Content marketing for your eCommerce store
The rise of eCommerce has given enormous opportunities for businesses to reach out and serve more customers from different demographies and geographical locations. But an eCommerce store is nothing more than a website with product displays, unless the listed items are marketed and promoted to a target audience.
As the eCommerce space becomes crowded and the customers are spoilt for choice, the need to provide extra information, tips or anything that will help the customers make better decisions becomes an integral part of the marketing strategy. Reaching out to them through digital ads and social media handles is not enough these days and providing random information, images and videos that are irrelevant to the customers do not help in any way to grab their attention. There is a need for careful planning and implementation to make content engaging for the target audience. This is where a successful content marketing strategy for eCommerce comes in.
What is content marketing for eCommerce?
Content marketing is the creation and sharing of useful and relevant content customized for specific target audiences. Content can be textual in the form of articles or visual in nature – images, infographics, videos, etc. The purpose of content marketing for eCommerce may be to:
- 1. Generate leads
- 2. Drive organic traffic to the eCommerce site by means of engagement and by creating interest
- 3. Create and reinforce the customers’ trust in your brand by providing authentic information to them
- 4. Improve brand visibility
- 5. Create value and help customers make informed purchase decisions
- 6. Lead them through the sales funnel and achieve sales conversion
Content marketing for eCommerce involves:
- 1. Understanding the pain points of the customers
- 2. Systematically scrutinizing the search trends
- 3. Predicting what the target audience are specifically looking for, and
- 4. Working to get that information appear on their search results, social media feed, content and video sharing platforms, etc.
When the target audience find the information they need, and they click the link and reach your eCommerce site. This brings organic traffic and improves your prospect of finding new customers and leads and increasing sales.
Questions to ask while formulating an effective content marketing strategy for eCommerce
The process of formulating a successful content marketing strategy for eCommerce involves answering a few questions.
1. Who is your target audience
The foremost step in content marketing for eCommerce is choosing your target audience, identifying their pain points and finding the means to solving their problems. In a digital world, it is possible to pinpoint a specific group of people as target audience from a particular age, gender, demography, geographical location, etc. The pain points of every group of people may be different, and each of those groups is looking for a specific kind of content to solve their own unique problems. Creating an ideal content marketing strategy involves selecting the target audience first and customizing the content accordingly.
2. What are your objectives of the content marketing exercise?
Content marketing for eCommerce can be done for various purposes. For instance, it can be designed to promote a particular product or hype the launch of a new product. In such cases, the content should be focused on a specific product, its use case, benefits and the problems it solves. However, if the objective of the content marketing exercise is to improve brand visibility or search engine ranking, the strategy and the content that needs to be created would be entirely different. So, choosing the right objective of your content marketing exercise is crucial to getting your strategy right.
3. What is the means to reach your target audience?
Different groups of people may look for solutions for their problems in different spaces. For instance, teenagers and younger generation prefer short-duration content on platforms like Snapchat or Tiktok. In contrast, relatively older people may find that information in longer and more elaborate text content on blogs or Facebook or longer duration videos on YouTube. So, depending on who your audience is, it is essential to reach out to them at their preferred online platforms with the kind of content they want.
4. How do you want to schedule your content calendar
Depending on the target audience and the objectives of content marketing for eCommerce, you can choose different categories of content on various topics and areas of focus, and make a schedule as to when you want to post/disseminate them. It is vital to keep posting relevant content from each content category periodically to keep the audience engaged. However, the priority should be on the quality of the content rather than the quantity.
Creating a dedicated calendar helps to stick to the schedule and deliver content to the audience at the right time without fail. Content calendar also helps to identify opportunities to connect with the target audience on holidays and important days with relevant content.
5. What are the kinds of content do you want to publish?
You can choose a variety of mediums to post your content. If your target audience likes to read text heavy content, you can post blog posts and articles to drive traffic to your site. Similarly, an assortment of content can be delivered in coordination through email marketing, social media posts, podcasts, video sharing platforms, customer stories, etc.
6. What kind of background work do you need to carry out before creating the content?
Doing a thorough research with regard to the topics covered in the content is key to creating quality content. Similarly, different kinds of content require different kinds of research. For example, if you are trying to improve your ranking in search results, analysis of keyword gaps, SEO competitiveness, etc., are prerequisite to meet the objective. Similarly, creating videos may require a written script based on a thoroughly researched topic. Content marketing for eCommerce requires you to closely watch and research on what the successful competitors are doing and adapting your content marketing strategy for e-commerce accordingly.
7. How would you track and measure the effectiveness of the content marketing strategy for eCommerce?
Content marketing for eCommerce is a continuous process. Only if you have a proper tracking and measuring mechanisms, you can determine how successful your marketing strategy for eCommerce is and tweak and fine-tune the strategy on an ongoing basis. There are various analytical tools available in order to track the impact of every content you post. These tools give you comprehensive insights on the performance of your content in relation to your objectives.
The measuring and tracking mechanisms and the parameters you need to track vary vastly depending on your content marketing strategy. For example, if your objective is to increase search engine ranking and generate more leads by driving traffic to your site, then you need tools that measure parameters such as number of leads you have generated, increase in traffic, conversion, user engagement, search engine ranking, etc.
The effectiveness of blog posts can be measured by tracking website traffic, time spent by the visitors in that specific page, etc. Email marketing campaigns are deemed successful when their open rate, conversion rate and click-through rates are high. Similarly, success on social media is measured in terms of number of followers, reach, positive comments and reacts, user engagement levels to the posts, etc. Videos and podcasts are considered successful based on the number of subscribers, viewers/listeners, shares, average viewing/listening duration, etc.
By measuring and tracking the performance of your content, you can constantly improve your content and increase user engagement. You can also update the old content to include more recent information and make it more relevant to the target audience.
