Top 23 E-Commerce Content Marketing Strategies To Drive Sales

Did you know that over 2.14 billion online shoppers regularly shop on e-commerce sites worldwide? This is where effective e-commerce content marketing can make all the difference for your business!

As the world of online shopping grows exponentially, eCommerce businesses are in a power tussle to gain the audiences’ attention and turn them into loyal customers.

E-commerce content marketing is the perfect solution to build recognition and promote your offerings as an e-commerce business. However, the cut-throat competition can make it tough to get yourself heard.

Don’t worry, though! This blog will cover the key content marketing strategies and concepts you can apply today to beat your competition and boost your e-commerce store’s traffic and sales. Let’s dive in.

What Is E-commerce Content Marketing?

E-commerce content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content to your audience to grow your online retail business and brand awareness. It involves sharing valuable content that attracts and converts your target audience.

You can use various content types, including email, blogs, videos, and infographics. And the choice usually depends on your offerings and audience preferences. 

However, the content should always address the requirements and challenges of your target audience in an engaging manner while presenting your store’s offerings as the best solution to boost your traffic.

Why Do You Need Content Marketing For An E-commerce Website?

Content marketing is an efficient method for e-commerce businesses to reach new audiences, build engagement, and increase their authority within their niche. Here are the main benefits of content marketing for your e-commerce website –

1. Improves SEO

You could have the best products or services in the world. But what’s the point if they don’t appear in the web searches? 

E-commerce content marketing improves your Search Engine Optimization to raise your visibility online, helping to generate more organic traffic and conversions for your store. So, you must regularly distribute high-quality content that appeals to your audience and search engines. This will improve your position on the search engine results pages and boost your e-commerce website’s traffic, leading to higher sales.

2. Completes The Customer Journey

Content marketing involves targeting the customers with relevant content for every stage of their journey. It keeps your prospects moving through your sales funnel to ensure long-term success in e-commerce. Here are the customer journey stages that content marketing encompasses-

• Awareness- They are aware of a challenge or opportunity but need more information to decide.
• Consideration- They are actively researching solutions to those challenges.

Decision- They are ready to decide which product or service to purchase.

3. Brand Differentiation

Standing out from the competition can prove tricky, and you need something that sets you apart and builds brand recognition. That’s where a content marketing guide can help you! 

High-quality content helps you create a brand identity and demonstrate why customers should pick your brand over competitors. 

4. Increase Brand Loyalty

Did you know that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60% to 70%, while the probability of selling to a new customer is only 5% to 20%?

These content marketing statistics show the importance of maintaining long-term relationships with your customers to keep them loyal to your brand. And you can ensure this by consistently sharing interesting, valuable, or entertaining content that engages and retargets your existing customers.

E-commerce Content Marketing Strategies That Work

E-commerce content marketing involves creating and sharing engaging content to build your recognition and get interested leads to your e-commerce website. It includes content creation for every stage of your buyer’s journey to convert unaware prospects to loyal customers who relate to your brand.

Sounds complicated? Here are some time-tested strategic approaches to help you implement content marketing for your e-commerce business quickly-

1. Create A Content Hub

A content hub is an internal linking strategy that boosts your SEO and increases search traffic by driving authority and topical relevance from the linked pages into the hub page. It involves linking multiple pages of related content back to a central hub page. The hub page usually has more generalized content and mentions the links to the other pages at appropriate points. 

2. Start With One Form Of Content

Don’t waste your time and money trying to leverage all forms of content across all platforms! The quickest way to start is to begin with one type of content on one platform.

Don’t pick at random, though! The best content format and the channel will depend on your product, service, message, niche market, and customer persona. 

And if you are not sure which to go with, email content could be the perfect starting point. In fact, 74% of the most successful B2C marketers use email as their primary content distribution method due to its high ROI, massive reach, automation options, and low costs. Other content types you should check as a beginner are blogs, infographics, images, and interactive videos.

