When Harry Gordon Selfridge opened the first Selfridges department store in the early 1900s on Oxford Street, he considered his customers’ experience paramount. Of course, the term ‘customer experience’, or ‘CX’, didn’t exist then. But his department store revolutionised shopping, ‘delighting’ customers with decadent window displays and open aisles. Fast forward a century, and online and app shopping has had a similarly seismic impact on how we shop. And still, the idea of customer experience, or working to Selfridge’s ideal that the ‘customer is always right’, prevails. Only a retailer’s website is now as important as its store. And content is increasingly how customers browse its aisles – product and category pages, blogs, informational articles, email newsletters, etc.

But what type of content will delight your customers? Paid-for branded or organic search content?

Branded content explained

Content you pay a publisher to create and promote. For example, in the US the Atlantic and the New York Times have their own branded content production studios.

If you brief a publisher to create branded content, not only do they create it – they publish it to their own website, flagged as paid-for content, in the same house style as their own news and features.

Search content explained

Content designed to respond to the queries people type, or speak, into Google. Often, this is created by the brand itself or by an agency. Search content breaks into two main groups:

  • Informational: Content not about the brand but something related to it. Think editorial articles that answer relevant questions. The aim is to inform, not sell.
  • Commercial: Content about the brand and its products. Think product pages and category pages designed to showcase benefits. The aim is to drive conversions.

Push vs. pull content

Another way to look at it is ‘push’ and ‘pull’. These terms describe how the content reaches the reader.

  • Search content is ‘pull’ content: The user opens it from Google after searching for a relevant topic. A department store may publish a piece on fashion trends for A/W 24, and someone searching Google for that term may find the article and open it.
  • Branded content is more often push: Take the example of content published by the content studio of a media organisation. This is published on a mainstream news site. The reader hasn’t asked for your content, but it’s been ‘pushed’ to where they’re at.

Paid vs. organic

Another way of looking at it is paid or organic. Organic content is published without any budget to promote it. Users find it ‘organically’ through search engines, and the quality of the content – and how well optimised it is for SEO – determines how easy it is to find.

Paid content is content you pay to promote on another creator’s platform or channel. There are many different types of paid marketing, from pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google to branded content we’re talking about in this article.

paid social

Matching content to someone interested in buying a big-screen TV

Though it didn’t exist in the early days of Selfridges, consumer tech is a popular category across major department stores. Let’s look at the big-ticket item of OLED TVs. How do we know what content to serve to that customer? It depends what stage they’re at in the purchasing journey:

  • Awareness: Introduce product or brand to potential customers.  
  • Consideration: Show how your brand/product can address their pain point.
  • Conversion: Demonstrate how your brand is the best, most trusted option.
  • Loyalty: Build loyalty post-purchase with positive and useful interactions.

Search content for consideration and conversion

Search content is ideal for customers in the consideration mode. They’ll be looking for in-depth informational content to outline their options and answer key questions.

The content that ranks best will be easy to understand and written by experts. Think of it like a master salesperson on the Selfridges shop floor, on hand to help.

Branded content for awareness and loyalty

Branded content is engaging and shareable. For example, something not product-related that taps into lifestyle and cultural events relevant to your customers.

The recent European football championships in Germany was an ideal way to talk engagingly about TVs to a post-sales audience.

Combine brand and search content for a holistic strategy

The best content strategies are holistic. They look at the challenge overall rather than working in silos and getting bogged down in detail. The meaning, or at least sentiment, of it goes way back. Harry Selfridge choosing to combine stunning window displays with open store environments was a holistic strategy.

It’s all about knowing what you want to achieve. Selfridge wanted to wow and inspire customers without being so exclusive he scared them away.

Create content that delights customers

Today, 73% of customers ‘just want to be delighted’ by companies, according Forrester. Yet delighting them is getting harder. Just one in four (26%) customers describes their digital experience with a brand they have an existing relationship with as “excellent”, according to Adobe’s Digital Trends 2024 report.

So, how do we delight through content? Serving the right content to the right person at the right time. The Adobe 2023 Digital Trends Retail report found that 92% of retail professionals considered the need to deliver consistent personalised content to more channels a priority.

In other words, developing the right types of content to share with customers at different stages in their journey. That means a combination of branded and search focused content.

One thing that hasn’t changed since Harry Gordon Selfridge first opened his doors in the early 1900s is the customers. People, then and now, preoccupied and busy with life, just want to find the right product at the right price. As marketers it’s our job to create content that helps them find that sweet spot.