The Digital Advantage: How marketers can unite technology to build a seamless path to purchase

In our ongoing series The Digital Advantage, we chat with today’s marketing leaders to explore and unpack all the current trends, challenges, and solutions senior marketing professionals need to know about in order to drive real change in their organizations.

This blog series dives into some key highlights from the episodes, and we continue now with Dónal Ó Mearáin’s conversation with Johan Boström, Co-founder and Chief Customer Ambassador at inRiver about building seamless paths to purchase. 

In the full episode, Dónal and Johan cover everything from how to maintain a personalized, consistent content delivery pipeline to the importance of investing wisely in your martech. The following excerpt provides a cutaway view into a couple of the other topics from their conversation.

You can watch the full episode below:

Dónal: Can you briefly explain what inRiver does?

Johan: inRiver has been around in the product information management (PIM) space for more than 15 years. We help brand manufacturers and retailers to create engaging content, and we help them to distribute that content to both their owned channels and third-party channels like Amazon or Walmart. 

We also provide digital shelf analytics to help them see that what's getting produced is getting published, that it's correct, and that it actually converts and creates the visibility needed. 

Dónal: Bynder has found that the vast majority of marketers globally (69% of them) see spending on content production, management, and distribution as staying the same or increasing. In your opinion, why are marketers investing more in content today?

Johan: I think we've always heard that ‘content is King’. I would add that ‘context is King Kong’, and these two interact with each other because it's hard to be in a consumer's context unless you have the content to create the context. 

Then you have the third-party syndications that most have to do today, and most of the endpoints — whether they're marketplaces, Google, retailers or distributors — require a certain set of content that fits what they need. It means that you’ve got to produce more content for those third parties as well. For instance, you'll probably need a specific text for Amazon, specific text for Home Depot or Walmart, and specific, localized text for your European outlets. 

If you consider just the quantity of visual assets needed for the content, the volume is usually far higher than the copy elements. The reason that we have that media explosion is that the number of artifacts belonging to a product is just skyrocketing — and it's only going to continue to grow.

Bynder's Content Workflow with AI assist capabilities enables marketers to accelerate content creation by generating, editing, translating, and polishing drafts effortlessly.  

Dónal: One of the data points that we've previously uncovered is that 66% of marketers — and this speaks to what you're saying — regularly use more than 11 channels for their marketing promotional activities. Besides this, an increasing number are using two dozen or more to distribute their content to engage their consumers.

Similarly, the expectations of both B2C and B2B consumers have increased greatly in the last few years. Is that something you're seeing as well?

Johan: Absolutely. If you look at B2C specifically, consumers now shop around way more than they did before, and this is a trend that will continue. I think the number of touchpoints will continue to grow too. 

But, it's also about convenience and how quickly a consumer can find what they're looking for. They’re not usually looking in 100 places for one particular thing. 

Brand value is diminishing in most sectors, so the product needs to stand on its own two feet. For example, when you look at how consumers search these days on Google or Amazon, they typically search for the properties of a product — that's if you look at B2C. 

If you look at B2B, consumers increasingly want to self-service, but for that to happen you need to have your context in place. 

For example, you don't want to go through hundreds of thousands of SKUs to find the part that solves your problem. The B2B buyer wants a frictionless buying journey — they're not doing this to satisfy their own needs, they're doing it as part of their job — so it’s about how they navigate, how they find things, and how you can serve that content up as easily and quickly as possible.

Dónal: If someone’s finding it, and it works for them, they’ll maybe continue on to the purchase stage on that eCommerce platform. This is also long-term brand building as you're trying to deliver a 'wow' moment to potential customers. If you're delivering disappointment in that moment, you know your competitors are just that one click away. 

Related to this, I've heard you speak about this concept of the ‘digital shelf’ and its place in creating a path to purchase — maybe we could just dive into what that phrase means?

Johan: There are quite a few definitions, depending on who you ask. My definition is that the digital shelf is the equivalent of the physical shelf — it's just that the digital medium has no limitations. 

It's ‘always on’, it's always connected, and there's no human between you and the consumer. 

And that means that the dealership is quite complicated to get right — and what you have to work with, platform-wise, is constantly changing. 

If you're selling on marketplaces or you're selling through a dealer distributor network, products are going to be presented differently on each product detail page. The structure of the content, the taxonomy, the hierarchy that the customer's navigating through… they're going to be different all over. 

And you have to be in control of that because otherwise, you're probably not going to get the sale. It's not just about the content being correct so that you avoid returns and bad experiences, it's about getting someone to the right product.

That's where digital shelf analytics comes in. It can crawl all the sites with your products and you can see whether the content is actually the right content. It means that you can quickly react when things like algorithms change.

Enjoyed these episode highlights? The Digital Advantage is an ongoing video series by marketers for marketers who want to create engaging content experiences to differentiate their brand from the competition. Watch previous episodes.

*Please note that some of the wording in the above conversation has been edited for clarity and conciseness.