We know that life can be pretty hectic when you’re an ecommerce business owner.
Your to-do list is jam-packed with important tasks, from inventory management to customer service and product development.
And that’s just Monday morning.
But if you’re looking to accelerate the growth of your business, it’s important to take a step back and review your digital marketing strategies from time to time.
Content marketing is one of the best ways to consistently drive growth for your business.
The right content strategy can enable you to differentiate yourself from the competition, elevate your brand reputation and increase those all-important conversions.
Let’s run through the basics of digital content, and outline how you can build your own content marketing strategy that will deliver incredible results for your business.
So what is content marketing, exactly?
Content marketing is easy to define, but tricky to master.
Content marketing involves the creation and distribution of valuable content to attract new shoppers, maintain brand loyalty and increase sales.
The content used within your marketing strategy can take many forms, including:
- Videos
- Articles
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- E-books
Different businesses and industries focus on creating different types of content, based on their audience’s interests. However, all of this content is ultimately aiming to achieve one thing – improved business performance and customer retention.
It’s also important to acknowledge the two key elements of successful content marketing.
The creation of high-quality, engaging content is absolutely critical to the process – but this content also needs to be distributed through smart marketing tactics.
You might produce some top-notch, highly informative content – but if it’s not being seen by your target audience, it’s probably just going to sit and collect virtual dust.
What can content marketing do for my business?
The concept of content marketing is fairly self-explanatory – but what can it actually do for an ecommerce business?
1. It enhances brand reputation and credibility
By creating informative and authoritative content, you can quickly establish your brand as a trusted voice in the market.
You can also instantly differentiate yourself from the competition, which is very important in a competitive ecommerce landscape.
Your brand reputation is particularly important for new customers who are less familiar with your products and services.
If these potential buyers see that your business has a reputation for creating high-quality content (e.g. blog posts, tutorial videos, infographics) then they’re more likely to trust your credibility – and trust is key to converting first-time buyers.
2. It helps to improve SEO performance
Content marketing can also have a direct (and noticeable) impact on your SEO performance.
Search engines tend to reward ecommerce sites who are consistently producing quality content that generates interest and drives engagement.
Not only that, but if you can pack your website content with relevant keywords, you can quickly climb the search rankings and boost your ecommerce brand visibility.
Improved Search Engine Optimization leads to increased organic traffic.
All of these additional clicks have the potential to be transformed into valuable conversions, which equals more revenue for your ecommerce business.
3. It’s integral to your sales funnel
A smart ecommerce content marketing strategy can also help you to push prospective customers through the conversion funnel.
If you strategically create different types of content to tackle different areas of the funnel, you can develop a highly effective content marketing strategy.
For example, content aimed at brand new customers is all about driving brand awareness and building familiarity with your offering.
Informative articles and social media posts are perfect for the top of the funnel, because they can provide new customers with a lot of handy information without feeling sales-y.
As customers move down the sales funnel, you can begin to deliver in-depth informative content that turns new prospects into warm leads.
This kind of mid-funnel content can include e-book downloads and webinars.
When you’re finally ready to convert warm prospects into customers, you can utilise content such as customer testimonials and product demonstrations to nudge a sale over the line.
Bottom-funnel content often includes strong CTAs that are designed to drive action.
Customers don’t necessarily move along the funnel in a rigid way (because, you know, they’re not robots) – but if you can produce a comprehensive content strategy that guides them in the right direction, you can consistently increase sales over time.
These are just a few of the core benefits that content marketing can offer your business.
And the best part? A good content marketing strategy is evergreen.
As long as you consistently produce relevant and compelling content, you can continue to reap these benefits and harness the awesome power of content marketing.
How to build an effective content marketing strategy
A solid content marketing strategy is sounding pretty useful, right?
But before you fire up the conveyor belt and produce mountains of new content, let’s take a look at the steps required to build a content marketing strategy.
It’s vital that you have a strong foundation in place before you begin to create fresh content, so that you can understand what type of content is needed to achieve your goals.
Step 1. Clarify your target audience
You need to thoroughly understand your target audience before you can begin to produce content for them.
Otherwise, you might end up creating content that’s irrelevant to your buyers and useless for your business.
Try to answer the following questions to help create accurate buyer personas:
- What is your audience demographic? (e.g. gender, age, location)
- What are their primary motivations or aspirations?
- What are their primary challenges or pain points?
- Where do they spend their time online?
- What kind of content are they likely to consume?
Once you understand the challenges and motivations of your audience, you can create more valuable content that’s likely to resonate with them.
More relevance equals more engagement.
If you’re struggling to find the right information about your audience, don’t panic.
You can use website forms to collect data about your users, conduct interviews and research among your audience, or just utilise desk research to build a clearer picture.
Step 2. Analyse how your audience consumes content
It’s important to create content that’s relevant to your target audience – it’s also critical that you distribute this content in the right places.
If your most valuable users are active on Instagram and Snapchat, but you’re only amplifying content on Twitter, then you’re missing a huge opportunity.
The same can be said for the format of your content. Are your audience willing to engage with long-form blog posts, or do they prefer bite-sized infographics?
It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how your audience consumes content, but try to collect as much data as possible. If you know of any successful competitors targeting a similar audience, it’s a good idea to analyse the types of content they’re regularly producing.
