3 Practical Tips for E-Commerce Content Marketing

3 Practical Tips for E-Commerce Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the best ways to get your E-Commerce off the ground. When attempting to get your marketing going with a smaller budget, and you don’t have the money to invest in paid marketing campaigns, you’ll have to invest something else: time.

Content marketing can be really useful for E-Commerce: content is easily shareable, consumable, and it can draw people back to your store. However, there’s other long-term benefits from content marketing that include getting back-links or referencing your site, making it easier for search engines to find you.

You can’t just create content to create it, your content needs a purpose; it needs a destiny.

There’s so much out there to compete with- so your content needs to be pertinent to your store or domain, it needs to add value to your reader, and it needs to be interesting.

How do you make content marketing work for E-Commerce?

We found a great infographic by Onlinekickstart.com that lays out how you go about getting sure results from content marketing.

Your first step should be to determine what the goal of your content is. Before you even start creating anything, you need to determine what this content will eventually accomplish. Is it going to attract shares on social media? Will it convert customers that are undecided? Will it develop trust with your audience? Regardless of your content’s goal, you need to define this and keep it in mind before you go any further.

3 Practical Tips for E-Commerce Content Marketing

Link attraction is when you’re trying to get pertinent back links to your site to help with referencing, getting shares, and visibility.

There are four main keys to attaining this goal:

Make it fail proof:

Look around and take inspiration from what is popular. What style, format, and platform worked the best to attract links before? Look at what your competitors do, and look at what works to guide you.

Become the reference:

You want your content to be so good and complete that everyone else links to your content.

3 Practical Tips for E-Commerce Content Marketing

Make it Evergreen:

For this to work you need to make sure that your content will be relevant 5 years from now and keep working to attract links for your site. That being said, this can be tricky in domains where change is constant (I’m looking at you, high-tech fields). Luckily, by leaving dates out of your content (not in your sources, but avoiding them in your titles can be helpful), and focusing on timeless topics, it can work.

Promote it like crazy:

This should be the biggest no-brainer. There is no “If you build it, they will come” nonsense here. They won’t come if they don’t know it’s there! So get to sharing and get it on every single platform and social network you can find. Don’t be afraid to ask for engagement (like messaging people and asking them what they think of your content).

2. Conversion content:

Content that converts pushes the buyer along the sales funnel, encouraging them to become more than just visitors. In this case, your content can follow the general formula:

  • Awareness: show that you understand the visitor’s problem/obstacle.
  • Evaluation: show that you have solved their problem in the past.
  • Purchase: Demonstrate how your solution is better than the alternatives.

3 Practical Tips for E-Commerce Content Marketing

Video is the king of conversion content, giving customers the access to tutorials and troubleshooting tips. By dispelling fears or anxieties customers might have about your store or your product, you encourage them to become buyers.

3. Authority content:

This helps when you’re trying to build a proper audience that like and trust you. The ultimate goal is to be able to influence your audience’s behavior.

There are 4 main keys to being able to achieve this:

Be truthful:

Tell the truth, even when it makes you look bad. Getting caught in a lie will be the easiest way to destroy the trust you’ve built with your audience.

Be transparent:

Be open and honest about your motives and decisions. Being transparent (even with certain things that could bring criticism) fosters trust with your customers.

3 Practical Tips for E-Commerce Content Marketing

Teach:

Something that helps customers trust you the most is giving away free information. This shows that your motives are pure.

Have integrity:

If you’re saying you’ll do something, keep your word. No one trusts a back-tracker.

With great power comes great responsibility, and abuse of the influence you have over an audience will be the quickest way for them to turn on you.

When you sit back and think about what you want your content marketing to accomplish for your E-commerce, it’s pretty easy to find inspiration after. When you have a goal in mind for the kind of content you want to create the rest will fall into line.

How do you create content around your goals? Tell us below or Tweet us!