Your digital shelf strategy empowers you to win your market. In this guide, we walk you through everything you need to know about successful digital shelf strategies and how to implement your own. 

What is a Digital Shelf Strategy – and Why Do You Need One?

The digital shelf refers to how and where a brand’s products are displayed online. 

In the past, brands invested significant resources to win the prime spot on a store’s physical retail shelf. Today, those efforts are focused on winning spots on the digital shelf. 

Most consumers –– over 80 percent –– do at least some of their shopping online. Even among consumers who shop in-store, a majority research products online beforehand. Today’s retail world operates within an omnichannel market, and brands must understand how to create and leverage a digital shelf strategy to maximize product page conversions. 

Take Hold of the Digital Shelf

As you can see, a powerful digital shelf strategy drives your e-commerce business. And in a saturated market, you must do everything you can to beat out the competition and set yourself apart to win the digital shelf. 

Below are our top five most important steps you can take to create a successful digital shelf strategy. 

1. Maximize Product Visibility

When consumers search for a product online, they aren’t going to spend time scrolling through multiple pages of results. To win the digital shelf, you must maximize your product visibility, and one of the most effective ways to do this is to optimize your content for SEO. 

SEO-optimized content empowers you to earn organic traffic to your site and your pages. And when done right, SEO puts your products at the top of the SERPs. 

Why does this matter? The coveted top spots on the first page of Google earn significantly higher click-through rates than other positions. A recent study found that moving up just one spot in the SERPs will increase your CTR by 31 percent. 

The same is true for brands selling on Amazon. Almost 100 percent of sales from the digital superstore come from within the first three pages of search results. Ultimately, you want to do whatever you can to get as close as possible to the number one spot on SERPs, because it’s here where your products will receive the most attention and the most clicks from customers. 

The more clicks, the higher your engagement –– and revenue.

In today’s omnichannel market, brands must go beyond the basics to create memorable, high-converting digital experiences. Optimizing product content for SEO helps you earn more traffic on every channel to make the most of your digital shelf strategy.  

2. Understand Consumer Shopping Habits

Creating a successful digital shelf strategy comes from understanding the consumer and their shopping habits.

As e-commerce shopping continues to dominate the retail industry, brands must know how to cater, market, and sell to an online audience. This includes optimizing product content, creating an informative and enjoyable digital experience, and providing the support consumers want and need. 

The lines between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce retail continue to blur. Brands that create seamless customer experiences are the ones that will come out on top. As omnichannel retail dominates the market, so does the omnichannel product content imperative. 

Understanding localized consumer shopping habits guide your decisions regarding your product content. By monitoring and auditing your regional content at the store level, you can ensure content is accurate, and for your targeted demographic everywhere they interact with your brand and products. 

Your audience shops in omnichannel, so your digital shelf strategy must reflect those habits. Delivering streamlined content experiences across channels positions your brand to win market share. 

3. Optimize Product Content

Your product content drives the success of your digital shelf strategy. Shoppers believe quality product content is more important than even brand recognition when making purchase decisions. Quality product content is the difference between making a sale and a shopper going elsewhere to find what they’re looking for. 

Rich product content is key to standing out and earning the ideal spots on the digital shelf. From hi-resolution marketing assets to 360-degree spin photography and AR/VR experiences, product content strategies help you win the digital shelf. 

Through enhanced image, video, and other content options, you can optimize your product content to engage consumers and increase your sales, earning you choice spots on the digital shelf. 

4. Audit Product Content

Publishing content isn’t the final step in your digital shelf strategy. Effective content management includes conducting regular product content audits to ensure your content performs as expected. Your unique goals, product launches, site changes or requirements, and competitive threats inform how and when to audit your content. 

Product content audits help you see what’s working and what needs to change. Audits can save you time and money by informing you of content that’s earning conversions and content that’s simply wrong. 

By opting for content auditing from a firm like Content Status, you can scale your audits for all your pages across all channels where you sell, and you can also scale your analysis to include your competition’s content. 

5. Know Your KPIs

You can measure the success of your digital shelf strategy if you know which metrics to track. The following KPIs give insight into the efficacy of your strategy. 

Traffic 

Page traffic is a clear indicator of how many users interact with your site and products. Your digital shelf strategy should uncover traffic sources you aren’t capitalizing upon and promote initiatives that help you earn traffic that converts. 

Knowing your share-of-search lets you see where you rank on the digital shelf and what you can do to earn even more traffic. Understanding your ranking helps you optimize for findability, compare your products and your competitors’ rankings, and identify new opportunities to drive traffic to your pages. 

Conversion Rate 

Your conversion rate shows how effectively your products and marketing content compels users to buy. The greater your conversion rates, the more successful your digital shelf strategy. 

Ratings and Reviews 

If you want to know exactly what consumers feel about your brand and products, just take a look at your reviews. Reviews give you direct insight into consumer opinion, and they have an undeniable influence on potential shoppers’ purchase decisions. 

According to PowerReviews, 98 percent of consumers feel reviews are an essential resource when shopping. Ratings and reviews are the most important factor influencing purchase decisions, outranking price, brand, and free shipping. 

Reviews and rating matter. As a result, you must implement robust review management when building out your digital shelf strategy. 

Conclusion

No matter what a consumer shops for, they’re going online to do it. Creating and executing a successful digital shelf strategy is key to increasing your engagement, sales, and profits. 

The team at Content Status knows what it takes to win the digital shelf, and we’ve got the tools and solutions to help you do it. Contact our team today to improve your digital shelf strategy and get the results you’re looking for.