The perfect e-commerce content marketing strategy

There is a lot of noise on content marketing. For those who have little idea about what is content marketing, let me give you a brief. E-commerce content marketing strategy is about providing valuable information to readers. It’s all about educating, entertaining and giving value to your customers to gain trust in your brand.

Content marketing is not only about selling your products. It is about helping your target audience to make informed decisions.

In a broader perspective, e-commerce content marketing strategy is an effort of marketing your brand and products through sharing of informative, entertaining and insightful information which creates value for the readers.

It’s not about pushing your products to the target audience through the sales pitch, but educating and moving people towards the best course of action.

To make your e-commerce business profitable, what you need is conversions.

The e-commerce content marketing rules have changed.

Marketers have realized that to achieve conversions they need to engage with their target audience.

Content marketing is the best way to convince people; it’s not only about filling up the funnel but increasing conversions too.

Why does your e-commerce website need content marketing?

If statistically speaking, content marketing can increase your conversion rate up to 5 times.

Quality content is essential for e-commerce. This content will make your website easy for search engines and for your customers to find you and your products.

Good content helps your customers to make an informed decision.

E-commerce content marketing is not limited only to the big player, and if you propose content marketing methodically and consistently, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish.

1. Understanding the buyers’ persona is an effective e-commerce content marketing strategy

A buyer persona is to understand your target customer and how your products & services best suit them. The goal of an understanding buyer persona is to humanize your content and message via which you want to reach to your target audience.

When developing buyer persona here are the fundamental questions you need to ask yourself and to your sales team about your target audience.

1. Who is your ideal client?
2. What are their needs? Learn what problems do you need to solve?
3. What do they value the most? What will excite your client the most?
4. How will you solve their problems and specific needs with your products/services?
5. Where do they go to find information? (research, reviews, friends, social media)

Create Buyer Personas for Your Business – By Hubspot

Learn buyers journey to develop your e-commerce content marketing strategy. By equaling customer’s requirements and problems with precisely the right type of content by the stages of the sales funnel, this enhances the effectiveness of your content marketing.

(Buyers journey chart – image source hubspot)

2.Define content goals

Start keeping the end in mind. What purpose do you want to achieve with content marketing?

It is uber important to define a content goal. This helps you to measure the progress.

These are some content marketing goals worth pursuing.

1 Building trust and rapport with your audience

2 Attract new prospects to your marketing system

3 Explore prospect’s needs and pain areas

4 Demonstrate life with your products

5 Attract business partners

6 Increase the loyalty of existing customers

Content marketing goals are very much subjective. They vary from business to business.

3. Finding great content ideas by studying your niche is a great e-commerce content marketing strategy

Here are some tips to find great content ideas for your niche.

1. Take good ideas and make them great

This is the easiest way to come up with content ideas. Monitor your competitors what are they writing about, add information to it which is not present on the internet.

Add more value to your content by making it longer, in-depth and readable.

2. Your content should serve as an answer to the problems. So, find the questions/problems.

Here, the fundamental purpose of content is to answer the questions of your target audience.

3. Answer those problems that other columns leave the readers with a puzzle.

Some posts are very general and meant to provoke thought. This is the opportunity for you to browse through the queries which your competitors are getting from their readers.

1. You can look at comments
2. Read articles from the readers’ point of view

4. Find and write about questions that no one wants to answer.

This tactic may not reveal significant content ideas, but it can reveal the content ideas of the highest quality.

Great content ideas give you a potential to produce the best quality content.

How to find low hanging content ideas from all over the world?

Tool: Content explorer by Ahrefs

(image source ahref)

It is an excellent content research tool for content writers and content marketers. Put any keyword or website, and you will get the most popular content for that topic.

There are three key factors to consider before prioritizing any content idea and keyword.

1. Search traffic potential
2. Ranking difficulty
3. Business value

There are nearly 7.6 billion people in the world if you consider reaching half of them; first, you need to understand how to make your content available to them!

4.Plan your keywords

Keyword research is basically the blueprint of your online marketing efforts. It nearly drives every decision you make to create and promote your content online.

