Why have – and how to animate – the blog of an online store
Your online store’s blog is an important tool in your digital marketing strategy. After all, your blog is a good means to boost brand awareness, show your target audience your authority in your niche, and market-specific products and services.
But there are good blogs and less-than-stellar blogs. If you animate the blog of an online store, odds are your blog posts will be much more interesting and successful. Today, let's break down why you should animate a store blog and how to do so.
Why animate your store’s blog?
Every online business needs a blog, as it’s one of the must-have features of any modern ecommerce site. But why would you bother animating some of its elements or posts in the first place? Truth be told, there are two big benefits to animating your store’s blog.
Better engagement
First, animating your store’s blog could result in much better customer engagement. Animated videos and moving pictures draw the human eye more than still pictures or, even worse, big blocks of plain text. If you add some interesting animation to a long blog post, your readers will be more likely to finish the blog post in its entirety and walk away with more information.
Be sure to keep track of customer engagement when they visit your site and blog, such as click-throughs and conversion rates. Look for dashboard templates that provide easy-to-follow data visualization graphics and tools so you can easily monitor and check if your KPIs are being met.
Easier to impart complex ideas
You can use animation to convey complex ideas to your audience. For instance, if you have a very technical store blog for a B2B industry or customer base, and the blog topic is about a complicated machine or process, an animated GIF (graphical image format) showing the same info could complement your step-by-step breakdown of the same topic.
In this way, animating your store’s blog directly helps you maximize its value to your audience and shows your industry authority or knowledge more succinctly.
How to animate your ecommerce store’s blog
Here are a few different ways to successfully animate your online store blog.
Add GIFs to posts
As touched on above, you can add GIFs to your blog. These don’t necessarily have to be informative or educational, however. If you have a product review blog, a discussion blog, or some other post, adding some humorous or entertaining GIFs throughout the text will do wonders to break up those text blocks and make the entire post that much more navigable and fun to read.
Indeed, adding GIFs is a stellar way to make the content you post on your store blog more interesting right from the get-go. They’re also a good way to add voice or character to your blog posts – a particularly salient benefit if the topics you need to write about are somewhat dry by nature.
Include animated headers
Alternatively, you can include animated headers at the top of blog post pages. Again, this starts each blog post right, introducing a novel and interesting visual element for an ecommerce site reader. Animated headers can further be used to:
- Quickly categorize different blog post types
- Showcase some basic information about the post
- Draw a reader’s eye to a specific element or part of the page
- Something else entirely
Luckily, tools like PrestaShop make creating animated headers and other blog post elements quick and simple. This online website development tool can help you bootstrap a new ecommerce brand website from start to finish, making it easier than ever to maximize your digital marketing.
Make animated videos summarizing posts
However, you can also take animating the blog of your online store to the next level by creating fully animated videos summarizing blog posts.
For example, if you have a blog post talking about a detailed topic in your industry, you can make an animated video summarizing all the same information and simply put it at the top of the page. Embed a YouTube link for that animation so that site visitors who want to watch something rather than read something will easily be able to access that information. Videos are important accessibility tools, too.
Giving your readers more ways to access the same information on your site is always a good thing. After all, some people may simply not like to read, or they might be more visual learners instead of textual learners. In any case, animating entire blog posts – especially the most popular posts on your site – is a great way to boost traffic and ensure that vital information gets transmitted to your audience in the most efficient way possible.
Wrap up
Ultimately, animating your store’s blog could be one of the best ways to maximize its value. Follow the tips above, and every blog post your brand puts out will be more engaging, interesting, and effective for your target audience.
