What are the strategic roles of online product for effective sales?

     


           B2B companies need to be vigilant about online product content. The lack of product information on B2B eCommerce websites result in poor customer experiences and impact your business negatively. If you are a B2B vendor, you should see what information your website lacking. Keep the eye on your multi-view product images to technical specification or SEO keywords and product features. This information is vital to your customers to place large orders and may need more specific information before they purchase.       
       Product strategy is a system of achievable goals and visions that work together to align the team around desirable outcomes for both the business and your customers. It emerges from experimentation towards a goal. Initiatives around features, products, and platforms are the proven way. KPI's and other metrics you are setting for your team are part of the product strategy.
Here are the core things of the product strategy to be successful,
    * Vision: It is the highest level, ultimate view of where the company or business line or customer journey. For smaller companies, this will be your company and products overall vision.
    * Challenges: This is the first business goal you have to achieve on the long-term vision. It is communicated as a strategic objective that helps align and focus your team on a certain aspect of product development.
    * Target Condition: It helps break down the challenges. Challenges are made up of smaller problems you need to tackle along the way.
    * Current State: It is the current reality is compared to the target condition. It should be measured and quantified before the work starts to achieve the first target condition.
         Design respond better to common business challenges. Good design makes products more competitive. It keeps products costs down and allows higher prices in the shops. It keeps users happy, making them come back and encourage them to recommend things to others. The design applies the power of the brand. A strong brand identity encourages customers to trust existing products and to try new ones.
    Double Diamond Design Process Model:
       Different designers manage the process of design in different ways, But, there is a similarity and shared approaches among designers. The simple graphical way to describe the design process gives more detail on the key activities in each of the process's four stages. Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. It shows the divergent and convergent mode stages of the design process and showing different modes of thinking the designers,

       

Discover:    It marks the start of the project in the double diamond model.  The user needs are identified in the discovery phase with an initial idea or inspiration. In this stage of the design process, the company is asking a question, posing a hypothesis or identifying the problem by analyzing the market data, trends and other information sources. It includes,
     * Market Research
     * User Research
     * Managing the Information
     * Research Groups etc.,
Define:  In this stage, the interpretation and alignment of the needs to the business objectives are achieved.  The combination of ideas or directions is identified ends with the clear definition of the problem and plan for how to address through design-led product or service. The key activities in this stage are,
     * Project Development
     * Project Management
     * Project sign-off
Develop: In the period of development where the design-led solutions are developed. iterated and tested within the company.  Design development methods are used to include creative techniques and methods such as brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and scenarios. At the end of the development stage, the design process will have brought the product development team to a stage where the product or service ready for delivery of production. The key activities in this stage are,
     * Multi-disciplinary working
     * Visual Management
     * Development Method
     * Testing
Deliver: This is the final stage of the double diamond model is delivery. This is where the resulting product or service is finalized and launched in the relevant market. It also includes processes for feeding back lessons from the full design process to inform future projects. The key activities and objectives are,
     * Final testing and approval & launch
     * Evaluation & Feedback Loops

 Plan for Creating an Online Product or Service:

