How To Easily Make Content Marketing Work For Your Business With Product Recommendations And Ratings

In today’s buyer-empowered world, people are demanding less generic, corporate-driven messaging, and more personal humanised content.

Content marketing has been revolutionised, and brands and marketers are increasingly benefitting more than before. Thanks to modern technology, there are so many smart ways to market your business nowadays without even spending much.

It’s now easy to boost relevance by offering product, service and resource recommendations that aligned with the interests your contacts have shared.

These interests could be both explicitly (via forms and preference centres) and implicitly (via their behaviour); they all contribute to relevance at the end of the day.

SEE ALSO: Why Visual Content Should Be Part Of A Business Marketing Strategy

Social media platforms such as Facebook now offer a great channel through which brands can easily make content marketing work for them.

Making content marketing work with product ratings

The fact is that customers are increasingly using peer reviews and ratings when evaluating possible purchases. Businesses too can easily make their content marketing work better by incorporating product ratings in their content.

Doing this will enable you to provide buyers with a perspective on your product or service that goes beyond corporate messaging. This also gives your messaging a more “social” feel and help boosts credibility in the process.

How an integrated platform can help content marketing?

When next you send out pre-purchase, promotional and transactional emails, make sure you integrate product recommendation, rating, and reviews. You can also include customised recommendations and product ratings in this kind of promotion.

For example, you could create a post-purchase upsell and/or cross-sell email to promote other products to your customers. This kind of email can feature a section alerting the recipient that “people that bought item A that you recently bought, frequently also bought item B.”

SEE ALSO: How To Effectively Promote Content To Relevant Audience

Your product review software can aggregate and analyse customer behaviours to identify what content customers who bought Item A find interesting and engaging.

Then, via the integration with your digital marketing platform, that content can be served up in your post-purchase email.

For example, this section might feature earrings that match a necklace recently bought.

It can also feature an extended warranty for an item purchased or a white paper related to the Webinar a prospect just attended.

Quick tips that work

Depending on your integrations, you could also include product ratings and/or reviews for any of the suggested items you highlighted. This will easily help you build trust with your audience and positioning your company as a helpful resource.

#1]. Test the number of recommended products

Should you include one recommended product, three, or some other number? Test to determine what drives the most revenue without over cluttering your message and overwhelming your recipients.

#2]. Ask for product reviews

Set up an automated trigger that sends a message requesting a product review one or two weeks after a purchase (test timing and use of incentives). You’ll accumulate more user-generated content and gain an extra touch point.

Once the review goes live, send a “your rating/review has been posted” email along with a related discount (if applicable) and a call to action for the recipient to share with his or her social network.

#3]. Reward top content contributors

Give those who review and share your content special status, such as providing them sneak peeks at new products or offering them special discounts. You’ll build loyalty and likely increase message reach even more.