How Shoe Carnival Has Simplified its Content Marketing

Retailers know that time and resources aren’t infinite in this shifting digital world, especially in marketing departments. Shoe Carnival, a “brand focused” footwear retailer that sells the likes of Nike, Adidas and Anne Klein, uses content like product images, lookbooks and video to give consumers a better understanding of its products.

“Consumers historically like to see, touch and understand the fabrics," explains Kent Zimmerman, Shoe Carnival’s vice president of e-commerce. "That’s really difficult to do online. Anything that we can do to help give the consumer a better understanding of the things that they can’t see, touch and hold in their hand, I think the more likely we are to convert that customer.”

Knowing that and then executing on that strategy are not one in the same, however. Shoe Carnival had trouble getting all of its content on its website.

“Previously, we might have had to cut corners in terms of building out something that was richer in content than we would have liked,” says Zimmerman. "We just didn’t have time to do it.”

A solution was needed. Shoe Carnival first shifted its digital properties to a responsive redesign template, and partnered with digital content solutions provider Amplience to manage its rich media assets and content creation workflows. Amplience's solution supports every stage in Shoe Carnival's studio-to-site process, from asset ingestion and enrichment through to delivery. Shoe Carnival is now able to produce new content more efficiently, test and optimize the way images are displayed, and eliminate human error.

For example, instead of having to create three different pieces of content for desktop, mobile and tablet users, Shoe Carnival designers can now create one asset to be distributed for optimized viewing in every channel. Zimmerman believes this gives Shoe Carnival a competitive advantage.

“By streamlining the digital content creation process, it’s really allowed us to start using that time to build a better user experience and focus on how consumers are interacting with those digital assets,” says Zimmerman. “Now, since we're not tripling our workload with the help of responsive redesign, we can take the time to say, ‘How do we want to build in a richer experience for the consumer?’”

In the future, Shoe Carnival hopes to produce even more digital marketing assets.

“The whole marketing landscape is changing,” notes Zimmerman. “A lot of things are moving from print to digital.”

More dynamic media, like digital lookbooks and digital versions of store circulars, will help drive Shoe Carnival customers through the buying funnel faster and, ultimately, increase conversions.

“There’s more visibility and control at the content creation standpoint of getting the content to the site," Zimmerman says. "It gives us a little bit more control over the type of content we can put out there to the consumer, and the level of interaction the consumer has with it.”