It’s 2018 and running an ecommerce business is a lot more than just selling your products and services online. It requires you to handle everything; inventory management, promotion, shipping, replacements, refunds, order management – pretty much a lot on the plate.
Amidst all these job obligations, we hope that you have not managed to ignore the importance of the content marketing strategy for your ecommerce business.
Well, the right content marketing strategy will get your business the recognition it needs. Aimed at creating the content that fits the audience’s perception well, this strategy will also help you boost your sales and retain existing customers because it lets the content speak for your eCommerce endeavor.
So, what is the right plan when it comes to crafting the best content marketing strategy for your eCommerce business? Let’s explore.
Portray a bigger story
Storytelling is a unique art that has braced digital trends and customers nowadays tend to be more interested in stories rather than factual descriptions. This applies to the content marketing strategy of your ecommerce business as well.
Let your content speak for itself about how your products have managed to avoid consumerism woes of many. This might sound stupid but this definitely has worked for many brands, an emotional background to these stories will help your content and audience connect better.
Spice up this story-laced content with pictures and videos to keep your audience looped. You can either run a separate page for this storytelling section on your eCommerce website or you could simply replace the traditional blog.
Serve a humanitarian purpose
From the business point of view, this move exists to seek a considerable amount of attention. Based on the scale that your ecommerce business is currently running on, you can opt for Charity Collab.
For example, Michael Kors collab with Watch Hunger Stop to eliminate world hunger that supports 16 million children over 70 countries. Through these collabs, your business is able to support a social cause and talk about it with their customers in a pursuit to raise awareness and build social credibility. Your eCommerce business can run a story/blog for this purpose and engage the customers in it. This will send out a super positive impression of your business as to how socially committed it is.
Build partnerships
Online business is definitely cooler than traditional business ways because it has inspired a trend of embracing competition and even working with them. Your ecommerce business can build great content around this strategy by partnering with the firms in competition and others as well.
Building partnerships with other members of the digital sphere can help you tap a new section of the audience as well as expose your line of products to customers who are loyal to other brands.
Influencers are everywhere
Influencer marketing has become the soul of online marketing and promotion of several brands and businesses. Your business can get in touch with key industry individuals who will drive your brand’s message to the prospective customers who follow these influencers on social media.
The online customers heavily rely on the opinion of these social media influencers, who use popular social media pages to market your content and products.
Provide some free value to customers
In an effort to market the content for your ecommerce business, you cannot always expect to make money churning moves and not move a brick for free. A great content marketing strategy for an ecommerce business will always entail the use of offline as well as online resources to garner the attention of the customers.
Offering an offline value resource such as physical coupons, newsletters, a trial of new products, FAQs sheet etc. can spark a sense of physical hoarding in the customers. Make it a point to send these for free because not a lot of people would be interested in paid stuff. Freebies are a great way to get your content marketed and make sure that new people try them out.
Involve your audience in your content
When your eCommerce website is planning its content, it is a great idea to involve your audience in it. You can simply ask for their suggestions for the next blog post or the suggestion regarding what features they might want to see next on your online website. Doing so will make the audience feel important which is an indirect way of promoting your business now that your customers trust it.
Be persistent with a content theme
Not yet followed by many new ecommerce websites, a content theme is definitely a great way of staying uniform in your ecommerce site’s content.
Let’s talk about the product listing on your site as an example. Your website could follow a generic page layout for each of these products in the catalog. However, the layout must be uniform and consistent across the listing. By that, we mean that the content length of the description, the use of target keywords, and the overall aesthetic appeal must remain the same.
You can eventually change the theme to keep things fresh and kill the boredom. Also, if you have been looking for some inspiration to keep things at your ecommerce website tempting, ecommercebooth.com is a highly valuable resource.
A guide for customers to keep everything covered
The best way to keep your audience hooked to the website of your ecommerce business is to provide them everything related to the product you are dealing in. By everything, we mean to mention the product guide, the installation guide, the customer point of contact, product description and images, customer reviews, FAQs related to the products etc.
An educational guide in the form of a listicle, a blog post, or a video will drive new leads to your ecommerce website simply for the fact that how useful your brand is capable of becoming in order to product-educate its customers.
Case studies for your phenomenal products
Your ecommerce website will always have some products that are comparatively more popular than the others. If your business is offering solution-based products, you can tap into its significance by creating content around it. To accomplish that, case studies are great.
Roundup posts FTW!
Roundup posts that go like “Top 10 electronics gadgets to buy this summer” are doing great in 2018. Why not integrate them into your ecommerce content marketing plan as well?
You can be creative and can compile a roundup blog post for the most popular products from your site. This will become a great resource for promoting more than a single product through a single post without them sounding sale-focused. If you have a budget, you can buy sponsored space on famous blog sites and ask them to publish these roundup posts for you.
Usher the customer into your personal/professional journey
If suitable to the line of business for your ecommerce endeavor, you can choose to unveil the personal/professional story behind your business idea through text-based or video-powered content on your website. This is, again, a semantic advantage for your site’s content strategy.
Hire expert bloggers
Last but not the least, the best thing that you can do for your site’s content is to hire expert content creators or writers who understand the right brand tone and know how to create content that converts. They might cost you a considerable amount on your content strategy budget, but they will be worth it.
Content marketing is all about targeting the right set of audience and making an attempt to convert them into loyal customers through targeted content that attracts them. By having a clear understanding of what your ecommerce content marketing strategy is expected to deliver, your work will become easy. For the rest of the part, the above-mentioned tips will help you plan a great Content Marketing strategy to improve your eCommerce business.
However, research is the key to making sure that you are adding new trends to the list. So, stay tuned to this space for more information.