3. Research Your Competitors

You should always check out your competitors’ successes, failures, and current strategies before taking the dive. This step is crucial to ensure you don’t repeat the common mistakes or miss the best opportunities that your competitors are reaping. Here are some questions you need to answer while applying competitor research-

• What are your competitors doing? 
• Which questions are they answering? 
• Which content format are they using? 
• What type of distribution channel are they using?
• What is their e-commerce content marketing strategy and investment?
• What are their past mistakes and successes that you can learn from?

You can run a competitor content analysis, competitive keyword research, ad research, YouTube keyword research, gap analysis, and other competitive analysis techniques for competitor research. Also, remember to record and incorporate what you understand from competitor analysis to get critical insights for your business.

4. Ask Your Audience

There’s no better guide to making compelling content than the suggestions of the target audience itself! Of course, you got an idea of your audience during the initial research. But the modern market changes before you know it!

So, don’t forget to regularly interview your existing audience about their needs, questions, and challenges. Their answers can be a goldmine for great future content ideas!

5. Build SEO Topic Clusters On Your Blog

A topic cluster is an SEO tactic to structure pages within a website. The trick is that you must group pages with related content such that they altogether cover a broader topic.

Here are some e-commerce content marketing examples where you may use topic clusters-

• If you’re an online fruit store writing about “Mangoes”, you can create several pages about the varieties of mangoes, their origins, and their harvest techniques. These pages are part of the same topic cluster because they are all related to mangoes.
• If you are a music store writing about “Guitars,” you can create several pages for the cluster, such as guitar types and their uses, top guitar brands, types of guitar strings and their use, and so on.

Here’s how it looks,

Source

This tactic increases the chance of finding each page organically by comprehensively covering everything a reader may want to know about the main topic in one place. It also raises your search intent and authority for search engines.

6. Create Product Or Service Videos To Show Your Offerings

A product or service video helps you leverage the power of videos to promote your product or service by showing it in action. The video is usually brief and presents the features and advantages of the offering in an interesting and convincing manner.

Not sure if the video marketing is worth the cost and effort involved? 

Two-thirds of people (66%) say they prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product or service. And this is over 3 times higher than people who said they would prefer to read a text-based article (18%) instead. So, using videos to show and explain your offerings is a great opportunity you must not miss!

7. Create A Section Of FAQs

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and check out the possible questions or doubts a customer may have about your product or service. If required, you may ask the target audience directly about possible questions. For e-commerce content marketing examples involving products, these could be some common questions asked by customers-

• Do you deliver to my location?
• What is your return policy?
• What if it breaks?
• How much will the shipping cost?
• How long does shipping take?

Once you have listed the FAQs, it’s time to address the prospects’ concerns with brief but complete answers. 

The FAQ page is a handy resource for prospects and reduces the burden of answering repetitive questions. Moreover, FAQs build trust by addressing the key doubts of potential buyers immediately.

8. Provide Case Studies That Show How Your Product Or Service Helps People

The universal question before buying anything is- “Will it work as promised?”

Often, people may trust the brand or simply risk trusting the brand’s claims while buying a product. But if your brand is new or the product is expensive, you must thoroughly convince your target audience about its effectiveness.

So, you should include case studies on your e-commerce website that show your offering in action with a real-life example. Make sure your case studies highlight how your products or services fulfill their promises and meet their customers’ needs. 

Prospects with similar needs will relate to the case and understand that the offering is authentic, boosting your conversions and sales.

9. Share User Tips And Tricks

You can create awareness and interest in it by providing interesting and innovative tricks for users to make the most of your offering. You can find the best product hacks from the company or content uploaded by users. 

Moreover, you can host a customer contest asking customers to share their most innovative product hacks as pictures or videos. This will further boost engagement with both existing and new customers at minimal cost!

