A Guide To eCommerce Content Marketing

One of the main challenges for eCommerce managers is generating quality traffic to an online shop while maintaining marketing budgets. While paying for traffic through PPC advertising generates instant traffic to your website, it can be costly. Content marketing integrates your blog posts, SEO, lead generation and social media to drive traffic, increase brand awareness and direct customers through your funnel.

In this post you will learn why a content marketing strategy is an effective strategy for your eCommerce business.

What Is Content Marketing?

In our blog post Inbound Marketing And Content Marketing: What's The Difference, we highlighted that content marketing: "in the broadest sense, describes using content to market products and services. It’s about creating content that is relevant and valuable to your prospects and placing it where they can find it, with the aim of delivering profitable results."

Some of the most common types of content for marketing purposes include:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Landing pages
• Guides and ebooks
• Emails
• Webinars

Content marketing starts with attraction as the main way to drive business, have a defined marketing goal in mind and target a specific audience. To add to this, the content strives to satisfy the needs of the reader and is a non-intrusive way to building a relationship between the prospect and the online store.

eCommerce Content Marketing Strategy

For eCommerce businesses the first step of creating a content marketing strategy is to set out content goals. By defining your goals you will know exactly what your objectives are and you will be able to measure your progress.

Once you have your goals set out, you must then set out buyer personas for your business. A buyer persona is a fictional, generalised representation of your ideal customer, personas enable your marketing, sales and customer service departments to establish their ideal profiles. 

There are many benefits to establishing buyer personas:

• Identify customers pain points, needs and wants so you can offer content, products to gain their trust and business.
• Gain an understanding of your target customers buying journey.
• Create content and develop new products based on your current customers and prospects requirements.
• Identify where your customers spend their time online to determine how best to reach out, communicate and promote your message and distribute your content.

Once you have established buyer personas, you need to research the buyer journey for the personas that you have created. The buyers journey is essentially the steps that a buyer takes from discovering or desiring a product to making a purchase.

Once you have set out your goals, buyer personas and buyer journey, you should have a road map for creating targeted content that will resonate with your customers.

Why Content Marketing And PPC Work Well Together

Benefits of using Content Marketing and PPC:

• Drive traffic fast
• Improve your brand exposure
• Leverage keyword data

Read this post to read more about why content marketing and PPC work well together.

Benefits of Content Marketing For eCommerce

Content marketing offers a wide range of benefits for eCommerce businesses and the strategy can help with:

• Increasing brand authority
• Generating targeted traffic to your online store
• Increase number of subscribers
• Results in more sales for your eCommerce business

Not Sure Where To Start?

If you are unsure of where to start with a content strategy for your eCommerce business, schedule a consultation with us today.