How to Create A Content Strategy for E-Commerce Sites?
With the entire world gravitating toward digital consumer experience, simply hiring an ecommerce development company and creating a site won’t help you sell anything.
You will need solid eCommerce content marketing to provide you with a competitive advantage.
How?
E-commerce content strategy assists merchants in building relationships with their target audience and gaining customers.
It’s one of the most cost-effective strategies to build brand recognition and loyalty while boosting online sales.
Brands should concentrate on meeting the specific demands of their target market by responding to their inquiries and concerns. Finally, this assists purchasers in completing their buying process.
“You can’t wait for customers to come to you. You have to figure out where they are, go there and bring them back to your store.” – Paul Graham, co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Thus, with the appropriate content strategy, your company can capitalize on the consumer move to eCommerce, significantly increasing top-line growth.
Read on to explore how content plays a crucial part in an eCommerce brand’s buyer journey. Learn why it’s critical to create and distribute content with a strategy.
We’ll roll out the fundamental strategy and steps you’ll need to follow to create, define, and implement your approach.
What Is An E-Commerce Content Strategy?
Content is the thread that connects customers and business owners. Consumers seek technical information based on where they are in the buyer’s funnel. Business owners deliver that information to customers through content (blogs, videos, webinars, courses, and more), answering their queries at each funnel stage.
eCommerce content marketing is how an eCommerce brand develops valuable content that appeals to its target audience. What is the ultimate goal? To deliver the information a user requires, regardless of where they are in the purchasing funnel, and eventually bring them to a final purchase.
Content marketing strategies, whether B2B or B2C, content marketing strategies can provide significant results.
eCommerce content marketing helps customers navigate the buyer’s journey to boost online sales.
A practical approach incorporates rich content throughout the customer lifecycle, ensuring that potential buyers can get the information they require at any time and through the appropriate channel.
The value that content for eCommerce websites provides to its audience distinguishes it.
Here are some examples of how eCommerce content may be valuable:
- Visually appealing to get the consumer to the website
- Video tutorials on how the products work
- HD images of the products entice the consumer and show them all the details.
- Online discussion boards for finding answers to questions
- Blog postings about topics of interest to customers that optimize search engines
- Content that understands pain points and gives a solution.
Why is e-commerce content strategy important?
Most businesses devote 30-39% of their advertising budget to content marketing. 91% of firms globally employ content marketing. What’s intriguing about this is that just 46% spend $10,000 each year.
This made more sense earlier!
The direct response was more prevalent in the marketing strategy. Things have changed these days; customers are increasingly swamped with advertising. As a result, an increasing percentage of customers (27% in 2021) use ad blockers to prevent what they consider intrusive advertising.
Content marketing covers the gap left by advertising.
Here’s the problem.
Researchers discovered that information overload frequently happens when buyers read content, which is:
- Broad and vague content ideas that are irrelevant don’t transit the fundamental knowledge to their readers and leave gaps in between.
- Complex information that is highly technical, specialized, or loaded with a lot of terminology and jargon.
- Debatable, dangerous, or contentious content reduces processing fluency, prompting readers to slow down and carefully assess content.
- Excessive details, wordy sentences, and too many details remove the quality of the content you intend to produce.
- The flow of unprocessed or new information confuses your customers,” What do you want to talk about?”
Thus, if you have the right content strategy, you can drive the e-commerce of your business without any hassle! But, with the wrong approach, your eCommerce firm will utilize content marketing thoughtlessly. As a result, you will target false personas and disrupt your buyer’s journey.
What Comprises A Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing entails creating and distributing information in various formats, such as written articles, tutorial videos, and infographics, to specific audiences to generate more leads, establish your brand, and bring more visitors to your website.
Content marketing is inbound marketing intended to draw a target audience to you from where they are already looking for answers online—whether on search engines, video search platforms, social media networks, or elsewhere.
“We need to create a business strategy for our content. That means saying no to many channels and content types, and focus on where we can build an asset, an audience, over time.” – Joe Pulizzi.
Ultimately the goal is to attract, engage, grow and retain consumers.
Steps And Strategies That Can Help Create The Content Strategy.
