5 Ways to Streamline Back-to-School Season Prep With AI

Although not a festival in itself, the back-to-school season is one of the biggest shopping events of the year, bringing in almost $110 billion in sales annually.

And if you’re working in an industry that’s part of the back-to-school rush, it means your content teams (or maybe even just you) are in a race against the clock to update products before the rush begins.

Overwhelming, right? Well, this is exactly where AI can help. In this post, we’re going to share five ways that you can use AI to help streamline back to school season prep.

Ready? Let’s go!

Why should you consider using AI to prepare for the back-to-school season?

Before you go on a crazy sprint to update all of your product descriptions before the back-to-school rush, let us explain why you should consider using AI.

You likely have large catalogs of products that constantly need to be updated with every season/shopping event, and there’s probably not enough time or manpower to revise all of them before the target deadline.

Instead of manually updating each description, AI can do the job for you—and it’ll do it in bulk, in a matter of seconds, for a fraction of the price.

For reference, if you pay writers and editors approximately $25 dollars an hour to update your product content, you might realistically end up shelling out $625 and 25 hours for updating about 50 products.

AI can do the same job, at a price of $28 per month, and can produce unlimited product descriptions, based on your requirement, writing style, and instructions within mere seconds.

Even if you excuse the cost savings you can get, think about the efficiency and consistency you might benefit from (especially if you consider the N number of events and holiday sales that’ll come right after the back-to-school season, and the monumental task that’ll be to again update and revise them all).

Besides, the AI of today is extremely well polished (e.g., Describely’s AI is specifically trained on product descriptions, so it has more data to pull inspiration from) and also considers real-time trends, demands, and seasons.

Suppose you have the same products you might want to sell for two different shopping events (back-to-school season vs. Christmas holidays), AI can help you there, too, by transforming your descriptions to match the theme of Event A to Event B. (We even put it to the test.)

Here’s Description A (focusing on the back-to-school season) vs. Description B (focusing on Christmas):

AI tools can also help you:

• Stay consistent with your brand guidelines and ensure quality control over your work, regardless of the tight deadlines on hand.
• Reduce returns by always having accurate information (technologies like Describely will also source the product information for you).
• Allow your content teams to get a little breather (they can instead spend their time overseeing the work that generative AI delivers).

On that note, let’s dive in and find a few more cases of use for generative AI, during this back to school season rush.

Where AI comes in and how it can help

1. Use AI to bulk generate and edit product descriptions

The major use case of AI, especially during the back-to-school season, is helping you create product descriptions from scratch or update the existing descriptions on your store.

You can export and import your products directly from your site (Describely integrates with WooCommerce, Shopify, Salsify, etc.), or download your product descriptions from CSV files, or manually fill in the data.

From there on, all you need to do is go to your catalog, select the products you wish you update/create descriptions for, and click on “Bulk Generate,” and the AI will perform the task in mere seconds.

From thereon, you can also track the status of your description (i.e., Draft, Reviewed, or Approved) and the last date it was worked on.

To ensure your product description delivers on user intent and has accurate information, you can add product information through bullet points and can even provide specific instructions and more details about the products to ensure that your AI generated product descriptions are accurate and on-brand.

2. Fill gaps in your data with product enrichment

Sometimes you don’t have enough product data from your supplier, or inspiration takes time to strike. However, chances are that you still want to write accurate product information and provide readers with all the information they could possibly need. We get that.

To save the day, you can rely on AI, which can scour the internet (as well as the manufacturer’s site) to find all this information for you. (We have a feature for this on Describely called “Data Enrichment.”)

Same as before, all you need to do is select the products for which you need to find more information and select “Data Enrichment.”

From hereon, you could specify details about the information you’d like it to fetch and the fields you’d like it to use in its search.

On the flip side of this, if you don’t enrich your data with missing product attributes, it can potentially lead you and your customer to do some guesswork, which could produce inaccurate product details, and hence result in product exchanges, which is not the best-case scenario.

3. Ensure your descriptions meet your brand guidelines

Consistency is perhaps the best quality of AI. If you were to employ two different freelancers to write your product descriptions, they might have different writing styles, even while having the same style guide in hand.

AI on the other hand, will work with the same writing style, guidelines, and instructions you feed it.

On Describely specifically, you can feed your brand and style information to our AI through Content Rules. For reference, here’s what the feature looks like:

You can use this tab to tell Describely how you’d like to frame your product content (including the tone, output language, word count, and bullet points it should have). You can also add more rules (e.g., Title Instructions), and can also ask Describely to create its own Ruleset based off a product description you really like.

Then there are other things you could do, too, such as:

• Set your own brand tone instead of choosing from the list of tones provided to you (you can ask Describely to detect a tone from a sample text, or you can provide your own instructions).
• Ask it not to include restricted keywords in your copy (Describely already has an in-built Amazon restricted keyword list, but you can add or remove N number of keywords, based on your liking).

4. Work with your entire content team in one platform

Managing a project during a major event, like the back-to-school season, is rarely a solo endeavor. Often, it involves multiple writers and departments working together.

To facilitate seamless collaboration across your teams, you need an AI tool that allows easy tracking of each writer’s responsibilities.

Describely excels in this area by offering custom catalog views based on status and assignee.

As you work on your product descriptions, you’ll always know who is handling each task and its current status. This level of organization and transparency is something you can’t achieve with clunky spreadsheets or generalized AI tools like ChatGPT.

5. Using AI to help write long-form SEO-optimized blog content and landing pages as part of your back to school season campaigns

Throughout this post, we’ve explored various ways to use AI to generate product descriptions and enrich data, helping you prepare for the back-to-school season. These AI-driven strategies ensure your product listings are detailed, accurate, and engaging, ready to capture the attention of busy shoppers during this time of year.

In addition to product descriptions, you’ll likely need to create long-form content, such as blogs, product-focused landing pages, and more, to support your back-to-school campaigns.

For example, something like this back to school buying guide on the Best Buy blog.

It obviously takes a ton of work to create blog content like this, which eats into your time optimizing your PDPs.

This is where you can leverage AI tools like our sister company, Frase.io, to generate long-form blog and website content tailored for the back-to-school season.

Here’s that exact same blog post from Best Buy generated in Frase in just seconds.

Frase.io stands out for its ability to generate research-based content that is optimized for search engines. By analyzing top-performing articles and providing detailed content briefs, Frase.io ensures your blog posts cover all relevant topics and meet search intent. This helps you rank higher on search engines and attract more visitors looking for back-to-school advice, tips, and product recommendations.

Ultimately, Frase. saves your content team significant time and effort, allowing them to focus on other critical tasks while ensuring your content is top-notch and ready to engage your audience.

Final thoughts on using AI to win a race against time this back to school season

Once the back-to-school season ends, there’ll be BFCM after that, and then Halloween, Christmas, and New Year post all of that.

This means that once you’re done editing your content for one event, the next event will be around the corner, and you’ll be pressed for time and will be on strict deadlines again.

So, it makes sense to instill the use of AI in your workflows from now on so you can always be one step ahead of your product content and can create, edit, and review it in bulk without having to go through much hassle and work overload.

Describely can help you not only create, edit, and review your product descriptions in bulk, but it can become the perfect partner for your eCommerce business by doing the important research for you (through Data Enrichment), adhering to your style guide (through Content Rules), and allowing you to collaborate with your entire team.

If it sounds like a tool your content team will benefit from, why not take it for a spin? Start your free trial today!