The Secret Sauce for Your Online Store: Automated Product Descriptions

Automated Product Descriptions
A Wealth of Advantages
Executing the Recipe: Ingredients
Executing the Recipe: Instructions

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Online store owners, you’ve got stashes of aspirin for the headache: you need fresh content for your website. 

Again. 

Our world is a buzzingly dynamic place and so, too, is your business - riding the waves (maybe sometimes it feels like the tsunamis?!)  along with it. 

Maybe you’re launching a new set of products. Maybe your brand voice has changed. Maybe the market trends have shifted and you want to stay current. Maybe it’s simply a new season. 

No matter the reason, you’re going to need a whole lot of meaningful content - likely a mountain of product descriptions and maybe more. 

And you’re going to need it fast (or maybe even yesterday). 

What if I told you there’s a little known solution to your content conundrum? A Secret Sauce for your online store?

Read on to learn the secret.

The Content Conundrum

As the first impression salesperson, your product descriptions wear many hats and are essential for your business. They advise, inform, and - if written with that special touch - convince customers to buy. 

But - before they even get in front of a customer, they need that Las Vegas flashing cowboy sign factor.

Just like on the Vegas strip, there are a lot of different businesses vying for potential customers’ attention. Your content needs to get your website seen, which means compelling uniqueness *and* that pinch of special SEO. 

There are a few ways to tackle the content creation monster in general. You can take the stock texts from your manufacturers - easy peasy.

But these texts are often published on multiple store websites - which means they won’t be unique, and chances are they won’t vibe with your brand voice, either.

You can create content the good old fashioned way - manually.

If you want your content and product descriptions done right, this means budgeting out time (and lots of it!) and money (and lots of it!).

You'll need those resources for writing, doing text briefings for your entire product portfolio, hiring a content team, editing and reviewing their work…then -

…Hello. Hello?! 

Oh, hey. Were you nodding off? Understandable.  

I’m about to share a third option with you - and you won’t need a double shot espresso to stay awake for this one.

Ready for your secret sauce solution? Grandma’s tried and true recipe?

Automated Product Descriptions

That’s right, you can leverage the wonderful world of automation and create your product descriptions automatically. 

Let’s zoom out a bit here. We’re talking about a technology that can go by many monikers - text robot, automatic text generation, text creation software...

At the end of the day it all falls under the momma umbrella of natural language generation. 

Natural language generation is the practice of using artificial intelligence to generate language. Smart algorithms base “learnings” on existing text material.

They then use these learnings to create content that is consistent with what they have trained with.

It has its place in a variety of arenas - not just in eCommerce, but also in news, sports and weather reporting.

All industries that work with structured data are already benefiting from it, and now that you’re “in the know”, you can too!

A Wealth of Advantages

Automating your product descriptions packs a hefty punch when it comes to benefits.

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Time and Money Savings

First, you’ll be amazed at the resources you save - up to 80% of the time needed for manual content creation! 

And you know what time savings means - huge money savings, too.

Just how would this be in the cards for you?

You’ll need a smaller content creation team, since only the preliminary textual work needs to be written manually. The vast majority of your descriptions will be done by computer.

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Search Engine Superiority

Remember that Vegas strip flashing cowboy sign you need? With automated product descriptions, we’ve got you covered - in more ways than one. 

The use of sentence variants and synonyms in the “training” text material means a wide variety of nuanced combinations and formulations is possible.

This ensures texts are unique and variant-rich, not just a repetition of another business’s website. 

The result? You’ll be able to avoid duplicating content (the enemy of every SEO ranking). 

What’s more, by fine-tuning the training text material, you’ll be able to target exactly the keywords you want, and SEO-boost your product pages.

Streamlined Time to Market

The automated content creation model means you have increased flexibility and agility and can quickly get started with new products or refreshed descriptions.

Since the groundwork is already done, it’s just a matter of renewing your product data, linking it to existing texts, and voila!

Your new product descriptions at the push of a button - and a fraction of the time.

Operating on a global scale, or thinking about expanding your reach? With automated product descriptions, it’s a breeze! Generate content in multiple languages right away, avoiding lengthy (and costly!) manual translation. 

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Executing the Recipe

Just like with any great sauce, recipes are a great place to start. For your automated product descriptions you’ll need a list of ingredients and a set of instructions.  