10. Gather And Share Curated Content

Content curation is the process of discovering, improving, and sharing existing content with the aim to add value and use it again. This process involves content source research, content filtering, information collection, content improvement or format changing, editing, and publishing.

While this process is time-consuming, it is generally faster than making new content from scratch. Moreover, curation helps you update and reuse content that got you the best results. So, the next time you run out of topics for new content, try content curation!

11. Find Guest Bloggers To Create Content For You

Creating fresh content for your e-commerce store regularly can be time-consuming and expensive. But you don’t have to do all the hard work alone! 

The key is to partner with guest bloggers who can create top-quality SEO content for your store. This will attract more customers and improve your store’s ranking in search results at little to no cost! You can also build a relationship with your guest bloggers over time, and they will become valuable brand advocates for your brand.

To find guest bloggers, you must start with your own posts and try to raise your blog traffic through SEO. After that, you must directly contact popular bloggers in your niche with your proposal to further boost the traffic. Also, try offering backlinks, shares, and author bios to attract more guest bloggers.

12. Create Promotions And Advertisements

Creating high-quality content and publishing it on the right platforms gets your e-commerce content marketing to the start line. But it won’t take off unless you start promoting your content!

After all, even the best content will be futile if it is not visible to your target audience. So, you must use promotional techniques to boost your content’s visibility. 

These can be organic methods like-

• Sharing posts/links on popular social media pages
• Using SEO and advertisement optimization
• Backlink building through guest posts
• YouTube video SEO
• Sharing content on online forums

You may also go for paid promotion methods such as-

• Paid ads and sponsored/boosted posts on social media sites.
• PPC (pay per click) ads on web search engines and YouTube. 
• Native ads where you pay sites to add links to your content inside of theirs.

13. Make Use Of User-Generated Content (UGC)

In marketing, user-generated content is the content related to your brand that someone who is not an official representative of your business creates. Prospects consider this content authentic and trusted as existing users make it instead of the company selling them. UGC could be a social media update, a video, a review, a podcast, or any other content form.

 You may prompt the creation of user-generated content that promotes you through a contest, campaign, or challenge. And this will bring in valuable content for your e-commerce content marketing campaign for free!

14. Build A Glossary Of Terms

Every industry has its own jargon. And using it in your content without explanation can leave your prospects scratching their heads!

So, you must create a glossary and add links to the definitions in the industry terms that you use in the content. This trick will help your new customers easily understand your offering and its advantages, raising the chances of conversion from your content marketing efforts.

15. Create Infographics And Gift Guides

Infographics are great tools for turning complex data into attractive, easily understandable, and shareable graphics. They let you convey data-driven messages about your products and their benefits to convince your customers at the consideration stage. Moreover, infographics can help increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your online store by gaining the interest of your target audience.

Similarly, gift guides offer brief information to help shoppers find the right gift faster. They are effective tools for introducing new trends or products while increasing sales by targeting gift buyers.

16. Create Guides And Tutorial videos

Product guides and tutorials help your customers to understand your offering in detail while clearing all the common doubts. This makes your audience familiar with your product quickly and builds trust in their minds by showing the product in action. 

What’s more? You can also communicate directly with your audience in the comments section of your videos. This helps you express your authority on the subject and build further engagement.

17. Turn To Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is an efficient way to improve your website’s traffic and authority. It involves writing interesting articles on popular websites in your niche while including links to your own website. This trick will help you drive traffic from other popular sites while raising your reputation and SERP rankings. 

Guest blogs are a great hack to impress your audience and search engines alike, especially as a new business.

18. Social Media Marketing For E-commerce Businesses

You should connect your social media marketing strategy with your content strategy. You must approach your target audience across all suitable social media channels with high-quality content that subtly promotes your store or its offerings. This step will guarantee you a larger audience and boost your online visibility. 

Moreover, you can gain a loyal following and boost your store’s traffic by posting interesting content regularly and engaging with people on social networks. The social media platform used may include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and even YouTube, depending on your niche.

