How to Get Ecommerce Content Marketing Right
Running a successful business isn’t easy.
More than 615 million devices now have ad blockers on them. That means 11% of the global population on the internet is blocking ads. The numbers are only set to grow.
What’s the alternative? Content.
Content helps build trust and establishes your site as an authority in your space. Here’s why content marketing is so important. Research shows that 70% of customers would prefer to learn about a company through an article instead of an advertisement.
Content marketing builds businesses. There’s no reason why it can’t build yours.
There are several different types of content you could be using. Say infographics, interactive quizzes, gifs, animation, podcasts, videos, and white-papers, to name a few.
Newer content types like podcasts are taking the world by storm. Power listeners listen to at least 12 hours of podcasts in a week and take action based on what they hear. You should experiment with different forms of content on your e-commerce blog to see if it picks up viewers.
Content Archetypes to Use for an Ecommerce Blog
Use Interactive Content
When you think of content, what comes to your mind? You might picture a blog. Or you might think of articles or product guides. Such content may fail to get proper traction when on an eCommerce blog. You want to talk about your products, but customers may not be keen to listen to that.
Here’s what you can do. Find themes and topics that align with the interests of your core audience and create interactive content on those themes. The ideas you choose should mirror your audience’s interests.
Interactive content that lies close at the heart of the products on your site is a great way to capture people’s attention.
For instance, Sephora’s virtual assistant app allows users to take a photo of themselves, upload it to the app, and test out different shades of lipstick, shadows, eyeliners and lashes to see if it matches with their skin. They can go on as long as they desire to get it just right.
As soon as the prospect zeroes down on a product, the app is ready with purchase links.
The takeaway? By gamifying your content, you make it much more engaging.
Blog About Audience Lifestyles
Most people, including e-commerce marketers, fall into the trap of thinking that when it comes to content, textual content is their only choice.
Nothing could be further away from the truth.
Sole Bicycles sells 15,000 high-end bikes a year. Most of the sales happen as a result of the traffic and traction generated via its blog.
Now, you might think they publish detailed guides on cycles with lots of quality pictures and maybe some video.
They tried that angle for some time. It didn’t pan out. Tips and tricks on cycling weren’t cutting it for Sole Bicycles. So, they decided to amp up the game with the help of content its audience was genuinely interested in.
It turns out bikers wanted to listen to music when cycling. By surveying their customers, they realized this unmet need and came up with mixtapes and offered those for free with their blog.
The rest is history.
The takeaway? If regular content isn’t generating traction, ask your customers what they want to read.
Choose a Side
Being neutral is the best way to get ignored. When you take a stance, a particular group will oppose you for it. Others will turn into raving fans.
There are countless issues you can take a stance on. Be it global warming, clean energy, deforestation, sexism or racism.
Stick to your stand and let it become the guiding light that defines your brand and attracts people to your brand.
With every issue, there will be people opposed to it, and there will be people who would love you for what you say.
Toms shoes donates a pair of shoes for every pair it sells. This way, they have sold over 60 million shoes. The vast majority of people, as the numbers show, love them for being socially conscious.
Toms shoes air their convictions through a dedicated story page where they talk about how buying from Toms creates positive change. They take a stand on issues like gun violence and other social issues.
The takeaway? Don’t be afraid to choose a side.
Straightforward, Informative Content is Your Friend
In many niches, straightforward, informative content focused on problem-solving works.
Try and see how it works for your brand.
For instance, Casper, a leading mattress brand, posts quality content revolving around its niche ideas of sleep and relaxation on its blog. It’s a great resource full of great stats and data on sleep, and how it impacts our well-being.
The blog has managed to generate hundreds of backlinks that helped it rank for important terms that its target audience searches for.
The takeaway? If information-rich content works for your site, it can bring hundreds of SEO leads.
How To Get Content Ideas
Join Communities
Join communities relevant to your product. Irrespective of the industry you’re in, there are niche-relevant communities on several social networking sites you can be a part of.
And no, you’re not joining them to blatantly blow your horn and spam your way into discussion threads hoping to score a sale or get a backlink.
You want to participate in the discussions to understand problems, concerns, and questions that people who could care about your product have.
Use Keyword Research
Now that you have a fair idea of issues and problems that your audience cares about, it’s time to generate more ideas.
Enter those themes into a keyword research tool to get a list of ideas that you can use to create content around.
People can be categorized into different awareness stages. With keyword research, you can identify ideas to target prospects who are at the top of the awareness funnel, the middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel.
It’s a great place to start. Within a few minutes of running a few ideas you got from the keyword research tool, you can get a handy list of keywords with useful information like search volume, keyword difficulty scores, and other vital metrics.
Whatever be the kind of content you create, keyword research can help you understand themes and get you popular ideas you can use.
Want to create mixtapes? Identify popular songs or singers with a keyword research tool. And so on.
Use Tools to Understand What’s Popular
With Buzzsumo, you get access to a real-time feed of the most popular content on a topic sorted by the number of social media shares the content generated.
Here’s an example. I entered the keyword “makeup”.
Buzzsumo gives me a list of the most popular content sorted by social media shares on the said topic. I could find new angles or new ways to repurpose the ideas I see here.
How to practically apply what you see here?
Combing through the list, I see there’s a story about a truck driver who, at the age of 60, quit his job to become a makeup artist. If I were running an eCommerce site selling makeup, I could reach out to the former truck driver and do a podcast interview with him. There are many more similar angles you can apply.
Concluding Thoughts
When it comes to an e-commerce blog, you should test out different ideas to generate traction.
There are lots of interactive content types available today, like interactive quizzes, and interactive chatbots like we saw with Sephora.
The key is to understand what your audience is interested in most and build from there. Test and experiment until you find something that works.
Source: AddThis