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Ingredients

To take advantage of automation for your product descriptions, you’ll need to gather a certain set of ingredients. In this case, that means a data basis with two main characteristics:

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High-integrity and well-structured data

Any secret sauce must be mixed from quality ingredients to ensure optimal results! 

This means your data needs to be comprehensive and consistent across products and information types. Inconsistencies in your data can lead to inconsistencies in your finished texts.

Let’s take product dimensions as an example. 

The information must always be written the same way. For example, lengths written in one instance as “10 cm” must remain in this format and never be alternatively written as “10 centimeters” or “100 mm.”

The text generation robot is smart - but not a mind-reader!

Sorry, you’ll have to keep seeing your local psychic for that.

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Comprehensive and detailed data

If you’re whipping up a spaghetti sauce, you simply can’t do it without basics like tomatoes. Finishing spices like oregano aren’t as critical but will go a long way towards enriching your flavor. 

When it comes to product data, information like name, type, and brand are your tomatoes. 

Your oregano? More detailed data like size, material, and color.

If you really want to knock it out of the park with a “grandma’s secret ingredient” level sauce, stir in a splash of unique selling points, usage notes, and other application fields. 

Instructions and Process

Throw on your favorite apron; now the magic begins!

Data Analysis

This is an ingredients check - do you have your tomatoes, your oregano, and grandma’s secret ingredient if you want that extra special touch? 

Here you evaluate the structure, completeness, and usability of your data.

If it’s not quite up to snuff, no worries! You can also evaluate how useful it would be to enrich and improve your data quality, depending on what sorts of statements you want in your texts.

Text Foundation Creation

The next step is putting your main ingredients together into an initial batch. Toss in your tomatoes, oil, and first round of spices!

This means creating an original “text template” the software can reference to work its magic.

Often created by a copywriter, this template serves as a foundational scaffold - upon which all your automatically generated content can be built.

Your template should have all the conceptual information the software will need to generate meaningful texts for you. This includes synonyms for key words, options for sentence variants, and a range of adjectives.

In your text framework the copywriter will also specify conditions like proper text structure, grammar rules, and how to link various components of the product data together.

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Software Training

Once your initial batch sauce is in the pot and ready to go, you’ll need to set your stove to the right temperature. 

For your product descriptions sauce, this means “training” the text robot so it learns the right way to include product data into its texts.

During this step the software uses its language generation textbook - the foundational scaffold - to understand the general meaning of words and phrases and how to use them.

After its copywriter-curated lesson, the software will be all grown up and ready to generate its first texts for you!

Quality Check

What’s the best part of toiling away in the kitchen brewing an ultimate secret sauce? The “quality assurance”, of course!

Get out your tasting spoon - it’s sampling time! 

Here you get to check out whether the software-generated content passes “the taste test” -  is there enough garlic? Did the oregano get added at the right time? Do the flavors play well together?

Do your automatically generated product descriptions meet your requirements?

Before you send the text creation robot off and running, it’s a good idea to check all aspects of the generated texts - the assortment of text variants, the use of synonyms, the execution of grammatical conditions, etc.

You can add content and make adjustments iteratively as you need to. 

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Text Generation

Once you’ve got your secret sauce balanced just the way you like it, it’s time to crank the stove down to that low, “simmer into something delicious” setting. Now you get to step away while your stove continues to do the work for you! 

With your preliminary work done, you get to reap the benefits of choosing to automate.

The text generator creates your content for you at the push of a button - toiling away on your behalf while you focus your attention on higher level strategy, button up your sales materials, or even while you sleep! 

Conclusion

Cultivating a thriving eCommerce business in today’s blazing fast world takes a “blood, sweat, and tears” style commitment - and unfortunately, there’s only 24 hours in a day. 

But with automation in your toolbox creating your product descriptions and even other content for you, the burden of that commitment shrinks - and you can focus your limited resources elsewhere.

Enjoy the unmatched advantages of massive time and money savings, unparalleled time to market capabilities, and flashing-sign-style SEO execution.

Do automated product descriptions sound like a recipe you just have to try? We’re here for you!

At Xanevo we’ve got a great text creation cookbook and a knack for quality assurance. Book a free 30-minute discovery call with us today to try out the magic recipe for yourself!