If your eCommerce business is struggling, there are a number of places you might look to find the problem. Is it an issue with your products? Is it the time of the year? Are customers struggling to use your website? Or perhaps, could customers not be finding your business at all because you don’t have an effective eCommerce content marketing strategy in place?
What is content marketing?
Before we dig into the specifics of eCommerce content marketing, let’s first talk about content marketing in general.
The Content Marketing Institute shares this great definition:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
With an effective content marketing strategy in place, you can expect to reap a number of rewards, including:
- Boosting your sales
- Saving money on ad spend
- Utilizing content as a profit center
- Attracting more loyal customers and retaining existing ones
It’s also interesting to note that whatever your current marketing strategy is, chances are, there’s already an element of content marketing you’re utilizing. For example, let’s say you focus on SEO. What you may not realize is that a great SEO marketing strategy relies on SEO-rich content to be successful! Alternatively, if you rely on PPC for marketing success, you need great content to get the clicks and lead generation you want.
Now, with all of this being said, let’s explore the specific types of eCommerce content marketing to help you get an idea of the strategies and options available to you.
Types of eCommerce Content Marketing
As it relates to eCommerce, here are some examples of eCommerce content marketing you might use.
Email content
This includes welcome emails, newsletters, comprehensive email campaigns, and much more. Any time one of your eCommerce customers or site visitors signs up for your email list, you have the opportunity to grow your business by marketing to them with email content.
And if you aren’t sure where, to begin with eCommerce content marketing, email content is a great option! In fact, a whopping 74% of successful B2C content marketers list email as their primary mode of content distribution!
We know the idea of creating email content can seem overwhelming at first. But the beautiful thing about this option is that it can be automated. You can create a series of emails that are sent according to certain actions consumers take. For example, a welcome email can be sent for new signups to receive right away. Or, if someone abandons something in their cart, you can create an email to target these consumers specifically.
There are all kinds of ways to use email for your eCommerce content marketing strategy, and it’s an option you most certainly want to explore!
Social media content
The vast majority of businesses of all sizes utilize social media content as part of their marketing strategy.
Just take a look at these statistics from Statista:
- “In 2021, 91.9 percent of U.S. marketers in companies larger than 100 employees were expected to use social media for marketing purposes. In 2013, the share stood at 86.2 percent.
- When asked about the leading challenges of social media marketing, 67 percent of surveyed marketers stated that assessing its effectiveness was their main concern, followed by strategy design and analyzing obtained data.
- In the United States alone, social media marketing spending is expected to exceed 17 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 – almost ten billion increase, compared to 2014.”
Additionally, a forecasted 91.9% of companies with 100+ employees utilize social media as part of their content marketing strategy in 2021. In 2022, that number is expected to grow to 92.1%.
Much like email marketing, the beauty of social media marketing is all of the different ways you can implement this strategy into your own business. So, if the idea of creating TikToks overwhelms you, you can stick to platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Alternatively, if you’re always up for a challenge and trying something new, creating video content for TikTok might be a very appealing option for you and your business.
Using Facebook and Instagram for your eCommerce content marketing
At Blue Water Marketing, we’re big fans of utilizing Facebook and Instagram for your eCommerce content marketing strategy.
Why? For starters, there are a lot of ways to target your ads on Facebook and Instagram. As a basic strategy, targeting audiences using categories like age, gender, or interests can yield good results. But to really get the most out of your campaigns, it’s best to build custom audiences based on which types of users produce the most profit for your company.
To speed up the custom audience-building process, you can upload a list of your leads or customer email addresses. There are a couple of advantages to this sort of database marketing, including more effective ad spend and stronger lead generation.
Social media is an incredible opportunity for you to extend your eCommerce brand and boost your sales, leads, and online presence. Our team, working in Stuart, FL. serves both local and national clients helping to achieve marketing goals, and reaching Facebook and Instagram users in a scalable, cost-effective approach.
Learn more about our social media content marketing approach here.
Blog content
Next, let’s talk about the power of blogs for building your eCommerce business. What we love about blogs is that you’re not limited to a certain amount of characters. You can share whatever you would like in as much detail as possible. You can add images as you see fit. And of course, you have total control over the content!
Blog writing is a type of long-form content that comes with a number of significant advantages. With more substantive content, you have the ability to develop stronger relationships with readers/customers. You’re able to provide them with significant value within a single blog post, and it’s also an opportunity to include a number of keywords and other SEO strategies to boost your rankings.
When you’re creating posts on relevant topics, it also gives you the opportunity to become an authority on particular subjects. For example, let’s say your eCommerce business specializes in custom birdhouses. When you create long-form blog content on topics your customers are likely to benefit from, you’re doing not only your readers—but also your business—a big favor!
