Why You Need A Content Engine and How To Build One

Brands want to be able to sell their products and sell them well.  After months of research, marketing and planning one of the final steps to achieving sales success is relying on retail sales associates to put the product in the hands of the customers that need it.  To ensure this happens brands invest in their content engine on their digital retail sales enablement platform.

A good content engine (videos that inform sales associates about products carried in their store) can help increase the knowledge of associates and in turn drive sell-through.  A poor or non-existent content engine can leave sales staff feeling uninterested, and uninformed on products, in turn  leading to lower sell-through and a poor customer experience.

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Content Planning

In order to have a good content engine that educates sales associates on upcoming products it’s important that brands properly plan their content calendar to align with product releases. Strategic content planning can help increase the likelihood of a brand achieving their commercial objectives and sell-through goals by ensuring their frontline sales associates have the product knowledge they need to drive sales and offer a stellar customer experience.  

Launching new content days or weeks before the release of a product can help ensure sales staff are adequately educated on the product and ultimately assists them in having informative conversations with customers, driving sales and strengthening the customer experience. To deliver on this, brands will have to factor in and plan out all their content script writing, video recording, editing and possible re-shoots, before the content needs to reach their sellers.

In order to execute a good content plan brands should first map out their budget and timeframe for completing the content followed by brainstorming ideas and deciding on the finer details such as when and what time to post the content.  Most importantly, brands should also assign responsibilities so that each person or party knows what they are responsible for delivering. 

A failure to plan content well can result in the quality of the content being subpar and, in some cases, content being pushed out after the product has been released.  Oftentimes the initial wave of customers who were highly interested in  a new product have come and gone and potential sales have fallen through due to customers feeling that the sales associate displayed a lack of knowledge on the features and benefits of the product.

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Script Writing 

One of the most important stages in producing a good content engine is the script writing phase.  This is also one of the stages that brands often get most wrong.  The critical mistake that brands make when writing scripts for videos aimed at sales associates is writing and producing content that typically would be better aimed at consumers.

In order for brands to create content that fully resonates with sales associates they should seek to speak directly to them, rather than speaking to them as if they’re customers.  Customer’s want to learn about a product’s features and benefits, sales staff want to know what makes these features and benefits good and why they’re important so they can relay this information on to customers.

To create a good script brands should list the features and benefits of their product alongside why these features are important.  By having this list to hand it ensures that when writing a script brands mention the “why” as well as the features.  To create the most impactful script brands should start with why and explain the feature that solves this problem.  Customers come into retail stores with problems and expect solutions.

A poor script can leave sales staff uninterested in the product they’re learning about and sales associates are likely to pass this level of uniterest onto consumers.  Brands want sales associates to act as an army of brand advocates for them, however if the content they’re watching leaves them bored they’re more likely to become advocates for competing brands whose content resonates with them.

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Video Editing and Feedback

After writing the script comes the video recording and editing stage.  This is the most time consuming portion of the process.  Sales associates are used to consuming well produced, high quality content and brands face their own challenges recording and editing content to meet the expectations of sales associates.

In order to see if the content they’ve recorded and edited resonates with sales staff, brands need to find a way to test their content and gather feedback on it. A content engine is more likely to garner good results if it is fine tuned via feedback from those viewing the content.  A digital retail sales enablement platform such as Myagi allows for sales associates to leave feedback on the content they’ve watched in written form as well as via a rating system.

Although each piece of video content will be different from product to product and brand to brand, good video content should tell a story and the framing and editing of the video should assist in the story telling.  To achieve this video editors may often refer back to a storyboard (that should have been created during the scripting process) in order to make sure they are sticking to the agreed storyline.

Once feedback has been acquired, brands can then take these insights onboard and strive to implement it in future content they create. Sales associates need good training as this increases the likelihood of them being able to sell more and a platform that encourages and features the functionality to receive feedback can ultimately help brands drive higher sell-through of their products.

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Announcing New Content

Once content has been produced and uploaded to a sales enablement platform it needs to reach the sales associates. Although some associates are likely to stumble across the new content, take their own initiative and complete it, a better solution would be notifying sales staff.

Having a system or means to announce the new content to sales associates increases the engagement which ultimately means a higher number of staff on the front lines with knowledge of the product which in turn is likely to lead to higher sales. 

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Conclusion

Building a quality content engine can be a time consuming process: devising the content plan; aligning with key stakeholders; scripting, recording and editing the content; seeking feedback on the video and announcing it to sales associates either internally or on the brand’s digital retail sales enablement platform.  A failure to execute one or all of these steps well can lead to sub-quality content, demotivated sales staff and potentially low sell through.

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Myagi can help brands produce a quality content engine as our platform enables brands to seek feedback on their content.  Additionally, brands are able to make announcements, notifying sales staff from across the region of new content.  The Myagi Services team offers a range of solutions that can help brands with video editing, writing scripts and creating lessons.

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To find out more about how Myagi or Myagi Services can help build your content engine, get in touch or click the green circle to chat with us.

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