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Visual Commerce: What Is It and Why Do You Need It?

August 21, 2020

Visual commerce featured

There is a continuous evolution in online business. Shoppers from every corner of the world are growing, which appears as though new chances to expand your business. Visual commerce is the most significant jump in the e-commerce industry. Through it, brands can achieve a new level in the ecommerce world.

In the present times, everything looks on with favor of the marketers. Users get exciting shopping experiences with visual commerce, which are backed up by technical innovations.

Visual impacts

What is Visual Commerce?

The e-commerce industry is regularly going through a lot of transformation that helps businesses to improve selling their products and services online. One such powerful element in this transformation is visual commerce.

In simple words, visual commerce alludes to enrich and improve user experience by providing captivating, strong, and alluring visual content with shoppable tags. This allows the users to view and explore visual content and buy the products tagged in these posts in real-time.

The essential of visual commerce is in creating and repurposing visual assets, like appealing multi-angle product images, engaging video galleries, trustworthy user-generated content, etc., which provide strong online present for a brand, enhance shopability, and spur purchase and desire to discover more on an online store. 

Visual shopping

Furthermore, visual commerce utilizes user-generated content supporting businesses to urge sales, probable conversions, and magnify user-engagement. It is all about turning the visual content into shoppable posts and displaying them on websites, online stores, social media, etc. Its probable impact will entice shoppers to buy the products right away.

Emerged as a unique solution from the social commerce landscape, visual commerce is driven by the social commerce that is visual oriented. The social commerce definition explains using social media and its content for the commerce activities and visual commerce is about using just the visual content rather than all social content and attributes.

Why Is Visual Commerce Important For Online Business?

1. Prompt User Engagement

Visually rich content is more engaging and compelling to the users. Consequently, visual commerce binds up users with impressive and striking visual content.

Social media cannot run without user-generated content (UGC) or brand-generated content as both are lively for it. Therefore if you integrate them into visual commerce on your website, the users will easily get engaged and attracted to it.

The visitors will get more powerful and innovative content along with new content now and then. This will be a great opportunity for your visual marketing strategy to generate more engagement and drive returns.

visual engagement on facebook

2. Apply with Social Proof

Now everyone's question is, what is social proof? It is evidence of something which you can acquire from social media with a good objective to approach it for support.

Social proof can be created when the users utilize your account handles or branded hashtags with their social media posts.

Social proof is generated by users already using your product and liking them enough to go ahead about posting it. This evidence can create wonders by turning visitors to potential customers.

You can curate the valuable user-generated visual posts and convert them into visual commerce to build robust social proof for the brand and its products.

3. Build Trust and Strengthen Confidence for Your Brand

In recent years, online businesses face a lot of competition. Thus your brand growth needs to gain users' trust. It is a common tactic that a user trusts your brand and products then they will refer it to other people.

Trust is the most crucial and primary step in the journey to reach conversions for the users. The validation of this statement is that over 90% of the consumers trust user-generated content to make their online purchase decisions.

Having authentic and trustworthy user-generated content in your visual commerce strategy will help you build crucial trust by showcasing credibility, reliability, past customer experiences, and a realistic picture of the brand/products to new consumers.

As we discussed earlier about the relevance of social commerce and visual commerce, so shoppable UGC is a mixture of both. This is what visual commerce and user-generated content do. Visual commerce helps raise user trust and confide them into your brand by exhibiting social proof. 

4. Improve Conversion Rates

Study shows that visual commerce can help a business significantly increase conversion rates by providing shoppers with trustable contents and personalized experiences. Every business acknowledges the fact that user-generated content is more trusted among consumers. This is because they know the fellow clients will not lie about the product for any reason.

Therefore, by displaying user-generated content, online businesses can gain the trust from their consumers and attract them to try their products. Custom visual content reduces buyers’uncertainty in decision making and fastens the process of purchasing.

People gain a sense of judging power on different backgrounds and in real-life situations when they recognize so many other users using your product. They can confide in the product more, and they don't spare a moment in feeling free to purchase the product.

5. Enhance Brand-user Relationship

Maintaining good relations with your users is of utmost importance for any of the businesses. If you wish to gain more loyal customers, it is essential to balance a good brand and user relationship.

Acquiring more loyal consumers means that they will think twice before switching from your brand to another brand. A solid UGC visual commerce is a prominent way to maintain a sound brand and user relationship.

As you can encourage your users to share more and more engaging visual content and their experience on social media using hashtags and mentions. The most active or regular users can become the brand ambassadors for the visual commerce strategy, where brands can also reward them with offers, vouchers, and gifts.

6. Delightful Shopping Experience

Visual effect on shop

Nowadays, even shopping has become digital, yet the shopping experience is a key attribute for the consumers that affect their buying behavior. So, it is crucial to have a delightful and satisfying shopping experience.

The visual commerce strategy provides you with that delightful shopping experience. It brings the point of inspiration closer to the point of the sale, allowing a quicker, shorter, and simpler shopping journey for the users.

Having all the information about the product in one place, along with a buying option through visual commerce that gives a chance of interest to conversion in a few moments, attracts consumers' attention.

Conclusion

Reach to the benefits of visual commerce with the development of innovation, advancement, and convenient social media aggregation tools. Deliver a prevalent consumer experience for your online business by acquiring the advantages of visual commerce.

The result of visual commerce will be much more than the least investment you will have to make for enhancing your business reach, user engagement, conversions, and sales.

In this way, it is clear that visual commerce has a tremendous effect on online business. Thus it is now up to you to decide how to utilize visuals in your business.

Alice Herman

BY

Alice Herman, an experienced digital marketer and content writer who has published over 100 articles around marketing & eCommerce industry. I am currently exploring emerging topics such as visual commerce, post-lockdown marketing, and shoppable content.

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