19. Start Video Marketing

Videos have an unmatched engaging and convincing power that you can leverage in multiple ways for your e-commerce site. In fact, 88% of people say that a brand’s video on its product or service has convinced them to make purchases in the past.

So, you should apply video marketing in multiple ways, including short ad campaigns, in-depth webinars, online courses, tutorials, demos, or anything in between! Here are some critical steps to implementing video marketing-

• Create informative or entertaining promotional videos for every stage of the sales funnel based on a detailed study of the offering, brand, and target audience.
• Share the videos on your social media channels and video-sharing platforms.
• Use them in lead generation or retargeting ads.
• Embed the videos on your website pages.
• Serve them appropriately across other points in the customer journey as required.

20. Make Use Of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing involves promoting other brand’s products in return for a commission for each successful sale. People who join your affiliate program or network will create content and add the custom tracking links the program provides to them. You need to pay only when you get sales through the links, so you pay only for results while leveraging the existing networks of affiliates to multiply your reach.

21. Optimize Your Content For Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the set of steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on search result pages for free when people make relevant searches.

This is crucial because most online searches about products or services begin with a search engine like Google. And your related content can come up for free at the top of the search results if you perform SEO correctly!

SEO techniques include on-page, off-page, and technical SEO steps such as backlink building, keyword optimization, website performance optimization, core web vitals, search internet optimization, URL optimization, and many more!

22. Leverage The Power Of Social Media To Get Maximum Exposure

Social media has a massive reach and penetration across the market, and you must make the most of it to present your content to your target audience at minimal costs. Moreover, good social media content can improve your search engine rankings as Google now takes the social impact that your website makes into account when ranking your site. So, you must integrate high-quality content into your social media marketing strategy to boost your e-commerce content marketing effectiveness.

23. Perform Email Marketing

Email marketing is a time-tested content marketing channel that helps businesses of all sizes to reach out to their audience at low costs. It offers high conversion rates and impressive returns on investment strategies when applied using outstanding content and advanced automation tools. And the fact that 87% of marketers use email marketing to share their promotional content reflects its effectiveness.

To get started, you must set up a subscription form on your e-commerce site and offer exclusive rewards for users who sign up. You can then use the data obtained to send your audience personalized updates about new products, offers, and the latest trends. In this manner, email marketing will help you capture and retain your store’s customers in the long run.

How To Create A Content Marketing Strategy For E-Commerce?

Content marketing for e-commerce websites can get tricky, especially if you are new in the competitive market. Your best bet here is to apply a strategic approach to create high-quality content that compels your target audience to buy from you. Let us check out the steps to build an effective e-commerce content marketing strategy-

1. Know Your Customer

The first step is understanding your target audience’s needs, challenges, perspectives, and situations. You must interact with your offerings’ expected buyers and perform research using existing records for this purpose. 

Following this, you must compile the results to build your ideal buyer’s personality or persona. This personality must include relevant characteristics such as age, income, gender, lifestyle, motivators, desires, challenges, and concerns. You must consider the buyer persona as the target of all your content planning and creation activities.

2. Create Goals To Measure Your Marketing Campaign’s Impact

Next, you must prepare to plan your content marketing campaign by setting your business’s marketing goals. At this point, you must understand why you are creating content. 

Do you want to bring more traffic to your website? Do you want to generate more leads? Or do you aim to establish your brand’s authority? 

Once you have decided on one or more of these goals, you will need to set some targets to measure the success of your e-commerce content marketing campaign. So, you must decide the relevant metrics and set objectives for marketing performance based on them. Here are some key marketing metrics you must check out-

• The number of content pieces published per week
• Organic website traffic
• Ranking for major keywords
• New sales that you can attribute to content marketing
• Session-to-contact rate
• Number of Sales Qualified Leads
• The average length of the sales cycle
• Sales
• Conversion rate

3. Build A Plan

The next step is to plan your content’s theme and format. Follow this by deciding which platforms to publish your content on and what content promotion methods to use. 

