Q: What's your ecomm war story?

[Artas Bartas]

Hi everyone,

I am doing the research on content marketing in the ecommerce industry and wondered if anybody here would be willing to share their personal stories and anecdotes with me. 

I'm not looking for a canned list of "successful" campaigns, but instead want to understand what larger themes, business problems and technical limitations the editorial teams at ecomm organizations grapple with. 

Here just a couple of questions that I am trying to answer:

• what problems do you solve for when you design a content strategy for the ecomm? 
• what technical constraints do you have to address in your content strategy and, later, when building content models?
• what are some best practices for developing editorial tone? brand lookbooks? UGC?
• do you know any case studies focusing on content marketing in the ecomm field?
• can you recommend examples of content models developed for merchandise? longform storytelling? promotional campaigns?
• what are some typical obstacles that prevent editorial teams from adopting the best practices in working with content marketing?

I would appreciate any help from the community. Whether it is a personal anecdote, relevant links, an example of a deliverable or just a poignant tweet. 

I also promise to keep the names of individuals and brands involved out of any deliverables that will come out from this research if you are concerned about the confidentiality.

Stay well,

Artas Bartas

[James_Mathewson]

My new book "Outside-In Marketing: Using Big Data to Guide Your Content Marketing," which I wrote with Mike Moran, has a lot of these stories in it. Every chapter starts with a light-hearted retelling of a high-profile ecomm failure. And we weave in success stories to illustrate the main points in the book. We conclude every chapter with an interview of a prominent thought leader, who tells their story to put their perspective in context. For example, Chapter 5, on content strategyfeatures an interview with Kristina Halvorson. Chapter 6, on UX and testing, features an interview with Jered Spool. His story is my favorite thing in the book.

James Mathewson