Content marketing is a powerful strategy used to attract, engage, and retain customers by constantly creating and sharing relevant content such as articles, videos, and other media. Content marketing has proven to be a very powerful marketing method because it answers the audience's questions and helps you build trust, develop relationships, improve conversions, and generate leads. According to a 2020 report from HubSpot, 70% of marketers are currently investing in content marketing.
An ecommerce content strategy is essential for your content to build value and trust in your brand and drive more traffic to your business. The first thing to keep in mind before developing your strategy is that it must be aligned with your product or service, and it should follow the same style and tone as the rest of your brand's communications.
Here are the steps to build a winning content strategy for your ecommerce store:
Step 1: Analyze your current business situation.
Before creating your content strategy, it is essential to understand your current business situation. To do this, it is necessary to analyze the current state of your business, your brand presence, and your current and potential customers. By doing so, you will be able to understand your strengths and weaknesses. After that, you will be able to start creating your strategy, taking into account where your business is starting from and in which direction you want to go.
Additionally, it is also helpful to perform a competitive analysis in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your main competitors. Although it is appropriate to look at powerful and larger competitors, it may be more helpful to research competitors of a similar size to your business. Analyzing the competition will help you to:
- Understand what content you are competing against.
- Learn from their strategy: publication frequency, content types, distribution channels, target keywords, and more.
- Get ideas for content that has worked for others.
- Know which of your competitors' content performs better in SERPs or has higher engagement in social networks.
This analysis will help you estimate your position in the market in terms of your online presence.
Step 2: Define your goals
Be clear about why you want to carry out this strategy. We recommend you to be realistic with the goals you want to achieve. Content marketing must have a purpose, with well-defined and clear steps to achieve the objective and goals.
Defining marketing goals is crucial to know where to focus your strategy. This will depend on the needs of your business, and your goals could include increasing web traffic, achieving a higher conversion rate, being better positioned in Google results or improving branding, among others.
Having clear objectives will help you develop content and measure the resulting performance.
Step 3: Identify your target audience and create buyer personas.
In order to adapt the content of an ecommerce website to the needs of the buyer, you must know exactly who that person is. By creating your buyer persona ( your ideal customer), based on actual data and marketing insights, you will be able to create personalized content. If you want to know your customer better, you can analyze:
- Demographics such as gender, age, and location.
- Interests and hobbies
- Their values and fears
- Their goals and objectives
- Their pain points
After creating your buyer personas, it's time to define what messages you want to deliver, what stories you want to tell, and how you are going to approach them. Now that you know your customers better, you can find out why they need your product.
Step 4: Define what type of content you want to create for each buyer persona.
In order to create content according to your audience, apart from your competitors, it is also necessary to study your field. Then, after having a better understanding of who your customer is, your target, and the competitors, you will be able to decide which type of content you want to create. Each form of content works in a unique way to reach your audience. Below, we present different types of content that you can create for your eCommerce.
Types of Content to Develop:
There are many different types of content you can create to grow your eCommerce. Here are some of the content you can work on to make your business go further:
Blog posts: Posts are fundamental to most content marketing strategies, as they build customer relationships, generate leads, and help improve SEO (search engine optimization).
Visual content: This includes everything from videos to good product photography. Visual elements not only help your audience retain information. It also ensures that they are more likely to remember your brand.
Customer stories: These can take the form of testimonials, reviews, and case studies. This content helps build trust in your brand and helps other customers who read these stories decide to buy your products.
Influencer marketing: Collaborating with influencers has become a relevant strategy as the results obtained are beneficial. Data shows that 80% of consumers have bought something through an influencer's recommendation.
FAQ pages: these pages are one of the best ways to improve the SEO of e-commerce sites. Since the questions they answer are often long-tail keywords that customers use to search for, you can get traffic directly to your website.
Step 5: Distribute &Promote your content
If you want your content to serve its purpose and drive marketing objectives, you need to be proactive with promoting your content. Social media is one of the most popular and effective distribution channels. 94% of content marketers use social media as a distribution channel for their content. In addition to social media, you can also send newsletters, share your content in online communities and forums, and promote it through link building or email. You can also launch paid ad campaigns to promote your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Reddit, to spread it further. A common good practice is to run different tests to find your business's most effective distribution channels.
Step 6: Measure the results and analyze how your audience consumes your content
Measuring results is vital to knowing what you are doing well and what you can improve. Therefore, after distributing your content, pay attention and analyze how your audience consumes your content to find out which content your audience finds most interesting, which they interact with the most, and which gets the best results. This way, you can improve your ecommerce content strategy over time.
Step 7: Collect feedback from your customers
Check the reviews, comments, and interactions users have with your content, app, or website. Often, users ask questions about a specific topic, product, or service, which will help you know what type of content you can create or which topics you should cover. Over time, you can adapt the content to solve their questions and needs.
In addition, when users leave positive reviews on your online store, new customers can resolve their doubts and decide to buy your products. This article shows you how to get five-star mobile app store reviews and ratings.
The power of multi-channel campaigns
Multi-channel campaigns can help you improve connections, leads, and conversions. A multi-channel strategy includes email, social media, push notifications, display ads, TV, and more. At Tapcart, we help businesses with their marketing strategy by offering mobile push notifications, one of the most powerful tools to drive engagement and retention rates. Tapcart gives you access to unlimited free push notifications.
A multi-channel strategy includes email, social media, push notifications, display ads, TV, and more. However, it is important to keep in mind that you should adapt the content according to the channel you are using.
Think about elements that can be easily extended to any platform when planning your campaigns. With the necessary adaptations, brands can carry out a broad marketing strategy capable of generating good results, capturing audiences anywhere and driving engagement.
The benefits of content marketing are many: improving SEO and brand authority, building relationships and trust, and increasing leads and conversions.
The importance of content marketing lies in providing your audience with relevant, quality content that they are seeking and in the format and channels they use regularly. If you achieve the proposed objectives with this strategy, you can turn your readers into your customers.
If you want to take your e-commerce further, contact us and discover the potential of Tapcart.