Essential Ways to Use Content Marketing for Online Stores

Whether you sell online books, handmade products, or anything in between, content marketing for online stores is one of the most effective methods of lead generation. 

Customers are tired of native ads. They feel the sellers’ attempts to sell the product along with the “neutral” descriptions. A person wants to buy himself and not remain the object of the influence of aggressive marketing technologies. What does this mean for online store owners? You will have to consider the needs of your customers. They need insightful information that helps them to buy products and services consciously.

Content marketing for online stores is one of the most effective tools for promoting a brand and selling products or services on the web. Consumers spend over 5 hours per day on their smartphones consuming content of all types. If you have an online store or have been working in this field for a long time, you probably thought about using content marketing to connect with your audience and attract new prospects.

Getting high-quality targeted traffic is the first task of any digital campaign. But what if the retail monsters with huge budgets have already occupied the first positions of search engine results? How to get the coveted visitors to the site? Of course, with the help of high-quality content. Today we will talk about content marketing for online stores and discover effective ways to convert traffic into sales.

What is eCommerce Content Marketing?

Content marketing for online stores creates and disseminates useful information for consumers to attract potential customers and gain their trust. Unlike advertising, content marketing benefits your potential customers without the intention of selling here and now.

The task of content marketing is to encourage the client to target actions. By distributing helpful content for free, you solve the audience’s problems at the time and place where it is most needed. When getting the benefit of your website’s content, the audience is imbued with trust, gratitude, and willingness to buy something from you.

Content is all the information that concerns your online store: product descriptions, articles in social networks, email newsletters, photos and videos, reviews, etc. That is, everything that you fill your site, social networks, blogs, and other resources, as well as how you communicate with customers.

Many online store owners define their development priorities quite similarly: they think about the quality of the product, the optimal delivery methods, the design of the site, its protection. But they postpone the development of an effective content marketing strategy “for later.” Meanwhile, it is the work that can bring an explosive increase in traffic.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators of content marketing for an online store:

1. Impressions.
2. Reach.
3. Engagement.
4. Email click-through-rate.
5. Cost per acquisition (CPA).
6. Organic acquisition traffic.
7. Social media engagement.
8. Abandonment.
9. Micro to macro conversion rates.
10. Average order value (AOV).
11. Sales conversion rates.
12. Customer Retention rate.
13. Customer lifetime value (CLV).
14. Repeat customer rate.
15. Refund and return rate.
16. Ecommerce churn rate.
17. Net promoter score (NPS)
18. Subscription rate
19. Program participation rate.

70% of marketers are already actively investing in content marketing. Do you still have any doubts as to the advantages of content marketing for your eCommerce project? 

How to Identify Relevant Topics for Your Content?

1. Explore your target audience

This suggestion’s importance is difficult to overestimate: it is clear that information about the new matte lipstick is unlikely to attract middle-aged men. But how to cook on an electric grill may arouse the interest of potential customers of different genders and ages.

Decide on “your niche,” read the latest news and press releases that somehow relate to the product that you offer. Determine the vector of interest (whether you should publish analytical articles with market forecasts or food recipes) and go ahead.

2. Importance of backlinks

Backlinks lead users to your online store from external web resources. The more backlinks to a site you have, the higher your site’s trust and value for search engines are. The logic is simple: if your resource is referenced, it means that the content is interesting.

Your goal is to create valuable and unique content that will work for you for a long time. The site’s content should be as “deep” and appealing as possible, starting from blog posts and ending with information on each product page. The more backlinks a page has, the more search traffic it gets from Google (www.impactplus.com).

3. Check out your competitors’ content

Knowledge is power, and eCommerce is no exception. To know where to move, you need to look at how your competitors differ. 

Study the latest content on the site, social networks, reviews left by customers, and see how competitors work with them (pay special attention to the negative ones). Identify the “blank spaces” that you can successfully fill in. Your main goal is to create better content than your competitors have and share it with your target audience.

4. Analyze the search engine suggestions

If you start typing in search engine queries related to your topic, the system will offer phrases that occur most often. Users are looking for this on the web so you can give a detailed answer.

Also, you can use the services that search for the most popular content. Google Trends, BuzzSumo, and similar ones allow you to find the most popular and “shareable” content. This information will help you understand where to go next.

Once you decide on the trending content topics, it is time to discover ways to use content marketing to improve your online presence.

