How to Create an Effective Content Strategy for Ecommerce
If you’ve been living under a rock, you know how crucial content marketing is for advertising online stores. Some marketers, though, make the mistake of thinking, “If I develop content, people will come.”
We regret to inform you that this is not how it operates. Without a plan, content is just words, pictures, and videos that get lost in the shuffle, adding nothing of value to the business concern other than the happiness and wealth of its creators.
Content marketing needs to be directed toward a specific objective, with well-defined methods for achieving that objective. It could be anything from raising brand awareness to boosting sales and revenue. Among the most challenging aspects of content marketing? To produce content that attracts qualified leads.
The correct content marketing strategy can boost direct sales, lead generation, and customer engagement. An efficient content marketing plan for online stores can be developed by following the steps below.
1. You must determine who your ideal customer is.
Your target audience’s demographic information is essential for crafting conversion-optimized content for your e-commerce website. Building a buyer persona using actual data and critical insights allows you to tailor your content to them at every sale funnel stage.
At the top of the funnel, for instance, you would deliver information that is specifically tailored to their needs but does not contain any explicit sales language. Once you’ve won a customer’s confidence, you can start proposing potential answers to their problems and giving a more tailored sales pitch to turn them into paying customers.
2. Research the content consumption habits of your target demographic.
You can learn about your target audience’s preferred content consumption method by analyzing existing data or researching industry trends.
Questions you should think about answering:
- Which platform is most used by my intended demographic in terms of social media?
- Do they prefer a specific format (video, long-form material, whitepaper, Etc.)?
- Does my ideal customer typically make purchases through their mobile device?
- How much time does my ideal reader spend per piece of content?
3. Conduct Research and Develop content
An E-commerce content strategy requires preliminary investigation to be successful. Suppose you want to discover the chances of developing content versus new search keywords. In that case, you may conduct an SEO competitive study by looking at the search engine rankings & keyword gaps of competitors’ domain names.
A keyword gap study allows you to examine five competing domains to identify unranked keywords. You’ll see the level of competition for the phrases you’re overlooking, which will help you focus on the easiest wins with your fresh content.
When brainstorming for a storyline calendar, a subject research tool can help you identify content ideas that resonate with your target demographic. Using this tool, you may find out what people are interested in, their questions, what your competitors need to cover, and how you might close the content gap.
Information about content concepts is presented in the form of cards that include the total number of searches for the subtopic, relevant resources, and questions that may arise from users’ queries.
4. Put Content Where It Belongs in the Buyer’s Journey
The traditional marketing or sales funnel model consists of an upper, middle, and lower section corresponding to a distinct stage in the customer’s decision-making process. Customers’ pain issues are validated at the top of the funnel during the discovery or awareness stage. At this point, anyone can quickly locate and read your material.
Content marketing, whether blog posts, social media posts, SEO articles, or anything else, solves problems for readers without directly selling anything. The “consideration” stage is right in the sweet spot of the sales funnel since that’s when you build a relationship with potential consumers and win them over.
You can start offering solutions now that you’ve shown that you get their problems. Instead of attempting to teach your consumers, you can now direct them toward the most helpful resources, which will hopefully be yours.
You might include resources like comparative guidelines, complimentary samples, or even case studies. In-depth research on the subject, including whether or not your offering is the most incredible fit, is typical at this point in the buyer’s journey.
At the end of the sales process, when a prospect is genuinely interested, they will make a buy. It is your chance to demonstrate why you are too valuable to pass up. To keep your word in front of a potential customer who is on the edge of making a purchase, you can employ techniques like live chat, a chatbot, emails to customers during the buying process, and retargeting/remarketing.
5. Evaluate progress
Since updating your e-commerce site’s content is typically not a one-and-done deal, you should evaluate prior efforts to inform future ones. With the help of proper measures, you can determine the level of ROI (Return On Investment). Some indicators of success could be:
- The organic flow of visitors
- Leads
- Rate of conversion
- Time spent on page
- Social sharing
- Engagement
- ROI
- Backlinks
The overall number of backlinks, referring websites, and time series can be determined for individual URLs.
6. Encourage Feedback From Customers
You need to hear what your customers say to increase sales and improve your content. Follow-up emails, client interviews, analysis of recorded sales conversations, social media monitoring, and other methods can all help you learn what customers think of your sales process so you can make changes as needed.
Conclusion
Content marketing is essential for top businesses of all sizes to maintain market share and grow their customer base. You can increase your online sales through paid and organic search engine optimization, or you can develop engaging content to promote your business.
To save time and money, keep tabs on Content Marketing Services to learn how to develop a content strategy quickly, pinpoint content gaps, and conduct content research, writing, and auditing. You can write your success narrative if you have the resources to analyze the market, conduct audits of the competition, generate compelling content and analyze the data to improve future efforts.
