The value of choices in today’s convenience-driven world cannot be overstated. Even though customers appreciate the ease of navigation and being guided, they still want to experience shopping that does not diminish the charm of having choices, as they do in retail.
This is where shoppable media emerges as a pivotal strategy that addresses these dual needs of modern consumers and e-commerce businesses alike.
Now, what is shoppable media? And how can it help businesses? It can help businesses shorten the shopping journey substantially by allowing customers to explore and purchase products instantly.
Before we begin, let’s examine the shoppable media definition and consider how it can benefit consumers and businesses.
What is Shoppable Media?
Shoppable media is visual content (images or videos) that directly facilitates buying products or services without navigating to a different page. It can be found at various eCommerce touchpoints, including an online store’s homepage, product pages, or social media channels.
Shoppable media content allows businesses to easily showcase their products and offerings on value-driving pages, inspiring purchases for customers and supporting them to act on their buying decisions.
Types of Shoppable Media
Utilizing shoppable media can have a profound impact on your business. However, choosing the best type of shoppable media that directly engages your customers is essential. Here are some types of shoppable media that brands generally use:
1. Shoppable Images
Shoppable images are one of the most common types of shoppable media. Every eCommerce brand has done some photoshoots for its products, be it for marketing or its website. Nowadays, brands are leveraging images more beneficially by turning them shoppable and embedding them on the store’s essential touchpoints.
Images are still the best form of content that helps customers visualize products without much effort; additionally, for brands, images are more accessible to display and keep the website accessible from load.
2. Shoppable Videos
Another type of shoppable media content is shoppable videos. Statistically, shoppable videos are one of the most potent forms of shoppable content for all the right reasons.
Brands utilize all forms of video content—UGC, influencer collaborations, and branded videos—to showcase products more realistically. By making them shoppable, brands facilitate easy purchases, ultimately boosting sales.
3. Shoppable Social Media
Social media has become vital for businesses in the past few years. So much so that it has moved beyond being just a platform for communication and has also become a marketing tool for businesses.
Shoppable social content is a popular type of shoppable media that allows brands to turn their social media page into a shop. Here, brands can add product tags to the posts and curate shoppable social media.
Benefits of Shoppable Media
Today, engaging visual content holds the key to the success of any eCommerce business. Customers have become more inclined towards authentic content such as reviews, visual testimonials, and short UGC videos to make purchasing choices, leading to the rise of shoppable media.
Integrating shoppable content into the shopping experiences is a win-win situation for both customers and brands.
Here’s how shoppable media benefits.
Benefits of Shoppable Media for Consumers:
1. Shorter Shopping Journey
Statistics show that over 22% of consumers abandon shopping carts due to a long and complicated checkout journey. For this reason, integrating shoppable media into the online store is an excellent tactic for eCommerce businesses. It allows customers to discover products and purchase them within the same interface. By adding product tags to the content and engaging CTA buttons, brands can substantially reduce the purchase journey and encourage customers to complete their shopping more easily.
2. Improved Product Discovery and Comparison
Shoppable media enables consumers to discover and purchase products directly within the platform they are engaging with, whether it’s social media or eCommerce web pages.
Shoppable media exposes consumers to a broader range of products. By embedding clickable links or tags within this content, customers can enjoy better product discovery and comparison. This allows customers to make better purchasing decisions and instill confidence and trust in their purchases.
3. Better Product Visualization
One of the most crucial issues consumers face while shopping online is not being sure of the quality of the products. With shoppable media in the picture, consumers can authentically visualize the product through user-generated content.
As shoppable content often showcases products in a lifestyle context, it can help consumers get a complete picture of what the product looks like in action, allowing them to make purchases more confidently.
Benefits of Shoppable Media for Businesses:
1. Increased Conversion Rates
A simple and direct shopping journey is one of the biggest boons for businesses. Today, customers are spoilt for choice with so many brands at their fingertips. Smoothening the user experience as much as possible is essential so customers are not frequently distracted and can keep their interest intact.
By removing friction from the purchase journey, shoppable media makes it easier for consumers to convert their interest into a sale. This translates to higher sales and revenue for businesses.
2. Valuable Customer Data Collection
Another benefit of shoppable media for eCommerce businesses is that it allows businesses to gather valuable data on consumer behavior, such as what products catch their eye and how they interact with shoppable elements. How?
This is because most shoppable media platforms allow businesses to track the performance of the shoppable social content and how much revenue has been generated through them. This data can be used further for targeted marketing campaigns and product development.
