This week Envision Horizons CEO, Laura Meyer, interviewed Endia Turney from Soona. In the interview, she shared her expert advice on making your creative assets stand out from competitors on Amazon. Read more for best practices on E-Commerce photo/video and watch the interview below!
Amazon Creative Assets and the Buying Experience
Photo and video on Amazon are an essential part of the shopping experience on the platform. There are millions of products, and standing out from the crowd with an attractive listing encourages shoppers to click through to your product page. Additionally, first impressions matter! When your listing appears in the search results and allows you to positively influence the customer’s opinion. An optimized product title and a high-quality image can help you along the way. Lastly, creative assets can also benefit sellers post-purchase. Providing accurate and detailed product photos will provide customers with more information. Transparency is essential, and when customers know exactly what they’re ordering, your return rate and negative reviews will decrease.
Making Your Main Image More Unique
On Amazon main images always have a white background, and reducing this white space is an Amazon best practice. Reducing white space makes your product image look bigger and visually enticing. As a result, it allows your product to get more attention in search results. For some products, you can further that up-close-and-personal quality by turning your standard photo into a 3D render. Endia Turney from Soona explains that 3D rendering is a great way to take your image a level up. She explains, “stock imagery is not going to work anymore. Customers want to see your product in a very true form. Everyone is aware of stock imagery so if your photo looks stock-like or edited, customers will notice and it can influence their buying decisions. Authenticity is key, customers want to know exactly what they can expect from your product.”
Additionally, main images with white backgrounds shouldn’t be boring! You can play around with shadows and angles in your images to make your product stand out. Trying out hard shadows, using shadows to create a “floating” effect, including sun shadows, or liquid shadows, are all ways to make your imagery more interesting. Endia explains that having fun with your product photography will translate into your customers having a more fun buying experience.
Storytelling with Creative Assets
Only your main image needs to be on a pure white background. The rest of your listing images can tell the story of your product. Endia explains that “Now that everything is online, brands have to get away from using face to face interaction to sell. We have to tell the product’s story through our product shots and titles/descriptions. We rely on storefronts to tell our entire story because we aren’t there to fill in the gaps for customers.”
When it comes to types of content, different features on Amazon can be used for different purposes. Spotlight content can be used to promote products from ingredients used, to what’s inside the box. A+ content is where brands can show a bit more of their personality through colors and backgrounds, lifestyle images to show the product in action, and to showcase other related products in the family. Lifestyle images are a great way to story-tell and paint a picture for the customer of how they might incorporate your product into their life.
Leveraging the Power of Video
Endia explains that “There is so much you can do with video and movement in general. From video clips, GIFs, 360 spins, etc there are a lot of great ways to showcase your product. Video can be used to tell your story so much deeper. Though video content creation might seem daunting at first, it is a killer asset worth investing in.” Product videos are one of the ways we can go deeper and bring the product to life for customers through a 2D screen. An ideal video should be concise while highlighting product features, demonstrating product usage, speaking to the customers’ needs, and distinguishing your product from competitors. Soona can create fun and colorful videos that tell the story of your product in multiple ways such as features highlight, product-in-use, testimonials, stop-motion displays, unboxing, 360 spin, how-to, etc.
Common Mistakes with Creative
Not investing in creative assets on Amazon is a common mistake that prevents brands from reaching their full potential. Treat Amazon creative as you would any brand experience. Just like you have to tweak your content for different social media channels, you also have to tweak your content by e-commerce channels. Spend the time to think through the user experience on Amazon for your consumers and make sure there aren’t gaps in information. Additionally, always make sure to look at your listings on both mobile and desktop.
Far too often there are great brands that spend millions on their website and branding but have horrible creative assets on Amazon. In episode three of our series, Common Mistakes, we discuss why brands should be investing in creative assets for Amazon. Read our post recapping our CEO’s thoughts on the top 5 areas where brands fail with Creative on Amazon.
Using an Agency to Build Creative Assets
Great creative assets on Amazon are a very worthy investment. Soona provides amazing quality, business-boosting creative content all for a great price. Soona shoots in Denver, Minneapolis, and Austin. Clients have the option of attending their scheduled shoot in person or shipping their products to the studio and joining the real-time virtual shoot from anywhere. After the shoot, clients can shop their content and only buy what they like. After selecting their content, clients receive edited assets in just 24 hours. Visit Soona’s website to read more about how it works.
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