Step 1: Identify the Ideal Client:  When you are specifically targeting your ideal customer, they will feel like your product is specifically for them. When you have a definite person in mind, your job of selling will be more straightforward. You'll know exactly who to address, and it will come through in your marketing efforts.Write down what you envision and create a description list. The goal is to fully describe the type of person you want to attract.
Step 2: Understand their Pain Points: The deeper the understanding of the person so you can create the perfect product for them. The most formal way to get your target client is to formulate a reader survey. You can also learn more about the person by engaging with him on social media. To create right product, you need to understand what your ideal reader or clients find valuable. Value is relative to the person your product or service for. It is also an understanding of problem and source of pain and has the solution for them.
   There are some pain points people experiences while shopping online like,
        * People cannot touch or feel the product online
        * People hard to reach out to get help when shopping online
        * The information architecture may be confusing, overwhelming and frustrating
Pay attention to these pain points of the customer which will significantly improve the customer experiences.
Step 3: Create the Promise: The promise is the value the customer can expect after buying your product or service. The promise should be the solution to the pain. The more painful their problem, the more valuable your product has the potential to be. You should have the answer to the questions like what promise should my products make to be truly valuable?
Step 4: Outline your Process: Every fabulous informational product has a clear-cut method for their audience to follow. People pay to you because they want to do something in an efficient way. The process you create should guide them to see the desired results in estimated timeframe. For ex, what are the steps your person needs to take to get from pain to process? So, your content should have following for each step,
     * What they should do?
     * Why they should do it?
     * How they should do it?
Step 5: Pricing: Creating the digital products costs more time than money for creation and delivery. The price of digital products is based on value. The deeper the pain, the more valuable your product has the potential to be. The potential lies in the promise. If the promise alleviates the pain, the value can change. If your promise eliminates the pain, then you will get the dollars.
 ECommerce Page Design - Product Content:  The perfect eCommerce website should be visually attractive and must show all the key information in a balanced, precise, up-to-date and error-free way. The product information must be well coordinated inside your company and across all the channels that distribute and display the data. There are some fundamental guides to follow to achieve a perfect eCommerce product page design,
       * Clarity and Sharpness: The design should be created for sight and touch with easy to distinguish the elements that are easy to interact with mobile screens.
       * Key Colors: The colors must be uniform, catching and must be used in key visual zones.
       * Elements Disposition: The most important elements should be located at the top of the page: the title, the highlighted image, the price, the BUY button. delivery times etc.,
       * Data Classification: Separate the general descriptions to technical specifications by bullet points. It is easy if product content management has already been carried out. Also, it is important to highlight the different information according to the product.
       * Harmony between Product Pages:  The product information and the design elements must be uniform among different pages and channels.  The synchronization and automation of content management is vital to the eCommerce page design
      * Interactive Elements: It is essential to present and explain products through animations, unique comparisons, or inspiring banner and by giving the user to play with the product such as changing the color of the element etc.,
      * Photo Gallery: Images must have the high quality and standardized pictures with same image formats and aesthetic line used in all product pages.
      * Secondary Buttons: It is useful to add the product to wishlist and share it on social media. Encourage its use through original strategies such as specific hashtag for the product.
      * Simple Reviews: Scoring the products with stars and brief opinion on product pages will gain in visual uniformity and users will have to be more concise.
      * Seasonal Design: Occasion will bring the unique opportunity to readapt your design and give a boost of personality to your product pages on Halloween, Summer sale, Christmas etc.,

     Including the pertinent content boost web traffic, conversions, and overall customer experience in the process.  Follow these steps for better results,
  1. Analyse Existing Product Content: Identifying the gaps is important to evaluate the product. The scientific method is to select a set of underperforming stock keeping unit(SKU) that are low conversions or low traffic product by conducting the initial analysis. It is also to identify the certain content updates may make a difference.
 2. Do the Research: Once you identified the gaps in existing product content, you should solidify keywords for each individual product. Typically, your product should contain three to five popular keywords per product to inform content development for those product pages. Popular keyword research helps you standardize product names, assign the attribution of SKU's and can help edit images, videos, user manuals etc., This will contribute to SEO for your products and helping them to get listed in top 10 results on google.
3. Adjust, Measure and Change: The analysis of product content often reveals the product pages in need of specific content to help customers to make the purchasing decisions. It reveals the consistency of the product names confusing to the customer who is searching for particular product specifications. It also reveals the product names that are not following consistent syntax.

     Once you make the necessary content improvements, the next step is to monitor specific traffic and conversion metrics of product page views, page exit rate, conversion rates, order rates as well as google page rank. The time and effort you put into page content and page descriptions, missing images, specifications, keywords will push the metrics in the right directions.

Comments