Content is king in today’s digital marketing landscape. It can help new e-commerce sites reach their target market and build revenue while staying within the budget.
However, your content won’t be effective without the perfect strategy. Therefore, you need to have a long-term plan to make sure the content you produce helps you achieve your goals.
In this article, we’ll provide you with eight easy steps for building an excellent content strategy for your e-commerce store.
Let’s get started.
1. Have a Capable Website
A capable website helps to realize a seamless content strategy. When conducting content marketing, you’re looking at tons of blog posts, images, and videos.
If your website can’t accommodate the weight, it starts to load slower. As a consequence, the user experience will suffer.
The best way to ensure excellent website performance is to find the right web hosting provider. Typically, e-commerce websites need at least a 4GB storage space to accommodate all your product images, customer emails, and articles.
If you don’t know where to find an excellent provider, check out web hosting from Hostinger. Apart from offering massive storage space, it also packs a free SSL certificate, ensuring your customers’ sensitive information is safe.
2. Understand Your Target Market
When it comes to writing content for an e-commerce website, pay close attention to your writing style, tone, and voice. This is vital because the right delivery will connect you to your target market, helping you generate quality leads.
To understand your target audience, analyze your visitors demographics and create a buyer persona. By identifying your customer persona, you’ll better understand who you’re trying to reach and what problems you can help them solve.
This is what a buyer persona’s profile usually includes:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Occupation
- Salary
- Personality
- Needs
- Pain points
- Motivation
- Preferred social media platforms.
With customer personas, the more specific you can get, the better.
3. Identify the Right Content Types
There are dozens of different content types. Some of them include tutorials, infographics, reviews, and glossaries. Depending on your products or services, adjust your content types based on how the article can help your target audience better understand your business.
Suppose you run a skincare business. In that case, you can write about how your product helps fulfill your target audience’s skincare needs. Or, it can be about what a particular ingredient can do to improve your target audience’s skin condition.
Additionally, encourage your previous customers to have their say by allowing user-generated content. UGC can be a great asset as it helps to build trust with your potential customers.
4. Research Your Competitors
Competitor research is about identifying your competitors in the industry and analyzing their marketing strategies. This research is vital for your business’ success, as it can help you learn what methods work and what don’t.
Start by finding out who your biggest competitors are. Keep in mind to target those with whom you share the same target market, as that will ensure a more precise analysis.
Here’s how to conduct your competitor content strategy analysis:
- Inspect the content types. Make note of every content you can find on your competitors’ marketing platform. Whether they’re blog posts or Instagram videos, this information helps you determine what content types you should invest in and what your target audience enjoys.
- Analyze the publication frequency. Take note of the social media platforms your competitors use and analyze how often they post new content on each of the mediums. Also, look at the content details, such as content quality and quantity.
- Check the content topics. Review the content titles, headings, and overall structure. Additionally, have a look at the minor details, like meta descriptions and image alt texts.
5. Determine Your Unique Selling Point
A unique selling point (USP) is what will make your company different from your competition in the business field. The two major USP categories are quality and price.
The former is when a company uses its products and services’ high-grade quality to attract potential customers. The latter is when the goods come at a very competitive price.
Without a USP, a company will have a hard time standing out from the competition. Thus, it’s vital to determine your business’ strengths that make it the best choice for your target market.
6. Create High-Quality Content
High-quality, informative content is key to generating organic traffic. This is because the more related your content to your target audience’s search query, the more Google sees it as relevant. As a result, your article will show up on the first pages of search engines results.
To help you optimize your content for search engines, conduct keyword research. Some of the excellent keyword research tools include Ahrefs and Semrush. The software allows you to find topics to write about and generate keywords to use in the article.
7. Strategically Distribute Your Content
Content distribution refers to publishing and promoting your content across different marketing platforms. For example, images and videos go to Instagram, as this platform is very visual. On the other hand, glossaries and tutorials make great blog posts.
When distributing your content through social media, consider your target market’s preferred platforms.
Additionally, consider other content types, such as eBooks, case studies, and white papers. Learn about the different stages of the marketing funnel and see whether that increases the traffic and conversions.
8. Measure Your Results
Content marketing is an ongoing process, meaning it needs continuous improvement to ensure it’s effective. That said, evaluate the campaign’s results regularly to see what works and what doesn’t.
Here are some of the success indicators you can track to measure your content marketing results:
- Organic traffic. The term refers to users who visit a website without the help of paid ads. When the content strategy is done correctly, you’ll see increasing organic traffic over time. Thus, monitor how your content performs based on how much organic traffic it generates.
- Conversion rate. This key indicator shows you how effective your calls to action (CTA) are. If the number is low, you’ll need to fine-tune your CTAs to encourage your potential customers to take the desired steps.
- Bounce rate. If you want to see whether your content successfully engages your target audience, look at how well your time-on-page score is. This metric can also tell you how far down a visitor scrolls through your content.
- Social media shares. Keep track of how many people share your content on their favorite social media platform. That way, you can reach a wider audience, improving your business’ visibility.
Conclusion
Throughout the article, you’ve learned the eight simple steps to building a great content marketing strategy for your e-commerce store.
One thing to keep in mind, this strategy is an ongoing process. There will be shifts in content marketing trends, so you’ll have to keep up with the updates to ensure an effective content strategy.
Also, remember to go with a hosting provider that can cater to your business needs. That way, you’ll provide your business with the perfect environment to grow.
Good luck with your new online business!