The Casas Bahia blog is one of the inbound marketing tools used by the Casas Bahia retail chain. It is primarily employed to acquire email marketing subscribers for e-commerce and to direct readers to product category pages on the company's online store.
• Also access and read the article: “ How to set up an e-commerce business ” (starting with an e-commerce blog)
Namely, the Casas Bahia chain is a Brazilian brand managed by Via Varejo. Under its banner, electronic products, home appliances and housewares have been marketed for over 60 years. In the Alexa ranking, the company's virtual store occupies the 3.078th global and 82nd national positions (data from February/2019).
Shopping Guide: the Casas Bahia blog
The Casas Bahia blog is called " Shopping Guide ". My analysis addresses the elements of this media as they were presented on February 1, 2019. Check it out:
• Design:
First, I submitted the URL of the Shopping Guide to the online application “Responsive Design Checker”, where I discovered that the blog is responsive. That is, it adapts to the large screens of desktop computers and also to the small screens of cell phones and smartphones.
On desktops, the blog displays the “Buying Guide” and “Casas Bahia” logos at the top, followed by a search field. Just below, there is a menu with the options “Furniture”, “Games”, “Mobile and Telephony”, “Computers”, “Electronics”, “Infographics” and “All Categories”.
On the smaller mobile screens, the search field and the menu (with different options from the desktop mentioned in the previous paragraph) are hidden behind a button positioned in the upper right corner.
Next, there is a display showing slides with photos and calls to action for four articles. Each article remains on the screen for a few seconds before being replaced by the next. Below the fold of the page, calls to action for posts are inserted, separated by departments such as "Home Appliances," "Tools," "Games," etc., in color-coded modules.
Finally, there is a field for subscription to the Newsletter, institutional information about the Casas Bahia network and buttons for social media. It is a blog with a good design.
• Contents:
In general, the content of the Casas Bahia blog consists of product tips, events and commemorative dates. It is presented in text format merged with photos. There are also videos and infographics, but less frequently.
Each text has, on average, 600 to 1.000 words. Most of the time, the focus keyword does not appear in the title, but only in the middle of the texts with links to the virtual store. Some photographs have captions, some do not. Finally, there is a recommendation system for reading other posts.
• Links:
The links provided in the Casas Bahia blog's text content lead readers to product category pages on the company's online store. Personally, I don't like this approach. I prefer that the reader be directed to a specific product page .
When the reader is taken to a category page, a page with several options opens before him/her. Therefore, he/she will have to evaluate product by product before choosing one.
But when the reader is sent to a specific product page, it is enough for him/her to read the descriptions and press the “Buy” button. That is, that way he/she will be much closer to making a purchase. Also, linking to the specific page reinforces the SEO of the landing page.
• Authors:
The blog posts in Guia de Compras are signed by real people and not by the institution Casas Bahia. This is great because it gives the blog more personality. However, the authors do not have biographies. So, it is unknown if they are experts or mere content paraphrasers. In my opinion, inserting biographies can increase media credibility.
• Frequency:
The articles in this blog are not dated. Therefore, it was not possible to establish its posting frequency. In my opinion, dating posts allows readers to recognize the perishability of information.
In other words, dated posts avoid the frustration of reading content that may be outdated and only realizing it when you are already very advanced in your reading. So I recommend dating.
• Banners:
I didn't see any banners from Casas Bahia or from partner sites during my analysis of the Guia de Compras blog.
• Mobile:
As stated earlier, the Casas Bahia blog is responsive, so it adapts well to tablet, smartphone and cell phone screens. I tested it on “Page Speed Insights” (PSI), which reported that it has a score of 68 (considered medium speed) for Desktop and 37 (considered slow speed) for mobile.
In other words, this blog needs to offer faster access to readers. To optimize it, PSI recommends, for example, activating text compression (which saves 2,4 seconds); defer unused CSS (1,5sec savings), Efficient image encoding (1,05sec).
• Organizational culture:
The Casas Bahia logo and shades of blue (characteristic of the brand) present on the blog ensure that this medium aligns with the company's organizational culture . In other words, there is a unification, which generates more credibility in the eyes of the readers.
• Search Google:
The keyword “Blog Casas Bahia” is searched between 10 and 100 times monthly on Google.
• Audience content:
The Casas Bahia blog has a comment module integrated into Facebook. There are articles that have a lot of comments from the audience, however, there are others that do not have any participation.
Readers' opinions, also called audience content, can help sell more products and, at the same time, serve as a basis for you to discover which products are bad or not appreciated by your audience.
• Social networks and subscriptions:
At the end of each blog-post there are buttons for the reader to like or share the content on the main social networks available in Brazil. At the bottom of the blog, buttons are available that lead Internet users to Casas Bahia's fanpages on Facebook, Twitter, G+ and YouTube.
Conclusion about the Casas Bahia blog
The Casas Bahia blog is slow and the links in the posts send readers to category pages and not to the product pages of the online store. However, it has a good design and quality content with texts, photos and videos.
So, despite needing some improvements, this blog fulfills its role, which is to get subscribers and lead internet users to the Casas Bahia virtual store. It is not perfect (no blog is), but the important thing is that it is fully operational and is a useful tool for this network of Brazilian stores.
