6 Tips for your E-commerce Content Marketing Strategy

SEO and PPC take most of the glory for driving sales online, but let’s not forget about another strategy — content marketing.

Through storytelling, e-commerce brands can showcase their values and beliefs to appeal to their readers. Additionally, content can serve to encourage existing customers to repeat purchases by reminding them to come back.

1. Define your target audience and their interests

You need to know who you’re talking to. Different buyers will have different needs, interests, and, ultimately, content preferences. What may be interesting to one buyer may not be interesting to another one.

To clearly define different targets, it’s useful to create buyer personas. For instance, if you are a women’s jewelry retailer, you may have the following buyer personas:

• Women buying jewelry for themselves
• Partners buying jewelry for their significant others
• People buying jewelry as gifts

Those personas would be further defined by demographics, interests and behaviors. They all require different strategies and content so by keeping those audience nuances in mind, will help you generate better content overall.

2. Consider different stages in the buying process

By knowing your target buyer personas, and what stage in the buying cycle they are in, will help you better tailor your content to address their needs and anticipate doubts or questions.

The buying cycle can be simplified into 3 stages:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Purchase

Content can help you bring new potential customers to the awareness stage by ranking organically for keywords that are related to your business. If you’re looking to nurture potential customers that are in the Consideration stage, it would be best to create content that highlights your benefits and unique value proposition. The goal is to persuade the potential customer that your product is a must-buy. 

3. Use the keyword planner for keyword research

This free tool provided by Google will help you get key data about the keywords you’re interested in.

For instance, the keyword planner can provide keyword volume, CPC, and competition data. Knowing the keyword search volume for specific terms will help you measure the potential success of your “awareness” type of content.

If the topics you’re interested in have no or low search volume, it means that no one is looking for those terms. Therefore, it wouldn’t make sense to write about them because they would not bring any traffic to the website.

4. Create a content calendar

It’s important to get organized. It is good to create a content calendar to ensure consistency and organization within your team.

Just add a column for Topic, Focus Keyword, Deadline, Writer, and Status. Then the writers, the person publishing the content, and the SEO or marketing specialist can be in sync to create a smooth workflow.

Content should be published constantly with a similar posting schedule to achieve the best results for search engine optimization or SEO.

5. Optimise content format

There are three key things to keep in mind when distributing content:

• Content Format
• Distribution Platform
• Budget

For Articles or Guides:

• Illustrate the content with images. It makes content come to life.
• Short paragraphs are best (about 3 lines). They are easier to scan than long paragraphs.
• Use simple language. Complicated language can be intimidating for some readers.

For Videos:

• Keep it short and sweet. One minute or less is perfect for social media and websites.
• Get to the point. The first seconds of your video are the most important.
• Add subtitles or in-text. It helps users that watch videos silently.

6. Use paid advertising to promote your content

There are millions of e-commerce retailers just like you, following best practices and doing all the right things. You’ll need to invest some money in paid advertising to be able to reach your target audience.

One of the best ways to get this additional exposure is Facebook advertising. With Facebook’s business platform, you’ll be able to create ads for both Facebook and Instagram, applying many different targeting options.

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