Speed is everything. Whether in procurement, service or delivery – webshop retailers must be fast to meet today’s customer expectations. Anyone who fails in one of the numerous tasks will be punished. Bad reviews, lousy product descriptions or even public criticism via social media are often the result. And once the reputation is ruined, it is very difficult to reawaken the favour of the buying clientele. That’s why online retailers attach great importance to providing their customers with first-class service and top quality.
However, the heart of every online shop often leads a shadowy existence: The target group appealing, informative and conversion-strong product text. For many ecommerce providers, first-class product descriptions are more of a brake pedal than a sales accelerator.
Products have to go into the web shop quickly, because if you don’t have new products in your portfolio fast enough, you will lose sales. So the topic of product texts takes a back seat. Many webshop owners are already happy if images are available. As a result, online retailers are struggling with these three biggest challenges in product copywriting:
1. Poor quality of product descriptions
Producing good product descriptions and getting them to market promptly is not only a question of cost, but also requires a well thought-out procurement process. Although web store operators often employ their own copywriters or even have an entire department responsible for content production, at the end of the day fresh content is always a bottleneck. This regularly leads to losses in the quality of the product texts. All too often, interested online customers are fobbed off with bullet point lists that are incomprehensible and irrelevant to search engines.
And webshop owners who cannot afford or do not want their own content department are happy to buy product descriptions from writing agencies. These brokers often entice with low prices and also promise fast production and SEO quality. The reality often looks very different. Competent and target group oriented product descriptions are neither available at a bargain price nor do the product descriptions perform in the search engines. How could they?
2. Incomplete and outdated product descriptions
When students, housewives and househusbands or part-time workers – often referred to as ‘crowd’ by text agencies – are under pressure to write masses of product descriptions, they quickly lose sight of the essentials. Important characteristics, functional descriptions and above all the utility value of a product often fall by the wayside. They are not recognised due to a lack of professional competence. No offence intended. Rather, it is due to the circumstances. The quality of product texts correlates with time, money and expertise.
And it even happens that product descriptions of a previous model are being recycled. Before a new product has no text at all, one helps oneself with that of the previous model. It would of course be better to highlight the advantages of the new product in text.
3. The duplicate content trap
It can even get worse: some owners of online shops use the manufacturer’s marketing text, which are often provided free of charge. With disastrous consequences.
Integrating suppliers’ marketing text into your webshop is not a good idea.
Let’s put it to the test. Let’s take an extract of any product description of a manufacturer and do a Google search. The result is shocking: over 3,200(!) hits are displayed, including a considerable number of online shops. Any individuality and uniqueness falls by the wayside – many webshops disappear into the uniformity of identical search results.
We can deduce three things from the example:
- The use of marketing text in online shops robs webshop retailers of any chance of positioning themselves and addressing the target group individually.
- Anyone who makes increased use of marketing text exposes himself to a risk that should not be underestimated. The multiple use of so-called duplicate content is not at all to the taste of Google’s search algorithm – a generally poorer ranking in the search results is the result.
- The use of marketing text weakens the conversion rate rather than helping it.
Automated text generation bridges the content bottleneck
The tension between on the one hand quickly created and on the other hand high quality content does not seem resolvable. And indeed, it does not help much to invest more staff, money and time. This inevitably has a negative impact on turnover and speed in go-to-market. However, all these challenges are overcome with automated text generation.
Based on the already existing product data and the attributes, product descriptions can basically be produced in real time. You can imagine it like this: Once a text robot has been configured, not only all existing articles are text-ed in one fell swoop, but in the future also all products that are newly added to the range. The same applies to recurring content such as news, reports or analyses.
A text robot does not know the time factor, never takes a vacation and is never sick. If required, it generates 500,000 SEO-relevant and unique texts for your target group in just one hour. And in the quality and characteristics that you specify.
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