Not only will you attract new business, but you’re also positioning yourself as an authority on all things birdhouses. Google will notice this too and reward you in the form of boosting your search engine ranking position.
Not convinced? Take a look at these statistics about long-form content from Backlinko:
- “Long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short articles. Therefore, long-form content appears to be ideal for backlink acquisition.
- When it comes to social shares, longer content outperforms short blog posts. However, we found diminishing returns for articles that exceed 2,000 words.
- Articles between 1k-2k words get an average of 56.1% more social shares than content that’s less than 1000 words.”
Blog ideas
If you’re not sure where to start with blog content, here are a few post ideas to begin with:
- A blog post detailing how to use your product(s)
- Sharing your company history (this helps build brand loyalty and customer
- A blog post with customer tutorials
PPC ad content
Next, let’s talk about ad content as part of your overall eCommerce content marketing strategy.
PPC advertising sounds straightforward enough. But for an eCommerce store, it’s a lot of work! And you risk a lot of wasted time and resources that you could’ve directed to what matters most – the growth of your business – if it’s not done right.
As part of your overall PPC strategy, it could include a number of opportunities for content creation, including:
- Google Ads: Google Ads’ reach is massive and not to be ignored. Our goal is to drive qualified traffic to your website based on predetermined keywords for your eCommerce brand.
- Shopping Ads: This involves bidding on products and keywords. It shows attractive and highly controllable images of your products to customers ready to buy
- Retargeting Ads: Remarketing brings back visitors who have already been to your site. Your display ads will appear on a number of the other sites they visit across the internet. (Read about the best practices for B2B retargeting success in this post)
- Display Ads: Display ads can be used for growing a Shopify or WooCommerce site and they’re perfect for increasing your online sales. These ads include text, as well as other graphics like images, videos, flash, and audio.
- YouTube Ads: YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. It provides a tremendous opportunity to launch strategic remarketing campaigns and video ads!
- Facebook Ads: Facebook is a valuable resource that allows you to target specific demographics with high-impact images and calls to action.
Other content ideas
In addition to the types of content we just covered, here are some other options you might include in your eCommerce content marketing strategy:
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
- Video marketing
- Infographics
- Whitepapers
- Courses
- Webinars
What Goes Into an Effective eCommerce Content Marketing Strategy
Now that you know more about the options available to you, let’s discuss what a truly effective eCommerce content marketing strategy needs.
It must be unique
Your content marketing strategy needs to be unique and personalized to your specific audience.
For example, when you work with Blue Water Marketing, we research your buyer’s persona and learn more about your customers. This helps us write content that appeals to them specifically. Next, we develop a content calendar, allowing you to see what topics, target keywords, and URLs we will be using for your eCommerce content marketing strategy.
It must be highly researched
Your content marketing strategy needs to have a lot of research behind it in order for it to be successful.
This involves researching your keyword rankings and your top-engaged social media posts to craft content that will drive both engagement and traffic to your website. It also means researching headlines titles that will rank on Google when people are searching for applicable terms.
Lastly, it means identifying market gaps and opportunities from competitive research to ensure your content ranks above your competitors.
You must carefully consider the platforms you’ll use
When you first create your eCommerce content marketing strategy, it might be tempting to get on as many social media platforms as possible to spread your message far and wide. The problem with this is that it means you’re not able to give your best to each platform…that is unless your budget and time is limitless.
Instead, we encourage you to stick to a few platforms rather than spreading yourself thin over all of them. We already mentioned that we’re big fans of Facebook and Instagram for eCommerce content marketing, so these are great places to start.
But ultimately, it’s up to you which platforms you use. Go ahead and experiment with different options. Additionally, the better you know your audience, the better you’ll be able to choose the best platforms to target them.
It requires a plan
Your eCommerce content marketing strategy shouldn’t be a “fly by the seat of your pants” type of deal. It’s not something you come up with on a day-to-day basis. Instead, we recommend planning it far in advance with the help of a content calendar.
There are all kinds of benefits to using a content calendar. For example, you can plan your content strategically based on certain days of the week and according to holidays and other events.
You can also schedule your content in advance so you know exactly what is going out and when. Of course, if you have last-minute changes or additions to your content, go ahead and add them. But if the majority of your content is scheduled and created ahead of time, this is definitely ideal.
Find Out How We Can Help
We know what you’re thinking: I have to do ALL of that to create an effective eCommerce content marketing strategy? Well…not necessarily. The thing is, we can do it for you!
Blue Water Marketing helps B2B and B2C organizations improve how they use content to strengthen their buyer’s journey. Content marketing is at the core of our lead generation practice. We act as a strategy and execution partner for content marketing. We build, test, and optimize content marketing programs to drive qualified leads and sales opportunities for your eCommerce business.
Ready to get started?
Click here to learn more or schedule a call.
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