In 2015, there were over 12 million ecommerce sites in the world, and these numbers grow every day thanks to the ease of launching an ecommerce websites. But the number of sites earning more than $1000 is just over 650K. The market, already huge, is getting even bigger, and so are your competitors.
How are you going to carve a niche and be successful with your website? If done right, content marketing is definitely one of the ways to stand out from your competitors and get organic traffic.
Organic traffic provides good ROI on your spends on content, compared to PPC campaigns in which the bidding pricing is going sky high with giants like Amazon also competing. Just listing a product and adding a product description doesn’t count as a content marketing strategy.
To beat your competitors you need to do more. Let’s look at some content marketing strategies which can drive more traffic and more sales.
- Planning: Identify your Audience The first step in content marketing is having a proper plan, or atleast a draft which you can improve as you go. Your plan should answer the below questions:
- Identify your target audience: Segment your customer base according to your product and identify their needs
- Which social media site does your target audience visit often?Identify the sites on which you need to be actively participating and promote your content
- How can you differentiate your content from your competitors?Remember, you are not fighting this battle alone—your competitors also have planned their content strategy. Analyze their content strategy and you need to do better than them or differentiate your content.
- Versatility is the name of the game As we discussed in the last point you need to plan your content strategy based on your target audience and your competitors, so don’t just look at modifying your product description and writing a few blogposts. You can do more with your content just by utilizing the multiple types of content available.Below are few content types you can use to win over your competition:
- Infographics You could present your product description/details through visual representation: images, tables, graphs and charts
- Videos You could create short product promo videos
- Memes If your target includes millennials, this is a must-have weapon in your content artillery
- Product Reviews If possible, collaborate with the bloggers and guest blog about your products on their blogs, or you could send them free samples and request them to write a review. This will provide you with a lot of SEO value and drive new traffic from the blogger’s subscribers.
- Unique Product Description Don’t just use the same product description provided by your supplier - chances are that your competitors are also using the same content. If you have a huge number of products on your site, rewriting the description for all products in not possible. Instead you can select the popular products and trending products (trend shouldn’t be measured based on just your website metrics) and change their descriptions to provide more value to your customers.
- Onpage Optimization for ecommerce websites
Content creation is just 30% of your content marketing strategy, 70% of it goes towards content marketing. The first step in it is to optimize your created content and make sure it’s crawl-able by search engines. Ensure that the basic onpage optimizations like title, meta description, keyword presence, header tags and image tags are in place. This will make sure that your site is ready for Google traffic.
- Follow the trend
Always keep yourself up-to-date with the market trends and the competitor’s product promotions. If there is a change in market trend on any product or product category, make sure your content strategy is ready for the change. Publicize through various forms of content on the availability of new products and make sure that you are the first one to reach your target audience with this new product information.
- Use Content formats that Social Media loves
Design content in formats best suited for a specific social media platform. You could create beautiful images just for Pinterest or viral videos for Youtube and Vimeo. To utilize social traffic, generate various forms of content and promote them targeting your target market.
Use appropriate and trending hashtags to attract more impressions, and tag related persons and partners in your posts. This will attract newer traffic from those following the tagged persons.
- The need for ecommerce blogs
A blog is important for ecommerce sites and B2B businesses. You could use your blog to publicize content on the changing trends, new product introductions, answer most commonly asked product-related queries, invite guest reviewers to review about any new/trending products, and create engaging content like contests.
Blogposts also give good opportunity to include a notable volume of keywords and long tail keywords, which will help your website rank in search engine results and also make it more discoverable.
- Ecommerce website Content Marketing
Promoting your content should be the major focus of your content strategy. You could promote your content through social media posts, social media contests, guest blogs, Pinterest images, SEO optimization, newsletter marketing and advertisement. We will discuss elaborately on the content promotion strategies in a separate blogpost.
Hope you find this blogpost on content marketing useful. Put your creative hat on and solve this content marketing puzzle and win over your competitors in attracting targeted traffic.
Need more tips to optimize your digital marketing campaigns? Book a free ecommerce digital marketing consulting session with one of our digital marketing consultants to evaluate your website and create a free digital marketing analysis (including content marketing) report for your ecommerce website