3. Enhanced Brand Engagement
Shoppable media also encourages customers to spend more time on the website, leading to better brand engagement. Shoppable media is generally user-generated content, which means businesses utilize content created by real customers by turning it shoppable.
When new website visitors see the content of customers embedded into the website, they feel compelled to share their version of the content. It encourages active participation from consumers and boosts engagement levels, as consumers can explore products, learn more about them, and make purchases without leaving the platform.
Inspiring Examples of Shoppable Media
Countless eCommerce brands are trying innovative strategies to build successful businesses, such as influencer and creator collaborations, email marketing, and social media campaign hosting. Leveraging shoppable media on valuable touchpoints is one strategy that various leading brands use.
1. Starbucks Shoppable Instagram Carousel Ad
Statistically, Instagram’s majority of users are between 18 and 24. Starbucks, a coffeehouse and restaurant chain, caters to customers of a similar age range. Naturally, Instagram promotions were a brilliant way for Starbucks to communicate about the release of its new packaged coffee.
However, Starbucks leveled up its promotions by implementing a shoppable content strategy. Starbucks hosted a shoppable carousel advertisement on Instagram, showcasing multiple products in a single post. This helped the brand cover all the targeted products in one carousel advertisement, leading to a more effective campaign.
2. Reina Olga Shoppable Gallery
For eCommerce businesses, offering near-perfect product visualization for customers holds the utmost value. As a swimwear brand, Reina Olga had to offer more than just catalog images to inspire purchases. The brand leveraged user-generated content to showcase its products more vividly and instill trust and confidence in customers for the brand.
Reina Olga curated a shoppable Instagram gallery from its customers’ video UGC, showcasing the brand’s best-selling products, and embedded the shoppable video gallery into the eCommerce store’s homepage.
3. Gymshark Shoppable Stories
Gymshark is a famous activewear brand that leverages the power of social media and storytelling to enhance user engagement and drive conversions. The brand has curated captivating, shoppable social media posts and visually appealing stories on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
These stories often feature high-quality images and videos showcasing their products in action, whether the brand’s ambassadors wearing their apparel during workouts or lifestyle shots highlighting the brand’s ethos.
In this particular new launch campaign by Gymshark, the brand curated shoppable Instagram stories showcasing the brand’s new products with a direct-to-buy link on the story.
4. Puma Shoppable Social Media
The well-known athletic and casual apparel and footwear brand Puma also ideally leveraged the opportunity to improve brand engagement and sales via shoppable media. Puma is a massive name in the athleisure wear industry. With so many customers trusting in the brand and making purchases online, Puma wanted to enhance the shopper’s experience further.
To do that, Puma hosted a shoppable social media campaign that showcased the brand’s products engagingly. The campaign featured a direct ‘Shop Now’ button that redirected the visitor directly to the displayed product’s detail page, helping the brand streamline the customer’s shopping experience.
5. Pampers Adorable By Design Campaign
Baby care is one of the highest-value-driving industries of all time. Statistically, the global baby care products market was valued at $204.75 billion in 2021 and is projected to grow to become a $331.92 billion industry by 2029.
The potential is massive, and Pampers – the leading baby diaper brand, understood the need to market its product better to stand out. Pampers leveraged shoppable media advertising to redirect the brand’s social audience on Instagram to its eCommerce store’s landing pages. This practice allowed Pampers to improve the brand’s engagement and revenue significantly.
Conclusion
In this blog, we have offered a complete insight into shoppable media as an influential strategy for eCommerce businesses. Additionally, we have studied how this strategy can bring numerous advantages to any brand, including better brand credibility and reputation.
Moreover, shoppable media enhances a website’s engagement rate and interactivity, capturing users’ attention and immersing them in the brand experience.
By providing a seamless transition from inspiration to purchase, businesses can capitalize on consumer interest’s momentum, ultimately driving higher conversion rates and sales.
FAQs
Imagine an Instagram post where you can instantly buy the cool jacket the model is wearing. That’s a shoppable social post! These turn social media browsing into shopping with clickable tags on pictures or videos linking you to the product or letting you buy it within the app itself. Super convenient!
Shoppable ads are like turbocharged product placements. They cut right through browsing, letting customers buy directly from the ad with a single click. This means faster sales, happier customers, and valuable insights into what makes your products fly off the virtual shelves.
Social commerce is the broad term for using social media to promote and sell products. It includes content that sparks interest, like influencer posts or customer reviews. Shoppable media narrows it down to content with a direct way to buy, like product tags that link to your store. Think of social commerce as the conversation and shoppable media as the “buy now” button.