Step 3. Research, plan, and create
Once you’ve gathered key info about your target audience and their preferred content, it’s time to kick off your research process.
Start by conducting research into the best topics and subjects to base your content plan around.
This research could involve SEO competitive analysis to identify successful brands, or keyword research to discover popular themes. You can even just keep an eye on your most well-known competitors to understand the types of content they create.
Use this information to build out a content calendar that will shape the direction and timings of your content strategy.
Now it’s time for the exciting part – creating brand new content.
You can create content yourself if you feel confident enough, but it’s often a wise move to enlist the help of professional writers who can produce high-quality, fully-optimised work.
Step 4. Publish and track performance
Once you’re happy with your content, it’s time to publish.
You should already have an idea of the best platforms for your content (based on your previous research) but you may also be distributing across multiple channels, such as:
- Your website
- Your social feeds
- Your email communications
Once your content is live, it’s very important that you keep track of performance.
By monitoring the right metrics, you can understand what types of content are delivering optimal results. This data can then inform and improve your content strategy over time.
Some important metrics to track include:
- Website traffic volumes
- Website conversion rate
- Landing page dwell times
- Social shares
- Engagements (e.g. clicks, views)
- Backlinks
- Conversions
Different types of content will focus on achieving different goals (i.e. top-funnel vs bottom-funnel) but you should always keep a close eye on these core metrics.
Step 5. Refine and evolve your strategy
All of the above steps are critical to building an effective content marketing strategy.
But just publishing fresh content and collecting data isn’t enough.
It’s vital that you use your performance insights to inform and evolve your content strategy.
Try to analyse all of your content marketing efforts to understand which tactics are most successful.
Which topics are driving the most engagement? Are certain formats leading to higher conversions? Which platforms are delivering optimal results?
The content marketing journey doesn’t end once you hit ‘publish’. You need to be constantly refining your strategy to maximise your returns.
Examples of top-tier ecommerce content marketing tactics
Now that we’ve covered the fundamentals of building a content strategy, let’s take a look at some highly effective content marketing tactics that you can employ.
Create dedicated content hubs
Once you’re on a roll with content creation, you may find yourself struggling to organise all of your articles, infographics and blog posts.
That’s where a dedicated content hub can work wonders.
By creating individual ‘hub’ pages on your ecommerce website based around specific topics, you can neatly and easily organise your content into different categories.
Below is a great example of a well-organised content hub from Klaviyo:
(Source: Klaviyo)
An accessible hub provides users with a much smoother experience when they’re exploring your content.
Site visitors can easily find the articles and topics that they’re looking for, which increases the chances of organic traffic and social shares.
Harness the power of UGC
Content marketing can deliver some exceptionally strong returns for your business – but one form of content in particular can really shine.
User Generated Content (UGC) can be an incredibly powerful asset in your content marketing playbook.
UGC is pretty much any content that your audience creates involving your brand. It could be a social media mention, a positive online review, or a video clip of them using your products.
UGC is extremely persuasive when you’re trying to attract new customers and generate sales. This content feels authentic and genuine, and maximises the potential of social proof.
Here’s some UGC in action on Monsoon’s ecommerce site:
(Source: Monsoon)
And the best thing about UGC? It’s created by your customers.
That’s right. Your very own users do the heavy lifting.
All you need to do is find smart ways to incentivise UGC creation (e.g. competitions, discounts) and distribute the content in the right places – for example, through your ecommerce store, social feeds and email newsletters.
Diversify your content strategy
One of the best practices for an effective ecommerce content marketing strategy is to keep your content fresh.
Try to vary the types of content that you’re creating and distributing.
Not only will this keep your content more engaging, but it will also help you to reach different potential customers in different online environments.
If you find that certain formats tend to perform better than others, then it makes sense to focus on them more regularly.
Just make sure that your content isn’t becoming stale or predictable.
Here are some examples of varied content that you could produce on a regular basis:
- Product tutorial videos that educate potential buyers
- Shareable infographics that provide users with helpful tips
- Blog posts that cover a variety of industry topics
- UGC social posts that showcase customer stories
- Guest posts from industry experts and influencers
Here’s a strong example of diverse content marketing from Intuit, including website video tutorials, a blog post hub, and social media article promotion:
(Source: Intuit)
The importance of content amplification
Publishing great content is just one part of the content marketing formula.
You also need to tactically amplify and distribute this content so that your target audience can see it.
High-quality content won’t achieve much if nobody can engage with it!
There are multiple channels that you can utilise to amplify your content, including:
- Organic social media marketing
- Paid social media activity
- Email marketing
- Incentivised sharing
- Influencer promotion
The key is to find channels and platforms that allow you to reach your audience at scale.
Always make sure that all of your new content is distributed as effectively as possible.
Track the performance of different channels to figure out what works, and maximise the reach of your content to deliver optimal results.
If you haven’t already built a content marketing strategy, now is the best time to start.
Planning and preparation are key. You need to be supremely confident that you’re creating content that will engage your audience and generate interest.
Once you’re happy with your content approach, you can start to produce new pieces (with the help of writers and designers) and distribute them to your target audience.
Over time you’ll begin to understand the best topics, formats and platforms to use for content marketing. Once you’ve nailed these elements, you’ll be seeing massive benefits in no time.