Another important question at this point is whether you should produce content in-house or outsource the work. You should make this choice based on your available funds and expertise.

You must consider your offerings and the choices of your target audience for these decisions. Also, a strategic mix of content types, publishing platforms, and promotion methods usually yields the best results.

4. Plan Your Resources

You must now look at what you can realistically achieve with your current resources and adjust your plan accordingly. The resources considered primarily involve time, money, and expertise. 

You will also need to appoint a competent content marketing manager and employ someone to respond to the comments and questions on your content. You also need to be realistic about how much time you can devote to your content marketing campaign. 

Planning your resources is crucial to avoiding losses by overshooting your available resources.

5. Plan Your Content Production Schedule

Next, you must organize your content plan and ideas to fit them into a content publishing schedule as per the expected market trends and available resources. The schedule should contain a calendar of publishing dates and the team member assigned to create the respective content pieces. A publishing calendar will help you publish content on time and regularly to ensure that your content marketing campaign stays on track.

6. Craft Compelling Content

The impact of all your e-commerce content marketing efforts comes down to the quality of content. Your content must be attractive, engaging, and convincing enough to compel viewers into the action of visiting your page and buying your products. Content that fails to do so will not bring sufficient website traffic and sales, making your efforts futile! 

So, you must employ the best content creators to craft compelling and personalized content that perfectly matches your target audience’s tastes, needs, and desires.

7. Create A Distribution Strategy

Content distribution strategy is the plan for sharing, publishing, and promoting your marketing content. It involves deciding how to provide your content to your audience amidst the diverse distribution channels and media formats.

You should choose the channel based on your budget, existing recognition, content format, and target audience. Here are the most popular distribution channels to consider for your distribution strategy-

• Owned Content Distribution

Owned channels are the content properties that your company owns. These channels offer greater affordability and complete control over the timing and method of publishing. And they may include your website, blog, social media profiles, email newsletter, and mobile app.

• Earned Content Distribution

Earned channels or shared channels are channels owned by third parties. These third parties promote or share your content over their channel by their initiative. And they are organic channels that grow as you earn more reputation and popularity with no costs involved! Earned channels include public relations, forum posts, social shares and mentions, guest articles, roundups, and product reviews. 

• Paid Content Distribution

Paid channels are channels that distribute your content for payment. They include paid promotion methods such as pay-per-click (PPC), paid search, paid social ads, sponsored content, and paid influencers. 

You should also plan the content formats according to the platform, target audience, and message. Here are the most popular content formats you can use to distribute your promotional message-

• Infographics
• Videos
• Ebooks
• Blog writing
• Podcasts
• Webinar content
• Images

8. Review Your Strategy

You must measure your strategy’s outcomes regularly based on the planned goals and metrics. This step is crucial to quickly find deviations from the initial plan and get your campaign back on track. 

Moreover, you may need to make corrections due to the changes in the dynamic business world. Continuously adjusting and improving is the only way to survive the ups and downs of the modern market!

Ready To Boost Your Web Store’s Traffic With The Best Content Marketing Strategies? 

Using content marketing for e-commerce websites can do wonders. You don’t need to have deep pockets or an army of employees to implement effective content marketing for your business. However, the challenge you might face is to beat your competition with exceptional content that drives qualified leads to your website. 

For this purpose, you must create and share engaging content on the right platforms at every buyer journey stage to build your recognition and get interested leads to your e-commerce website. And this is indeed a lot of work unless you adopt a strategic content marketing approach that guides your content planning, creation, and delivery process. 

So, this blog has aimed to help you by covering all the key concepts and strategies for e-commerce content marketing. Hopefully you now know why content marketing is important. It’s now time for you to apply these top 23 strategies to watch your sales soar!

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