The Future of Ecommerce Content: How to Prepare for 2023

There are brands out there making millions and millions and millions of dollars from posting videos on social media platforms. And for some reason, you still haven't built an effective content strategy for your brand yet. I'm Zach. I'm the founder of Flax Labs. We're a scientific e-commerce marketing scaling agency, whatever you want to call it. We're a marketing growth company. We help e-commerce businesses grow faster, and we have clients that will literally post an Instagram story and make $50,000 just off of that story alone. So today I want to talk about ways that you can build an effective content strategy that will actually make you money and allow you to spend less time advertising, more time building effective content, and in turn get better ad results, a bigger brand, a bigger following on social media, more loyal followers, and a whole host of other things alongside more profitable sales and more profitability in general. I've tried to package this into a relatively simple formula. Obviously there's a million things I could talk about, a million variables that go into this, and it's not something that could ever be covered in one video alone. But today I'm going to just talk about 4 or 5 main topics or things that you can do to craft an actual effective strategy. So the first thing that you need to ask yourself is, what problems can I solve as a creator for my viewer? Now, when you're trying to sell something, you're usually not trying to create the most entertaining content in the world. Again, this varies brand to brand, and you could build this into your strategy if you wanted, but you're not necessarily looking for virality, but you're looking for the highest amount of sales per video. Now, if I had a video that gets 5 million views on TikTok that makes me $1,000, I'd much rather a video that gets 500,000 views that makes me $100,000. So you're looking to make the most money per video, which means that in most instances, you need to be solving somebody's problem for them rather than just trying to make a video that works well with the algorithm, makes you cool and goes viral. You cannot expect viewers to follow you or even trust you if you're not giving them something to actually gain their trust with. Every great product or service solves problems for people. So think about the problems that your brand is solving for your customers and make videos surrounding those problems. If you don't know how to actually understand your audience and figure out who your target avatars are in the first place, comment below and I'll make a video about it. The next thing is you want a really strong brand identity. Now Try to think of a big company that doesn't have a really recognizable brand or consistent branding, and you'll struggle because almost every large company out there has been incredibly successful in building a strong brand. You need to think about how you want your brand to be perceived by your audience, and then you also need to understand what types of brands and what types of things will make your brand more attractive for your target customer. I recommend building incredibly strong guides or standard operating procedures outlining the language that you use as a brand, the emojis, the people that you're targeting, the ways in which you want your brand to be perceived, the core values of your brand and what you actually stand for, aside from generating revenue and profit for people. And just have a general understanding of how the brand is meant to be perceived online. And if you look even at a company like Instagram or Facebook, if you want to use one of Instagram's or Facebook's logos, they have really specific brand guidelines as to how you can even use their logo for your own website or in a graphic that you're posting somewhere or anything like that. Now, your, your brand identity and brand personality can evolve over time, but put it all in one place, in one centralized document that explains your entire brand, and then build off of the foundation that you already have. The third thing that you need to get a grasp on is content concepts. You want to create your own concepts that are unique to your brand. Now, content concept is a style of content that your brand might create. If you're not using unique concepts, then you fail to be an individual brand. It's really hard to differentiate yourself, especially in a busy, noisy, crowded market like e-commerce, if you don't have a way of differentiating yourself and being a clear individual in the space. So you have to think what makes your content unique and different to everything else out there that already exists. I see a lot of people copying content from others and just honestly, like some videos, it's ridiculous, are just straight ripoffs of videos that already exist. And this happens with some of my videos. Instead of copying what others have created, Take their most successful videos. Don't necessarily reinvent the wheel, but add your own spice and version and flavor to it, if that makes sense. I want you to find trends and build upon the successful content by trend stacking and creating your own versions of successful content. Again, we do not want to copy. Copying will not help you long term. It will not create an individual brand for you. It might get you followers. To create a unique content concept, find multiple pieces of content from other people that have been creating successful content in the space and combine that with content styles that you've seen and that you would like and that you enjoy and you want to replicate. Create some sort of mood board and use that as your foundation of your brand's content identity. As people become familiar with your content styles, you create a recognizable brand that people are more likely to actually engage with and follow. The last thing is content creation itself. Now you can have all of this brand identity and content concept planning and preparation, but you need to actually be creating content to have an effective content strategy in the first place, because as you start creating content, you see what works and you can optimize it. So it's really important to set goals for yourself. Ask yourself, how am I going to grow this account? How much content do I need to make? And set achievable targets for yourself. Don't try to make 400 videos a day, day one. Slowly build up from maybe 1 or 2 videos a day and increase from there. And even if that's unreasonable, maybe start with 3 videos a week or 2 videos a week or 1 video a week. Whatever you do, start and build something that is consistent and improve off of the baseline that you are creating yourself. The last note that I'll add to this is you need to create content that is specific to the platform you're uploading to. So short-form comedy videos are typically at this stage, uh, as of December 27th, 2022, um, they're typically not something that you would be uploading to Twitter. It would likely be TikTok or a short-form platform. Long-form videos that are horizontal, again, wouldn't be uploaded to these platforms. So understand where you're actually planning on uploading your content and create content for the platform specifically. That's basic, but for some reason people still don't seem to grasp that very well. And don't forget that sometimes two brains are better than one. You can always ask somebody for some insight. And when you're asking somebody for insight, don't ask your grandmother. Ask somebody that's actively involved in the space. There's lots of influencers out there with over 100,000 followers that you could reach out to, and they'll most likely respond to your questions because they're not as famous as you think. So I always recommend getting a second eye on something. And if you have a team, even better, you can bounce that off of your team and you can grow together. Now that's everything I had today in my notes. If you want more specific things on building a content strategy, let me know in the comments, like actually specify what you want me to line out for you and I will. Otherwise, subscribe to me.