as a one of the key components of your customer’s experience with your brand.

As consumers continue to evolve to online shopping, it’s imperative that you help make that customer experience as pleasant and seamless as possible.

Instead of display tables, endcaps, and friendly faces at the cash register, you and your retail partners are providing well-designed and branded product pages that adds value to your customer’s buying journey.

According to IBM’s Institute for Business Value, shoppers who enjoy their digital shopping experience tend to convert more. This echoes our own decade of experience in creating enhanced product pages for hundreds of brands and several major retailers, especially Amazon: customers reward brands who invest in enhanced content with higher conversion rates (link to my LinkedIn ROI).

In particular, we’ve found that online shoppers want the following on Amazon:

• Well-Written Product Descriptions – Content should provide a clear explanation of the product’s features and benefits without market-speak
• Beautiful and Informational Product Imagery – Product photos should highlight the product features and convey it’s most salient features.
• Effective Branded Content – Banners and logos promote visual branding on the product page and endear the consumer to brands that they trust.
• What’s in the Box – This tiny piece of content can cause the greatest headaches if it’s not done correctly. Missing details of what’s included with the shipment can lead to angry user reviews and product returns.
• Comparison Charts – Charts and product matrices make it easy to see how the product compares to related products within your brand.

Philips A+ content:

Amazon research shows that providing this type of enhanced content can boost conversion rates as much as 10%.

Most Amazon Baby Content Stumbles

So, are Amazon’s top-selling baby brands delivering an excellent online shopping experience? Not really.

A majority (57%) of top-selling baby brands have added enhanced content on their product pages, yet our research found that much of that content is outdated, poorly branded, uninformative, and not optimized for mobile.

Only 27.5% of top-selling brands in the Amazon Baby category are on the new modules. This means that nearly 75% of baby brands are not optimizing their presence for mobile users.

Mobile commerce is no longer a theory; mobile is how consumers research. If your Amazon product content is not in the new modules, you’re missing out on the vast majority of customers looking for products like yours.

Five Steps to Optimizing your Amazon Content for Conversion

The overarching rule that will help you succeed on Amazon is to take full ownership of every piece of product-page real estate that Amazon offers you. Amazon offers many media-buy and promotions that you have no control over. But you have full control over your content.

With the help of analytics tools such as Profitero’s, and Amazon’s “self-service” tools now available in vendor central, you can take full ownership of your content and optimize your pages for conversion in five easy steps.

1. Audit your “above the fold” content: Make certain your product titles, bullets, and basic product descriptions are accurate and in Amazon style-guide compliance, and that your products have professionally produced hero images.
2. Perform the “80/20” rule for A+ Content: Invest in A+ content on the 20% of your ASINs that are driving 80% of your revenue. This will provide you with a cost-effective way to drive conversion and optimize for mobile.
3. Monitor, analyze, and repeat: Perform a “before/after” test with your products to see which ones benefited from the content changes, closely monitor user reviews and social mentions of your products, and adjust your content accordingly.
4. Optimize for Amazon Search: Use the Amazon Media Service keyword tools to incorporate keywords into your content to drive traffic.
5. Keep Your Content Updated: With Amazon’s self-service tools, you can revise your content according to seasonality, marketing campaigns, and events in the world, such as new research about childhood development or health issues. The days of “set-it-and-forget-it-content” are over. Keep your content relevant as buying behaviors change.

Conclusion

Content is the key to customer satisfaction and conversion. Using measurement tools to monitor your content performance such as the ones that Profitero offers will keep your product pages relevant to new parents coming online to look for the products that you offer. Use the Amazon real estate that you own to acquire those new parents. Those parents will reward you for your investments.

You might also be interested in watching Profitero’s recent webinar with content26: The Online Baby Category: A Gateway to eCommerce.