The only way to win at content marketing is for the reader to say, “this was written specifically for me,” Jamie Turner.
The target audience affects almost every decision and step you take when it comes to content marketing. Strategic planning is not an exception in this case.
You must:
- Understand your target audience
- Know their difficulties and pain points
- Assist them with a more personalized approach.
One strategy to research your target audience is looking at your current client base and your most successful content. For instance, Google Analytics can be a goldmine of information about your target audience. It can help to know the traffic sources, best-performing landing pages, and location of your audience.
So, personal creation and the customer buying cycle are essential components of any content strategy.
These can help you explore customers’ buying behaviour, interests, age, location, purchasing record, shipping history, the most frequent customer inquiries, and claims.
Content marketing strategy for ecommerce is something that most brands don’t give enough thought to. This thinking comes from the notion that, “do we need to create content when we are selling products?
eCommerce content strategy is more than just improving your product and category pages. The finest eCommerce stores use the power of their blog posts, social media, pictures, and video streams to drive conversions and grab more eyeballs on their products.
Some of the appropriate eCommerce content ideas and factors to consider in producing a good content are as follows
E-commerce places a significant emphasis on pictures more than other verticals because purchasers like to see what they buy in as much detail as possible. Due to this, HD images of products give customers a better understanding of what they are purchasing.
These can also be highly useful and include how-to articles that explain how to utilize a product, textual product reviews, articles that describe product tips and techniques, and in-depth development or industry-related tutorials.
- In-depth Videos and Tutorials
Marketing is about creating awareness, increasing knowledge, and assisting customers in purchasing things from online shops. Products are the focus of eCommerce. And video tutorials or detailed videos on products are among the most effective content medium for retail and eCommerce enterprises in this regard.
Online reviews present social evidence of the superior quality of your products to your target audience. Online reviews are essential to 92% of buyers when purchasing. This implies buyers make an extra effort to read product reviews before buying a product.
Clearly, including reviews on your eCommerce website can assist you in increasing conversions.
FAQ pages are only some of the most spectacular content, but they benefit eCommerce businesses. An FAQ page enables you to overcome the concerns of your prospective purchasers while also helping existing clients, so it’s a win-win situation! In terms of SEO, this is one of the best practices for content writers and marketers.
So, keeping up with ever-changing SEO criteria is another critical responsibility for content creators. To ensure that Google and other search engines can grasp your information, you must make it simple. Google has several content production instructions that can be useful.
Some of the essential SEO factors which eCommerce content creators need to follow are:
Keeping up with ever-changing SEO criteria is another critical responsibility for any content creator. To ensure that Google and other search engines can fully grasp and index your information, you must make it simple for them. For instance, Google has several content production instructions that can be useful.
Some of the best SEO practices adopted by eCommerce content creators are:
- On a page-by-page basis, conduct keyword research. Choose the right long- and short-tail keywords to target, then optimize the website’s content accordingly.
- Link building. You may convince Google to rank your site better by attracting connections from high-traffic areas featuring great content.
- Use high-quality pictures to display products and more effectively communicate your ideas (stay away from free stock images, too, as a lot of other companies reuse them all the time)
- Create high-quality text content to entice organic visitors and boost search engine rankings.
- Crawl your website with a free tool like Beam Us Up to find and fix problems like duplicate content, missing alt texts or metadata, and broken links.
- Google Analytics and Google Search Console are essential tools for optimizing your SEO
Creating content for your eCommerce site is only worthwhile if you can successfully market it. Pages targeting specific keywords may receive organic traffic over time. But you must use the time in your hand judiciously by distributing information about your product and services via more immediate channels.
Thus, Distribution is a critical component in developing a digital marketing plan. Your distribution channel for ecommerce websites includes:
- Social media is one of the most successful ways to reach customers. However, before you begin advertising, you must first decide which social networks your target audience uses, their interest, purchasing behaviour, and more.
- Paid media comprises search engine marketing, pay-per-click marketing, and paid social adverts. This will ensure that your customers view your content in SERPs, social media feeds, and other places of their interest.
- Any exposure or promotion received from outside sources is considered earned media. Digital word of mouth includes sharing, likes, retweets, comments, and more. They help you to be in touch with your customer.
