Unless you’re living on a deserted island with Wilson the volleyball, you would know that content marketing is crucial for any eCommerce business.
A 2022 survey from SemRush shows that more than 51% of marketers utilize organic traffic to measure their organization’s success. These statistics show that clear, efficient content marketing allows companies to share their identities and goals with their audience in an authentic and engaging manner.
However, the top content marketing challenge for marketers these days is generating quality, organic leads, and their difficulties stem from not having any content strategy in place.
Without a well-defined content strategy, your content is just words, images, and sounds that get thrown into the fray without any meaning. Content is just stuff on the internet, after all. No matter how much money you put into content creation and marketing, you will not get your desired results if you do not have a strategy in place.
Now that you understand the importance of strategizing your marketing content, here is a convenient list of questions that you can ask yourself, which would help you reinforce customer engagement and drive sales in the eCommerce space.
Question 1. Who is your target audience?
Successful eCommerce businesses know who they are selling to, there’s no doubt about it. eCommerce marketing content needs to be tailored specifically to your customer’s identity, purpose, and needs, so an efficient strategy is to build a buyer persona.
The buyer persona is a detailed representation of your target audience – created based on deep market research and insights – and used as a singular customer for your content strategy.
As your business goes down its sales funnel, you can also tweak your buyer persona to address existing issues that can be solved to retain business with your customers.
There is a multitude of factors that can be included when you develop your buyer persona, including:
- Motivations
- Demographics
- Psychographics (Behaviors/Characteristics/Personalities)
- Audience’s preferred content platforms
- Customer problems
Piercing through your buyer’s psyche allows your organization to outline your customer’s pain points and buying process, thus enabling you to create relatable content.
Question 2. What type of research should be done before launching content?
What research do you need to do for your content strategy to generate organic traffic and quality leads? There are several tools that you can play around with, depending on your situation.
Here are a few research methods that you can use for content marketing:
- Story Calendar. This research tool allows you to develop ideas in a clear, well-organized manner. In the ideation process, you can take advantage of topic research tools to help you identify trending and relevant keywords, engaging headlines, and content differences between you and your competition.
- Competitive Analysis. An SEO competitive analysis can also be a useful research method if you wish to compare your market positioning with your competitors’. You can also see crucial gaps in keywords, titles, and domain names, allowing your company to create new content in areas that haven’t been tapped before.
- Lateral thinking process. Everyone loves out-of-the-box ideas, and when you’re working in the oversaturated world of content marketing, you will need a lot of them. An efficient lateral thinking process for ideation allows your team to create new angles.
Content generation is a skill, and with the right research tools, your eCommerce business can pick up on fresh content pretty easily. Remember these questions: is your content relevant and engaging? Is it powerful and time-resilient, or will it wilt over time? All these questions should be answered in your research process to capture the right content ideas for your audience.
Question 3. What type of content should you launch in each part of the sales funnel?
Sales funnel concepts are vital to fully conceptualize a customer’s journey – from initial awareness all the way to purchase/conversion. As a content marketer, you would understand that the content you put out should coincide with the specific section of your customer’s journey.
In the awareness stage, you should strive to provide easily accessible content (e.g. blogs, vlogs, SEO marketing, etc.) that solve problems without the need to sell products. This content should demonstrate that you understand your customer’s problems.
Content in the consideration stage should subsequently help you interact with your customers on a deeper level. You’ve already shown your knowledge of your customer’s pain points, now it’s time for you to guide them toward the solutions that they need.
The consideration stage is also where your customers are doing intensive research, specifically on whether your solution would fit their needs best. Try to provide detailed, well-researched content (e.g. case studies, explainer videos, podcasts/webinars, etc.) to drive your customers to your business.
Finally, customers in the purchase stage would now decide where they can get the best bang for their buck. You can convince your audience that your products are too good to be passed on by launching a variety of content (e.g. testimonials, emails, free trials/demos, etc.) Your objective here is to retarget your audience who are at their purchase point.
Question 4. What are your content performance metrics?
You’ve already published your content, but how do you measure results? Does your content help your business goals by generating ROI, or does it lack impact? Since content marketing is a continuous process, you need to look at different performance metrics to help your team create better content in the future.
As an eCommerce business, you will have to track several key performance indicators (KPIs) depending on the type of content you put out to the public. Some relevant KPIs include the following:
- Organic website traffic
- Page views/time per visit
- Likes and followers, shares, and other post reach metrics
- # of downloads, subscribers, view duration per video
- Open rate, conversion rate, click-through rate (CTR)
Accurate metrics are useful in that they not only give you an idea of your content’s performance, it also highlights critical points of improvement for your eCommerce business to strengthen its marketing capabilities.
Both small and large brands invest in eCommerce content marketing because it has proven itself as a powerful tool to reach audiences and generate business in the social media age. While there is no magic recipe to content marketing success, you can strongly position your eCommerce business by connecting your customer’s pain points into a driving point for your solution.