Google keyword research is the basis of any online marketing campaign.

The goal of keyword research and planning is to find out what your target audience is searching on google and to create quality content around those keywords to answer their questions.

Once you have a basic content idea; you can expand your search more deeply with widely available search suggestions.

You can try from one of the below-listed tools to check the competition, Global monthly searches, Local monthly searches, an approximate cost per click.

Google keyword planner

Target 0-10 keyword difficulties and try to write an awesome article on it.

Find the keywords that your competitors are ranking for.

• Study competitors
• Find their best content
• Beat them at it

image source – google keyword planner

• Search traffic potential
• Ranking difficulties
• Business value

Answerthepublic.com

We all are searching for something. It gives a simple visualization of the data that could be widely used on how you could start answering your public better. By creating content that’s useful, funny or inspiring.

It will give you an insight into what all possible searches people are making for that specific keyword.

5. Understand the searcher intent and how to match it is a perfect e-commerce content marketing strategy

It is imperative to target a specific keyword to narrow down the exactness of what your target audience is searching for.

One major mistake what many marketers make is they try to optimize their article for the keyword with the highest search volume and ignoring the fact that their piece doesn’t really match the searchers’ intent.

Here what you need to do is pick the most relevant search query, even if the search volume seems low.  

Remember the search volume for a given keyword doesn’t equal business opportunity.

The searchers’ intent behind the search query does.

Let me explain this to you with a small example.

Here is a small exercise,

Send your article draft to your friends and ask them what it is about.

Ask yourself these few questions,

1. What are people looking for when they search for that keyword?

2. What goal do they have in mind? What is their motivation?

3. What kind of search result perfectly satisfies them?

6. Create such content that people care to read and share with others

Create e-commerce content marketing strategy that promotes itself.

Three ingredients will make your content great.

1. Quality

2. Uniqueness

3. Authority

Let’s discuss them in detail

Quality:

Learn to write well

Improve how it looks. Because if your article doesn’t seem right, people won’t read it.

Things that make your article visually appealing

• Design of your blog
• Quality images
• Short paragraphs
• Subheadings
• Quotes
• Lists
• All sorts of formatting tricks

In short, it should be pleasing to the human eye.

Craft a catchy eye headline. Study how to write a winning headline

Make sure to brainstorm at least five different headlines for every piece of article you write.

Uniqueness:

If your content is a clone, it doesn’t deserve more attention than the original.

Say something that has not been said before

Find a new angle

Try to explain a topic better

Authority:

If you want to create good content, you need to be a journalist.

Not journalist by profession, but it will be great if you possess a few qualities of journalists to get first-hand information.

Talk to people

Interview them

Collect first-hand information

Publish in your article

Reach out industry leaders, interview them

How to create a unique content that will stand out?

You can craft unique content from,

1. The data that your company produces

2. Insights you have because of your industry experience

3. Stories of the people you have access to

What if you are a new marketer, and you don’t have access to the above?

Find a new angle.

The more steps you take towards making your content impressive and unique, the less competition you are going to encounter.

How to create content that attracts backlinks?

Think of what people enjoy sharing.

Emotions (News, entertainment, controversies)

Utility (tutorial, guides, how to’s)

Numbers (Research, data, statistics)

Stories (Case studies, examples)

Things Catch On by Jonah Berger. I highly recommend reading it so you can get the in-depth stories and studies he tells to back up his points.

Optimize your content

Nailing the searcher intent with your content you automatically do 80% of all optimization work.

Let’s talk about the rest 20%

Use the target keyword (or synonym of a keyword) in

–    URL

–    Title

–    Headline

–    Content

In this example, the keyword is e-commerce shipping cost. Which has been included in the title, in the URL, in the article body?

1. Include keyword within the first 60 characters of your title.

2. Make sure you publish every article with a unique URL which contains at least one or two keywords.

3. Optimize meta description. The meta description helps the reader to determine what the article is all about. Whether it is relevant to what they are looking for.

4. Optimize your images’ alt text. Adding keywords to your images may seem minor, but has a value to recognize in google. It takes hardly 30 seconds to change the name from img45678 to “e-commerce-shipping-cost”.