- Finally, remember to include email campaigns in your eCommerce content strategy. From drip email campaigns to promotional campaigns – you can use it all to inform your customer about your products and services.
Every few weeks/months, monitoring your strategies’ performance is essential. Through this, you gain crucial information like:
- How have your blog posts performed?
- How did your videos perform?
- Which sector requires more attention?
This will help you shape your future content strategy!
Additionally, getting regular feedback from your audiences can help you know the key areas that need improvement. It will also help you source new ideas for future campaigns.
However, you must monitor your metrics and check your monthly views, click-through rates, lead generation rates, search visibility, conversions, and so on. Through this, you will gain great insights to edit, refine, and improve your content and its performance on different channels.
E-Commerce Content Marketing Examples
This company specializes in trendy furniture and homeware. NEXT has recently acquired it.
They take a few alternative approaches to content, but one of the highlights is their “Ideas” under the Edited Section. Shoppers will find intriguing information, including home design inspiration and style ideas.
They also have an Inspiration section. Here, visitors can read through visual-centric articles showcasing interior design inspiration from people who have mastered it.
And what is interesting is how MADE.com includes links to highlighted products and details on their interior decorating service. This is a subtle, non-sales technique to market their products and services while interestingly showcasing them.
If you are into writing for work or school, you must have used the Grammarly app to keep your text clean and error-free.
Grammarly’s content approach includes a wealth of information and details for its learning audience. Their blogs provide detailed writing assistance, how-to tutorials, and grammar recommendations.
This ecommerce website’s content is about assisting you in writing your best copy, article, blog, email, and more. Not just that, the content is focused on specific keywords to attract customers browsing through different search engines for better results.
Overall, they market themselves as a helpful buddy who helps you deliver better content in a non-pushy way.
Sephora’s Beauty Insider group is a forum for users to discuss anything and everything relevant to the brand, the beauty industry, and other related matters.
The company employs moderators to oversee the forum and encourage members to participate in their discussions, share their views, and work to increase their engagement over time.
The combination of social media marketing, online forums, and user-generated content makes this an excellent example of eCommerce content marketing. They distribute their content on different marketing channels through one platform.
As a result, enterprises prepare and distribute their content holistically. It also helps them to engage and interact with more audiences to increase their revenue and traffic.
Conclusion
Increasing traffic to your website is merely the first step in your company’s growth. Once they’re there, you would like to engage them, establish brand loyalty and trust, and ensure that traffic returns – this time without you needing to entice them with an ad.
It is for this reason that a content strategy is so important.
You may employ content in advertising to draw clients in, then engage them in that content to demonstrate your expertise, earning you trust in the long run. You will not turn every visitor into a purchase the first time they visit your website.
With an average eCommerce conversion rate of 1-3%, you need to find another means to pique people’s interest and raise brand exposure.
One method is to use your content marketing plan. And once your strategy is in place, you’ll need a team to carry out the process smoothly.
Need help implementing these strategies on your end? Are you looking for a way to implement these strategies?
We are a leading Ecommerce development company that typically assists firms in creating result-driven strategies and the ultimate ad plan to increase conversions. Furthermore, we offer ecommerce development services that help organizations increase revenue and customer reach by combining omnichannel visibility, user-centric solutions, and understanding customers’ needs.
As a leading ecommerce development services, we also provide top ecommerce solutions for platforms like Magento 2, Shopify, WooCommerce, Drupal, Joomla, Shopware, Sylius, etc.
FAQS
A content strategy is usually the plan to achieve your goals. As a result of content, online businesses gain likes, shares, and sales. Content that combines a headless CMS, meaningful product information, and images can attract customers’ attention and increase sales. Content that influences purchasing behavior necessitates an e-commerce content marketing strategy.
E-commerce content marketing increases brand loyalty. Content marketing improves your interaction with your target audience and increases brand recognition and loyalty. You establish a relationship with your audience by providing excellent content that informs, entertains, or both.
Here are 5 essential features that are a must for any e-commerce website;
- User-Friendly Navigation
- Accurate and Detailed Product Description Videos
- High-quality Images
- Product Reviews
- FAQs
