Compared to traditional advertising, content marketing costs 62% less and generates three times more leads.
Recently, the online market has become more challenging to promote your eCommerce business because more and more marketers are leveraging the power of content marketing and consumers are becoming more selective. Therefore, if you want to drive high-quality traffic and convert it into sales, you need to be strategic with your content creation and promotion.
Here are 6 important things you should keep in mind when developing a Content Marketing strategy for your eCommerce business.
1. Focus on a result-driven strategy
Among many tactics you can do in content marketing, you must define a direction to ensure that your time and resources are spent effectively. Your content strategy should cover these elements:
- Long-term and short-term goals
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) in relation to your goals
- Buyer persona(s)
- Keywords or key phrases
- Editorial calendar (including holidays, seasonal events, and your company’s marketing calendar)
- Promotional schedule, which could include social media, influencers, and email marketing
Leveraging social listening solutions to get meaningful insight of conversations your audiences are having on social media is a must. From this insight, you can define a strategic direction for the content type you produce and identify influencers to spread your product’s awareness towards with what’s trending in the social space.
2. Utilize various content types
Using a variety of content formats will give you the opportunity to make your products appeal to different audience types and help increase engagement. The most popular content formats include images, infographics, memes, videos, and e-books, among which video is a great medium to show your products in action.
According to a report, 43% of people want to see more video content, and 51.9% of marketing professionals identified video as the marketing effort with the highest ROI. Videos can be created for every stage of the sales funnel, from awareness all the way to conversion.
3. Put your products in context
Content marketing is all about building trust and relationships through valuable and informative materials. However, you can mention your product or services directly if they help your audience achieve the results discussed in the content.
For instance, if the product you want to promote is a line of health supplements, you could post an article titled “Best Ways to Look Younger Than Your Real Age,” and mention taking health supplements as a way to slow down the aging process. You could insert a link to your product page, along with the recommendations, without appearing overtly promotional.
4. Maximize the advantages of blogging
Maximizing the potential of blogging can help you drive traffic, generate leads, and convert sales. Before writing, it is necessary to do some keyword research to understand what your potential customers are searching for online and use this list of keywords to form your topics and titles.
After publishing a post, you need to promote your post to drive high-quality traffic. Here are the most effective promotion methods:
- Sharing it on social media and in social media groups
- Email marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Bookmarking
- Commenting on other blogs
- Paid promotion
- Blog Promotion Checklist
5. Build and leverage relationships
Guest posting helps you build brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and boost SEO with backlinks. The first and most importing thing you need to do is identifying sites that are good matches in terms of audience and topic, and then spending time to create high-quality content. In addition, the sites should have an established audience and a plan to promote guest posts. Finally, don’t forget to craft an intriguing bio, include a link to your website in the “About the Author” section and one or two relevant links back to your website or product pages, if allowed.
After a few posts, you can build relationships with influencers and ask them to promote your content (text, images, videos, etc.) by writing content for your blog then sharing the link with their followers to drive traffic back to your website. This strategy is called “reverse guest posting.”
6. Share non-promotional content on social & paid media
Non-promotional content helps you build trust and brand awareness. It’s also easier to get people to click through when you’re sharing valuable, informative, or educational content. Keep in mind this 80/20 rule when sharing posts: 80% of your posts should be unbranded content that matches your audience’s interest, and 20% can be brand-or product-focused.
However, organic reach can be slow and unpredictable. You can drive more traffic and boost sales with paid media (i.e., ads and boosted posts). Through paid social advertisements or sponsored posts, you can create highly-targeted content to grab attention from the right audience and direct them to your site. Paid advertisements can be used on almost every social media platform, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. as long as those platforms give you access to your ideal audience so that you can deliver the right message and maximize ROI.
To sum up, Content Marketing is a long game. Even for the best content marketers, it probably takes at least 6 to 12 months to build reputation, brand awareness, and SEO success. The key to make content marketing work for your eCommerce business is to create and promote content consistently, and measure your results based on the goals and KPIs identified in your strategy.
If you’re looking for a partner who can help you build an effective content marketing strategy for your business, and execute all the above marketing tips on social media, do not hesitate to contact our Digital Marketing team here.