You can create valuable content marketing for e-commerce sites by focusing on the core principles of any superb content marketing strategy; inform, entertain and inspire. ECommerce websites are easy to content market because you have so much to tell customers, old and new. There is plenty to talk about, from brand news, product launches and lifestyle topics in your content marketing efforts. Here’s how.
Content Marketing tips for e-commerce sites
If you’re unfamiliar with content marketing, check out my complete guide. Essentially Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on producing and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and gain a defined target audience. Ultimately, the goal is to drive purchases on your e-commerce site. Creating blogs is the ultimate form of content marketing for an eCommerce website, and this is the main focus of today’s topic.
Be consistent in your offering
One of the best tips I can give on e-commerce content marketing is maintaining consistency and frequency in your blogging. By ensuring you post something at an expected time each day, week or month, your audience will come to see you as a dedicated company with an interest in more than just sales. It’s also beneficial for your SEO strategy, as search engines reward consistent publishing, recognising the effort that goes into it. But, a word of warning, its not just about publishing any old content, it must be of high value to your audience and written well.
Provide content outside of sales
Blog articles for e-commerce shops can accidentally focus on sales and products too much. Your blog is not the place to simply talk about your products and brand. The blog should be where your audience can learn about your industry, niche or similar products in general. For example, if you sold soy wax candles, you might want to write articles about soy wax candles as a topic, not your product. These titles provide examples:
- To inform – Are soy wax candles safe?
- To entertain – What your favourite candle scent says about you?
- To inspire – How to decorate your home for Christmas
It’s not about producing content that says, “buy my products; they are the best”; it’s about building trust and educating your readers. This doesn’t mean you can’t share your products in an article, but most of the time, they shouldn’t be the main focus.
Utilise your content
After you’ve published your blog, you may feel the work is done but far from it. A blog post can be used continually, as long as it still holds value. Its primary goal may be to attract traffic through search engines, but you can utilise it in many other ways to reach a new audience. You should always post it to social media, email newsletters and anywhere off your site that you can share it. But, you can also link to it throughout your site too. You can repurpose your content, whether expanding on them or condensing them, so make use of your content and maximise its return on investment properly.
Provide Variety
Producing a range of article styles is key to ensuring your blog is readable and remains fresh. How-to tutorials, product or lifestyle guides, reviews, explainers, case studies and testimonials and listicles should all be used to provide variety. But, the written word isn’t the only content of articles. You can also create business videos and infographic posts. These provide information for visual readers and break up lots of writing. However, you should still include some written copy, which is vital for search engines. Include a transcript of the video or infographic for SEO and ensure your content is accessible to most people.
Ensure SEO is considered
While creating engaging and entertaining content is the goal of content marketing, no e-commerce site should create it without some consideration of SEO. You should create content primarily to draw people to your site, especially through search engines. Creating a content campaign based on your SEO strategy will provide you with endless titles to work to and a structure to adhere to. While it’s good to be able to write content that you are interested in as an organisation, such as news about your company or topics that are close to your heart, only your dedicated customers will see and enjoy this type of content. Instead, most of your content marketing strategy should focus on answering your audience’s most searched questions and queries that support your targeted keywords and phrases. Content marketing is intrinsically linked to SEO, so it should be part of your content marketing strategy from the star
Content marketing for e-Commerce with Middleton Marketing
Don’t have the time or skills to produce quality content consistently? I can help. I love creating articles, case studies and whitepapers for companies that want to boost business by providing genuine, helpful content for their customers. With my SEO-focused approach, the content we produce together will be research-driven, providing information and entertaining and engaging content for your readership. Get in touch today, and we can build a flexible, cost-effective strategy that works for your organisation.