In a recent post, I shared some of my favorite tips and tools for retail blogs. There are so many ways to interact and offer information in this sector, that I couldn’t fit them all into just 1 post! I have a couple other suggestions that you may find useful if you have a retail blog or plan on starting one.
Showcase Your Products with a Video Demo
What makes your product better than the competition? What makes your store better than the next? Many mobile smartphones and tablets have a built in camera making it super easy to take and add video to the web. Give a quick demo of the item, point out the best features and SELL it. Have a new shoe line? Take a video with someone actually wearing the shoes to show on a person how they actually look with jeans/dresses, etc..
Video is so visual and a quick way to grab the readers attention and engage.
We have recently started using Wistia.com – a really awesome and easy to use video upload program that allows you to quickly customize and embed video into a blog post. It even allows you to simply change the color of the video buttons, provide a clickable call to action, add your logo and more – giving your embedded video a really polished look. You can also add video right to your email campaigns making them even more clickable!
What’s more, they even show you the location of who watched the video and how long users tuned in – really amazing data to continuously improve your messaging.
Tie in Your Pinterest Account
Do you have a Pinterest account for all your products? If you don’t, it could be very worthwhile to start one! In fact, Pinterest is one of the top social media outlets providing referral traffic to thousands of retail websites. You could create inspiration boards, provide link backs to your website, shopping cart, or blog. If you do have Pinterest boards, you could even feed this into your blog.
To do this, simply go to one of your boards on Pinterest and add the word /rss to the end of the URL.
For our Mannix Marketing shopping web design board, this would be
https://www.pinterest.com/saratoga/saratoga-springs-ny/rss/
From there, you can take the feed, add it to your blog to interlink your other social media accounts, encourage more followers, pins, etc..
Include an E-News Signup on your Blog
Make sure your blog customers can get your latest and greatest information right in your email by placing a strong e-news sign-up on the right hand side of your blog. This is a fabulous way to continuously touch and re-market to your fan base creating loyalty and continuous branding.
Track Your Stats!
In order to continuously improve and grow your blog base, you have to know what works! Make sure you are tracking your stats, seeing what blog posts are the most shareable and most heavily trafficked. This data is so important! You can use this to determine what kind of content your readers love. You may be surprised what content attracts your fans the most. For WordPress, you can get the plugin JetPack and view the data right in your dashboard.
Finally….
Remember who you are speaking to. Try to keep your blog tone as personal as possible so it is like you are talking to your customer directly!
Comments are always welcome! Please share your own tips, tricks and suggestions for retail blogs!