Content Marketing Tips For ECommerce Sites

This chapter deals with content marketing — one of the most important considerations for businesses in this era.

Content marketing refers to the creation and promotion of valuable content that engages your target audience, generates qualified leads, and convinces them to become your customers. For ecommerce sites, effective content marketing holds the key to increased traffic, better conversions, direct sales, and ultimately, a pumped up bottom line!

Let’s dissect the ways to make content marketing work for your ecommerce site.

Two Golden Rules for eCommerce Content Marketing Success

eCommerce is a crowded space. Globally, you are looking at a market with 2-3 million ecommerce companies. Content marketing is one of the consistently fruitful ways of creating and nurturing a customer base in such a competitive market is to provide the audience useful and interesting content that they can trust and derive value from.

Keep in mind these two words: Useful and interesting.

Have a Blog to Support Your Ecommerce Site

Maintaining a consistent and high-quality blog is one of the simplest ways to get your ecommerce content marketing right. Be careful about making sure whatever content you create interests your audience, addresses their pain points, and offers actionable solutions

Experiment With Content Formats

Some of the content types have proven to be most effective for ecommerce sites are ‘How-Tos’, product guides, explainer videos, infographics, and of course, blogs. Try out these content formats and see which ones work best for your business.

Create a Mix of Free and Gated Content

Have a mix of freely accessible content and those that are gated. Gated content requires readers to opt in or fill out a form before they can access the content. This is a great way to collect customer information and build your mailing list. But this works well when you have built enough trust through free content.

Utilize Social Media

Social media has become a powerful tool to target an audience of your choice. You can use your social media presence to share your published blogs and websites to reach out to a broad number of people.

However, at first, you must know your audience and their favorite social media platforms. You can achieve that by surveying your audience, collecting feedback, and directly communicating with them.

Once you have recognized the platforms, you need to craft your content based on that. For example, if the audience prefers Instagram the most, your content needs to be visually stimulating. You can do that with images or short videos. In the case of Facebook, a combination of text and visual content works better. Pinterest, like Instagram, requires posts to be visually striking.

Social media gives you the opportunity to humanize your eCommerce brand. Make sure to take advantage of that opportunity by weaving content around current trends, festivals, and events.

Generate Video Content

Recently the video-sharing social networking service, TikTok has reached a whopping 1 billion monthly users around the world. According to Google, 55% of the buyers will turn to videos even when they are inside a store. Video content is entertaining, keeps the audience hooked, and carries a sense of authenticity and authority. That is why most buyers look for video content before their purchase decision.

Don’t forget the Influencers

Roping in influencers can give your ecommerce content marketing strategy the ultimate lift. Influencers have a significant fan following on some of the biggest social media platforms today like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Partnering with them can boost your reach among a wider audience and make your brand awareness skyrocket!

These content partnerships can be in the form of sponsored posts, giveaways, events, webinars, and interviews, to name a few.

Let’s look at an example. Boss, a clothing brand partnered with Khaby Lame, one of the most popular TikTok and Instagram influencers of recent times, to organize an impromptu fashion show. The campaign raked in millions of views and shares.

Such campaigns are also SEO friendly. The influencers tag your account and product on their posts. Similarly, you comment and share their posts. This creates backlinks that expose your site to more audience.

Steps to eCommerce Content Marketing Win: A Quick Walkthrough

Here’s a quick list of steps you can take to create a simple yet effective content marketing strategy for your ecommerce site.

Step 1: Identify who your target buyer is.

Step 2: Understand the content consumption behavior of your target buyer — what are their interests, what type of content they like, which platforms they visit, etc.

Step 3: Create content based on your understanding of your target buyer.

Step 4: Post and promote targeted content on the basis of where a buyer is in your sales funnel.

Step 5: Measure results, keep what’s working, tweak what’s not working, and repeat.

Final Words

Content marketing can be super-effective, but not without a sound knowledge of the target audience. Therefore, the first thing to get your ecommerce content marketing right is to spend some time (and even money) to get into the trenches and analyzing what your buyers really need and want.