4. Update/improve your existing article as and when required.

5. Merge multiple articles on the same topics. Merge duplicate items.

6. Delete old articles (to improve the website’s rank).

7. Make sure your content is Grammarly proof.

We check all our posts in Grammarly to highlight spelling check and grammatical errors.

Besides, not to forget the foundation of your success is the actual content and not only the SEO enhancement that you apply to it.

7. How to promote your content and make it rank high on google?

Let’s discuss the four common mistakes people make in content promotion.

Mistake 1  Focusing on short-term traffic over backlink

Mistake 2  Giving up content promotion too early

Do this to promote extra:

1. Submit your content to relevant groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+
2. Mention on the public slack channel
3. Convert your content into a different format (podcast, video, slides, infographics)

Mistake#3  Abandoning your old content

Do not abandon your old content. Update and review. Add the latest information and insights to it.

Re-promote once it is fresh again.

Divide your time for content creation

Make sure your visitors are getting the up to date information

It helps to rank I google.

Mistake 4  Not spending money on promotion

Create sponsored Facebook and LinkedIn Ads

Most popular content promotion strategies are,

1 Reaching your existing customers (via social media, email marketing)

2 Reaching relevant communities

3 Content repurposing & syndication

4 Guest blogging

5 Outreach

6 Paid promotion

The best content promotion strategy reviewed

No tactic or strategy will make an awful piece of content popular.

The quality of your content always comes first.

Remember, awesome content promotes itself.

Measure success

1 Search ranking

Search ranking improvement is the one factor which determines your content marketing success. Subscribe to SEMRush or Ahrefs to continuous monitor success.

2 Website traffic

Measure your website traffic on a regular basis. You can use google analytics to measure traffic for previous year/quarter/month/week.

3 Subscriber growth

Monitor the increase in subscriber rate. Measure your subscriber growth by this simple formula

4 Social media shares & followers

The considerable and steady growth of your social media post likes/shares and number of followers indicates that the content you share with your audience is engaging.

5 Backlinks

An inbound link is a positive indicator that you are creating valuable content which people want to share and link to their content.

6 Leads

The overall success factor of your all e-commerce content marketing efforts ultimately should give you educated, and quality leads. People are inspired and taught by your content and want to purchase your products.

2. Major strategies for growing a blog

53% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. (HubSpot, 2017) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

Content goes viral only if it is exposed to a vast audience.

Busting the myth of “publish more often” myth in an e-commerce content marketing strategy

You don’t have to publish a lot of content but still can get tons of traffic every month.

Goal: To create content around a specific keyword and make it rank in google.

Viral traffic is a gamble.

SEO traffic is predictable.

How to convert visitors into subscriber?

Strat growing your email list

Your audience is your asset

Make your content rank well in google.

To do so, test your article ideas for search demand.

The biggest mistakes what marketers make is writing about the things that no one is searching for!

Instead, blog about things that your potential customers are searching for.

They find you –> Follow you –> Buy from you

Grow your audience

There are two ways you can grow your audience to market your products to

1 Email list

2 Find the medium that works for you

For all marketers, people are most interested at the moment they subscribe you.

Put the most engaging message for them once they subscribe to you or show them one of your greatest work/products.

Regular updates to your audience via email is uber important.

Respond your customers, visitors for each and every query they send to you.

Inform them about what are you doing, what new style, products, categories you are adding to your store.

By doing this, they feel part of the process. They feel valued.

Besides that when you send emails to your customers, give them a human touch as if you are sending an email to a friend.

Final Thoughts

On e-commerce platforms, the buyers only prefer to associate with the brands that compliment their concerns and interests as opposed to traditional marketing.

There is no need for overly technical analysis, just focus on a couple of things like searcher’s intent, publishing valuable and engaging content, take a unique angle and give your audience what they are looking for.

E-commerce content marketing is not a one-day or one-time job. It requires the right amount of efforts and understanding of your target audience.

But it is definitely achievable to increase passive traffic & conversion through content marketing month by month.

Also, read email marketing tips for e-commerce business.