Essential Ways to Use Content Marketing for Online Stores

Now we know what to publish and for whom. It is time to create content and share it with our target audience.

1. Create product guides for your clients 

Your target audience wants to see how your products/services work and what they look like. Though people read less today, still, from the point of view of SEO, this is the most profitable way to convey information. 

Make sure to combine your text information with visuals. The picture itself attracts more attention than the text, and if this picture still contains a good piece of valuable and exciting information, it will be shared. Infographics are an excellent solution here – the perfect way to talk about complex things simply and clearly. In this format, you can clearly show the sequence of actions in the form of an algorithm. A person does not need to read the text, go back to the previous page, break his head without visual examples — everything is visible in one image. Infographics are the fourth most-used type of content marketing – get the most of this content marketing format for your online store.

2. Demonstrate your products in how-to videos 

Video content is one of the most relevant ways to connect with your customers. People spend on average 2.6x more time on pages with video than without. Unlike amateur content, creating videos for business is primarily subordinated to the company’s goals. You should have a clear understanding of whom your video is aimed at and what you expect from the audience after watching it.

Highlight various features and benefits of your products and service in video content. Try not to sell, but to help in your videos. Build a solid foundation for your relationship with your client, helping them solve problems over and over again.

3. Use high-quality photos of the products 

Marketers know that visual content has the highest engagement rate and use this to drive traffic to their website, blog, and other media campaigns. They predict that between 51% and 80% of businesses will heavily rely on visual content in 2021.

To have a high-quality product is not enough to promote your business on the web. When you use high-quality professional images that are connected, you immediately get sales growth. Successful photos help potential customers visualize your product or service with themselves, and if they support your business, they will immediately want to make a purchase.

4. Share user-generated content 

People trust people. Major brands have included user-generated content in their strategy, and some have built their brand entirely on it, such as GoPro. 

This can be photos sent to the contest, reviews, stories, for which you can promise a prize. Share your customers’ success stories about using your products or services. Whether it is a product, service, or experience, today’s consumers want to know what they will get before placing an order. A person needs to see and feel the product as it is – without Photoshop and filters.

5. Share valuable tips and hacks

Offer your target audience some original or exciting ways to use your product to increase engagement and attract more traffic.

Also, you can ask your customers to share their tips and tricks with your product or service. Arrange a contest to fuel hype. Contests in social networks are a proven way to increase the audience’s reach and activity and an excellent method of attracting new subscribers and increasing the level of sales.

6. Become an expert in your area

Offer value to your existing and potential customers. Answer questions on quora.com or reddit.com with no intention to sell. Work out the guides, checklists, profile articles, lectures, presentations, etc., and share information that the customer may not have known about your product or service.

You act as an expert from whom your audience can expect helpful or relevant information on a particular topic. Having publications in its arsenal that are full of specifics and applied advice, the company gets an audience of people who see it as a particular field’s authority.

7. Tell your personal story

Think over this faster, cheaper way to create content. There is no need to compile research or findings which are required for case studies, research studies. Tell your audience who you are, your mission, and how you succeed in achieving it. 

People adore success stories and personal brand stories. The brand story affects the emotions and feelings that make the consumer prefer a particular product. These emotions are encoded in the history of the brand, its philosophy and values, and certain symbols associated with it. Share a beautiful story about the creation of a product and challenges on the way toward success.

8. Guest blogging 

Thanks to guest posts, you can promote your own brand, promote yourself, and provide good traffic. This is an excellent option for developing blogs and websites. And if you consider that there are very few free ways to promote today, guest blogging is a real chance to get a link to your resource on an advanced site.

To attract attention in the real world, many companies participate in conferences and other significant professional events, organize meetings with potential partners, interact with customers, and make every effort to remain visible. The same principles apply in the digital space. The more sites publish your authorship content, the more Internet users know about you, and the stronger your authority will be.

Conclusion 

For online stores, websites of manufacturers of goods, and companies that provide services, published online information is essential. It affects the customers’ decision-making about buying or ordering. eCommerce content marketing is an efficient tool that gives you an understanding of attracting targeted traffic from search engines without additional investment.

With the advent of social networks, with the ability to instantly exchange information, neglecting this channel means depriving a large audience’s web resource. And although the ultimate goal of an online store is sales, it is worth paying attention to related indicators: customer loyalty, trust, recommendations. And here, content marketing is a great helper!