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Why Creative Variety Is Compulsory For E-commerce Brands
People say necessity is the mother of invention. Many business owners didn’t realize that until this year. The pandemic caused a lot of sudden changes in different aspects of life. People who would otherwise not shop online have had to do so this year, although many still hope to go back to their traditional consumer behavior. However, we’ve been at this for 10 months, so maybe it’s time for everyone to adapt to the new tides.
It’s not only buyers who are adapting to the new tides, some businesses are too. Many on-site retail businesses now see e-commerce as a viable option, and many of them have built an online relationship with their customer base. However, the digital purchase journey has its unique touch-points that are different from the on-site retail purchase journey, and vendors must take them into account. Therefore, e-commerce brands and businesses that are new to the e-commerce space need to revisit their brand storytelling. Simply put, you as a business owner need to create digital assets for your brand.
E-commerce Brands Depend on Creativity
To sustain your business in the e-commerce space, you need to create e-commerce campaigns. There are no two ways about this. As you have come to notice, e-commerce campaigns require several creative assets to work. For example, you need to create channel-specific content, such as Facebook campaigns. Facebook has its own unique rules for creating campaigns, so, if you’re not creating your campaign within the scope of Facebook policy, guidelines, and culture, you will not achieve your results. There are also other types of digital assets. Now that you know that creative variety is an e-commerce necessity, what are the common drivers of creative variety?
Product Launches
It’s an unspoken law that e-commerce brands must have digital announcements of sorts to introduce a new product. They have to do this to let customers know that there’s a new product in town, and this also boosts sales, as buyers would rush to buy the product, winning the early buyer’s bragging rights.
The announcement needs creative assets; a dedicated landing page, videos, product descriptions, user-generated content, user reviews, etc. Your in-house creative team or the agency you pay will be tasked with the responsibility of creating all the digital assets for the product launch.
Localization Needs
If you’re looking to expand outside your country or within your country even, one of the pressures you will have to deal with is the need to create local content that will connect with the buyers in the region you’re expanding to. Their culture and consumer behaviors are different from the one you’re used to, and in the case of outside your country, the buyers probably speak another language. Therefore, you have to create country-specific, and maybe city-specific creative assets.
Responding to Social and Cultural Issues
2020 is a perfect example of this. Brands had to create content that takes COVID-19 into account; that is lockdown, masks, and social distancing among others. Another example is the BLM protests that started in the US. Several e-commerce brands also had to acknowledge that in their storytelling to find a way to connect with the BLM protests. This means that you have to pay attention to new developments in your region and the world at large so that your brand won’t come off as insensitive to major issues. The only way your customer base will know that you’re aware of social and cultural issues is when you create and publish creative content that addresses the issues.
Additionally, this shouldn’t be a one-time thing that you do and then go back to sharing old creative contents that you produced before. For example, COVID-19. As in, you shouldn’t publish crowded outdoor-type campaigns even now in October, there’s still coronavirus outside. The key is to create digital assets that take cognizance of the times.
Seasonal Events
Christmas falls on the same date every year, as well as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, July 4th, Easter season, Mother’s Day, etc. To boost your seasonal sales you have to create digital assets for all of these events and more. You can’t do this by using just any content, you must be specific. For example, if you’re gunning for Christmas season sales, then you must create Christmas season digital assets to target shoppers. You can use season-specific content to target new and old customers, and mentally prepare them to shop during the coming season.
Use Automation To Create Creative Variety
If there’s one thing you need to know about e-commerce, it’s that you can’t do a lot of things manually; you need to automate many of your operations. This also applies to creative variety. Given the limited budget, time, and resources available for producing digital assets for creative variety, you have to find a way to manage and optimize what you have. Thankfully, automation software and tools can help with that. Make sure you research different types of creative variety automation tools before settling for the one that best suits your brand based on subscription price and the features in the tools.
One of the automation tools we recommend is Creative Automation. Larger brands such as Spotify and Adidas use it. Creative Automation makes it easy for e-commerce brands to create multiple digital assets. The software has a library of ready-to-use templates, and also allows users to customize theirs. It also has a content feed where users can save data such as language formats, product images, messaging style, etc. With the library of resources readily available, your in-house creative team will find it easy to create numerous creative content and campaigns fast.
Over To You
We understand that this a new terrain for many businesses. However, e-commerce is a non-stop moving train, so you need to get on with the culture ASAP. You don’t have to do this all by yourself if you lack the expertise or don’t have a creative team. You can hire an e-commerce agency to help. Make sure you watch and learn from them as they help you build your e-commerce brand if you can.
