Webinar preview: Why it’s time to get serious about content strategy

It’s a common experience nowadays: A brand’s Web site has comprehensive content, but the Facebook page is barely populated. There’s a Twitter feed full of helpful tips, but none of that information is listed in the customer service section of the company’s mobile offering. Email marketing doesn’t match mobile messaging. A search ad landing page fails to incorporate relevant customer reviews.

We’ve all heard the mantra “content is king.” Rich content that helps shoppers connect with products can not only smooth the path to purchase, but can boost brands’ relevance when it comes to search engine rankings.

The good news is that the volume of shopping content is growing as merchants manage brands across a growing number of customer touchpoints. But the bad news is that the content is often disjointed and sprawling, just when consumers’ expectations are higher than ever for cohesive, relevant information. One indicator of these heightened expectations is the “1-and-out,” or bounce, rate, which measures the percentage of visits ending after just one page. According to the MarketLive Performance Index, the “1-and-out” rate increased more than 12% from Q4 2010 to Q4 2011 alone. More shoppers than ever are abandoning sites almost as quickly as they arrive, indicating their impatience and lack of willingness to go deeper into a site that doesn’t immediately seem to address their needs.

With shoppers ready to click away from sites at a moment’s notice, it’s up to merchants to communicate relevance instantly — a challenge that requires a cohesive, well-considered content strategy. Moreover, as online shopping competition intensifies, great content can create new pathways to purchase. With search engine algorithms being increasingly fine-tuned to give preference to authentic content, merchants can score big SEO wins for unbranded keyword terms by creating comprehensive lifestyle content that demonstrates the brand’s expertise.

MarketLive’s Optimized Commerce: Content Webinar Wednesday will address how merchants can plan their content to address shoppers’ needs, create effective content across customer touchpoints, and assign tangible success metrics so content can be monitored, evaluated and modified.  There’s still time to register, so sign up now and join in at 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday, June 20.

Meantime, what strategies do you employ to create and maintain great content?