How To Boost Your Ecommerce Content Marketing Strategy

Why Is A Content Strategy Important?

Content marketing involves creating unique, high-quality content that is aimed at a specific audience, appeals to their interests and addresses a query that can be resolved. Your content is a way to sell your product, brand or service by providing beneficial information that attracts customers to your website and ultimately entices them to buy your products. The end goal is to encourage conversions from the engaged visitors to your website.

Identify Your Content Audience & How They Consume Your Content

In many ways content marketing starts with the basics and creates some customer profiling.   Perform some customer analysis.  Who are your customers?  What do they like/dislike?   What products are they looking to buy?  Are the products unique or are they sold widely and competitively?  What sort of company do they want to buy from?   

When you know who your customers are you can then start to target them using content.

• How do people view your content – do they have a preferred social media platform?
• The type of content they view – do they prefer to view videos or images, read long-form content such as blogs or articles?
• Consider device optimisation – do your visitors view your content from mobile phones?
• Time –  how long do visitors spend viewing your content?

For example: Some customers are looking to buy cut to size acrylic panels.  These customers are going to be mainly B2B customers and they will probably try to find you using Google Search on a desktop or laptop. They will be looking for a good idea of how good the materials are and will probably appreciate example videos and images.  They might find you on the weekend using their mobile phone but will probably order on a weekday.  

All of these considerations will help you to not only determine your audience but how they consume your content, so that you can adapt and focus your content accordingly.  

Research & Write Your Content

High quality content will help to naturally draw in your audience. There are many ways that you can research and write your own content.  These include:

• Researching and writing rich product descriptions containing a wide variety of phrases and keywords that your customers might use to find you.  So for example if your product is red, make sure to include the words red, burgundy and even pink in your product descriptions.  

• Combining your ecommerce products to create strong category pages and then combine this with category landing page content.  This can help to define the content and draw in more visitors to that page.

• Using supportive content around product and category descriptions – such as your own product images and videos, product or company awards and branding statements.  This supportive content can also be rich in keywords and content that is likely to attract your customers.  

Choose Your Distribution Method

Your content is primarily distributed by search engines and the best way of getting search engines to distribute it, is to make it search engine friendly. Some people call this search engine optimisation. This is a fine art in itself but the general rule of thumb is that if you write well constructed, genuine content (the type of content that you yourself would like to read) then you are on the right path there. Other points to consider include; a well designed website which looks good to Google and to the customer, a fast and advert free website that breaks records in terms of the speed of the download (and this includes well optimised images and videos), and always avoid duplicate content.

If you have written a blog or article your aim should be to gain some engagement and the more people that share it, the more likely it is to get more interest. You could share it across social media platforms since the traffic generated will be relevant to your business.

It’s worth noting that different social media platforms are better suited to different content. For example, Instagram is great for images and videos. LinkedIn however, may be more suited for B2B ecommerce businesses as it is targeted more towards professionals and companies.

(Non Product) Content Types

Outside of product and category content there are other places that you can drive more customers through better use of content. These include:

• Blogs – a great way to display a vast amount of interesting and varied content that visitors can return to time and time again.  They help to build relationships between customers and businesses and generate leads.  They also contribute to SEO processes. 
• Email marketing – quite underrated but is highly effective.  Emails can be personalised and offer reminders of special events or promote new products or brands.  Emails are also useful for confirmation of orders, notifications about delivery and general communication.
• Offsite Images – for example you can place images on selling platforms such as marketplace and gumtree and on social media platforms such as pinterest and instagram.  There is also some success in generating a gallery on your own website as this can drive more sales through google image search.  
• Product guides – guides and infographics can drive more traffic to your website as they will give customers even more information.
• Customer reviews – shoppers like to read reviews of the products they are about to buy.  This doesn’t need to be limited to customer reviews and including content such as case studies and testimonials can also be an excellent part of your content marketing strategy.

A Final Word On Content

It is always good to know what content is working and what content isn’t, so being able to track the effectiveness of the content you have created is especially important. Tools such as Google Analytics will enable you to track the effectiveness of your blogs. There are also supportive software solutions such as SEMRUSH which will help you to track the effectiveness of your content.  
Vertical Plus uses a system of opportunity management through Cleargro.  This system helps you to focus your content optimisation on products which are already highly visited or being sold.  For sites with large inventory management sites, Cleargro can help focus your content marketing in the right places.