An effective content marketing strategy for ecommerce involves much more than simply repurposing content for different platforms. With the boom in ecommerce, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for online stores to acquire and retain customers without incurring high costs. However, a successful content marketing strategy can help online stores build a larger audience, increase engagement, generate high-quality leads, and improve content marketing ROI, all while reducing existing costs.
Before you start building your ecommerce content marketing strategy, there are a few things that you need to consider. Firstly, you need to write a business case that outlines how you will provide value to your customers and stakeholders. Secondly, you need to define your audience and buyer persona, which involves understanding their demographic, psychographic, and behavioural aspects, as well as their preferences, spending habits, and motivations. Thirdly, you need to create a brand story that highlights your values, ethos, culture, and brand positioning.
Once you’ve established these essential elements, it’s time to run a content audit to get an idea of what type of content resonates with your audience. You can use an SEO tool to perform a full website content audit, which will give you valuable insights into your website performance, landing pages, page-wise performance, and user engagement. Additionally, it’s essential to conduct an email audit and a chatbot integration review to ensure that both channels are integrated with your business plan, both technically and creatively.
You should also examine your analytics to analyse your paid marketing efforts, ROI, engagement rate, branded vs. unbranded traffic, and other metrics available from different platforms. This will help you understand where your competitors are investing in terms of investing in content and how it’s performing for them. After gathering all these reports, you can define a content marketing plan, set timelines, and establish KPIs for each goal.
A SWOT analysis will help you identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as you plan your content marketing strategy. The ‘backward goals’ method can be used to define a realistic timeline for each activity that aligns with your overall content marketing plan. To produce effective content, you need to identify how your content will help meet your audience’s needs by asking the right questions, such as what content formats they prefer and what motivates them to make a purchase.
Once you have answered these questions, you can use BuzzSumo to get content ideas and find the most effective platforms for distributing your content. Producing a master resource for each content piece and distributing it in various formats, such as long-form articles, mini-blogs, infographics, emails, social media posts, podcasts, and videos, is crucial to reaching a broad audience without incurring extra costs.
To stay organised and consistent, you need to set an editorial calendar for publishing activities. An editorial calendar helps you stay on track and achieve small victories regularly while remaining flexible to make improvements. Remember that building trust takes time, and consistency is key to achieving long-term success. By following these steps, your ecommerce content marketing strategy will be effective and sustainable.
