A quick analogy … If your business is surfing, then merchandising content is your surfboard. It’s what you stand on, your foundation. It supports you in rough seas and you can ride it safely to your destination. Without a surfboard, no matter how great the waves, you are just out in the ocean bobbing up and down.
When marketing your business, no matter how great all the rest of your content is, without great merchandising, your business isn’t going anywhere.
Merchandising Content: If you don’t get this right, the rest doesn’t matter.
There are many kinds of content, ranging from the mundane to the epic. If you think of your marketing content as a pyramid, today we are going to talk about the base of that pyramid. The one element that supports all the rest. Today we are going to talk about merchandising.
“But I am in a service business. I don’t have products to merchandise.” Guess what, even if you are selling a service, you are still selling a product. Furthermore, if you are selling a product, you are also selling a service – customer service.
Products and services are not so different as many would have you believe. And either way, you have to get your merchandising right. It’s your foundation, and usually, it’s the last content that a prospect sees before making a buying decision.
So what is merchandising?
The planning and promotion of sales by presenting a product to the right market at the proper time, by carrying out organized, skillful advertising, using attractive displays, etc. – Dictionary.com
I like that definition, but it’s a little broad. For this discussion, we are going to discuss merchandising content:
The images and descriptions that outline the many features and benefits of your product or service. – Me
Alright, let’s break that definition down a little:
Images
Here, we are talking about product images. Simple and clean, but professional in appearance. Easy to understand. This is not the time to get artistic.
If you are in a service business, we may talk about photos of your facility, or of your vehicles. If you are selling yourself (as a consultant, for example), then your “merchandising” photo may be a nice clean headshot.
If you are selling a product, especially a physical product, you will want multiple photos that show your product from every angle. If it opens, open it and take a photo. If you use it in conjunction with another item, show how they attach and how they interact.
The idea is to use your merchandising photos to answer your prospects’ questions before they even realize they have them.
Descriptions
You see that little “s” at the end of the word description? That “s” is not only there because you may have more than one product or service. Chances are, you will need more than one description for each of your products or services.
You may need a 100 character description, and a 100 word description, and a 500 word description. If your product or service is complicated enough, you may even need an entire micro-site. The point is, you need to have total clarity about your product or service. Can you sum it up in a few words? Can you go deep and give a thorough explanation that even a layperson can understand? That is your challenge.
Features and Benefits
Even though this phrase came last in my definition above, it is what you need to think about first. Considering the features and benefits of your product or service will guide you as you make your images and write your descriptions.
How can you illustrate this feature of your product with a photo? How can you describe that benefit of your service in only a few words? If you don’t clearly understand your features and benefits, you are flying blind. You are guessing about what will be important to your prospect.
Features and Benefits – Redux
That last sentence contained a critical phrase – “what will be important to your prospect”. As you are considering your features and benefits, you must remember to always view them as a prospect would. Avoid the mindset of the creator, retailer, or service provider.
Here is a quick example… Say you have developed a SAAS app (Software As A Service application) for project management. As the developer, the first thing that pops into your head is that we developed it using Ruby on Rails (a programing language). Do you think that your prospect will care that we developed it this way? Only if they are a developer as well. Now, what they may care about is what using this specific programming language means to them – greater security, ease of use, lower processor overhead, enhanced interoperability, etc. I have no idea if anything I just typed is accurate (HTML is the limit of my coding ability), but you can see how those features and benefits would seem far more important to the prospect than the name of the programming language.
Remember, put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and create your merchandising content from that perspective.
But why is merchandising content so critical?
Merchandising content is critical, foundational, because it is the content that is closest to your product or service. It is the deciding factor. After prospects work their way down your marketing funnel, your merchandising content is the last thing they will see before making their decision.
Depending on the business you are in, your merchandising content may be the content that gets syndicated to third-party vendors. Your images and descriptions could be published on eBay, Etsy, Amazon, or many other marketplaces. If you are selling an online course or digital product, your merchandising content could be published on JVZoo, or ClickBank, or distributed by joint venture partners. If you are in a service business, your merchandising content is the most concise and pertinent content you will produce, so that makes it the content most likely to be shared by your fans and friends.
All the other content you produce will serve the main purpose of driving prospects to your merchandising content. So if your merchandising is not rock solid, you have wasted a lot of effort. Your key take-away is that quality merchandising content makes the rest of your marketing more effective; it’s an amplifier. Poor merchandising makes everything else you do ineffective and irrelevant.
So, set aside some time, follow the tips outlined in this article, and create some great merchandising content.
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Photo courtesy Joschko Hammermann / Unsplash