• by Holly Pavlika , Columnist, June 26, 2017

We read blogs because they entertain us or give us information that we find valuable, and trust the content because it comes from people we can relate to. In fact, based on a recent survey that we conducted nearly 60%of U.S. consumers take social and blog content into consideration while shopping. It’s no wonder that influential bloggers are turning more and more to e-commerce solutions as a way to monetize their media property. And there is no doubt that blogs, along with other forms of digital and social media, have had a definitive impact on shopping. 

According to the e-tailing group, 60%of shoppers spend 16+ minutes comparison-shopping. Consumers, when in comparison-shopping mode, clearly consume a lot of content in order to make considered purchase decisions. So what if blogs, one of those sources, had the capability of closing the path to purchase by allowing consumers to shop one click away through tiny tags on the blogger’s images? 

“Commerce always seeks the path of least resistance to the consumer, and today that path is the visual content that so many of us scroll through every day on social media, blogs and brand’s own sites,” said Apu Gupta, CEO of Curalate. “That content increasingly features products and, as Mary Meeker points out in her latest ‘Internet Trends’ report, we believe that consumers will want to shop what they see and that content will become the store.”

We are hoping just that — influencer blog content will become the store. Employing Curalate technology, consumers simply click on product images within blog posts to make direct purchases, driving higher levels of engagement and sales for brands. “Brands using Curalate to power commerce overall have increased traffic to their site as much as 150%, with a 79%increase in time spent on site, and up to a 45%increase in revenue per visit,” said Gupta. 

He added, “For content to be truly shoppable, it needs to be aware of the products that it contains. Content needs to be accompanied by the product meta-data, which allows consumers to purchase the individual products featured in the image or video. That’s where Curalate comes in.”

Benchmarking the time spent with content over the past few years, we have seen the average influencer’s blog post gets over two minutes regardless of category, be it food, fashion, consumer electronics or health related content. That is a considerable amount of attention reflecting very valuable engagement. By taking the visual content, such as the lifestyle imagery created by influencers and commerce-enabling them, the result will be an additional avenue to increasing revenue and traffic. Brands will also be able to unlock valuable consumer intent data around the types of experiences most likely to lead to sales for everyday consumer packaged goods (CPG) products. Brands such as Post Cereals have already begun to use this new consumer experience to drive sales at specific retailers.

“We’re making it easy to go from inspiration to transaction,” said Gupta. “With Curalate, a consumer simply taps on a picture to see all the products within it, making discovering new products intuitive and fun.”