Building traffic to an eCommerce website is essential, and content marketing is a valuable tool for bringing high-quality traffic to your website. Find 10 valuable content marketing strategies that will help you grow your eCommerce business.
10 Content Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Websites
Once you’ve taken the time to create an outstanding website experience for your customers, it’s time to consider how you’ll get them to your website. These content strategy ideas help make eCommerce businesses stand out in their industries to capture attention and encourage purchases.
Whether you market handmade products, software or services, here’s a look at the most effective ways to use content to grow your business.
1. Publish High-quality Original Content
When you think of content marketing, you likely think of owned content or content you publish on your website. When looking to build organic traffic, publishing high-quality, original content is the best tool for increasing search rankings and connecting with new customers.
But that’s not all this content can do. It also offers an opportunity to earn backlinks from other websites and start a relationship with prospects.
Producing original content tells search engines that you are working to provide value for your customers. But it also tells customers that you know and understands their needs and the challenges they face.
Before drafting content, take time to learn about your target audience. Outline their pain points and the challenges they aim to solve with your content. When it comes to the best B2B marketing strategies, you’ll find that a clear understanding of your customers is the foundation for everything you do.
Build a niche for yourself and write an original content within that niche. When drafting content, always focus on the value you can provide readers and less on how you’ll benefit from the content.
Always include a call to action in the text or offer a chance for users to take the next step with your company, such as by subscribing to an email list.
2. Use Personalization
Today’s eCommerce platforms are very advanced and allow for the creation of personalized experiences. For example, once you know a little about a prospect or a customer, you can start serving them with relevant products or related products based on what they’ve purchased or shown an interest in.
Personalizing content demonstrates that you know the customer and can serve their every need. And in return, customers offer a higher conversion rate because they find what they need quickly.
Personalization can remove friction in the customer buying journey to help customers speed up the process.
One way to personalize content is to design various landing pages for paid campaigns, such as pay-per-click ads or email campaigns. You’ll know the segment of your audience that these campaigns target to reach them with targeted messages that better meet their needs.
Your goal with personalization should be to make the shopping process faster and easier for customers by showing them the necessary solutions.
3. Write Better Headlines/Page Titles
Headlines are the first thing that a customer sees. They are essential for capturing their attention and eliciting a response from them.
Make your content work harder for you by writing better headlines. And if you get stuck, use a headline generator tool to help analyze or improve your existing headline. You can use tools that will analyze your headline and make suggestions or other tools that allow you to input your target keyword and get results.
Regardless, be sure that your headline relates to your content. You don’t want users to click or start reading and then be disappointed because they got reeled in by some clickbait that doesn’t cover what they thought it would.
4. Leverage Email Marketing
Email marketing is incredibly powerful for eCommerce businesses. So much so that the ROI on email is 36-1. That means that you’ll see $36 in your bottom line for every dollar you spend.
Some emails you should be sent include:
- New product announcements
- Deals
- Promotions
- Case studies
- Blog posts
- Automated responses to inquiries
- Lead nurturing series
Your email marketing should aim to educate and inform your audience. Focusing less on sales and more on relationships will have an impressive
5. Engage with Your Target Audience on Social Media
Social media presence is essential to connecting with today’s audiences. Social media can help build awareness for your product and attract new customers and build loyalty with existing customers.
Engaging on social media can humanize your brand and make people view your products not just as great tools in their daily lives, but also view your brand as a helpful friend in guiding them toward success or fulfillment in that aspect of their lives.
When using social media, ensure a good mix of images, storytelling and video content. This will help you connect with your audience.
Some content ideas include showing a behind-the-scenes look at product manufacturing or sharing user-generated content demonstrating use cases. If you’re unsure of how to generate such videos, consider partnering with an influencer who is well-versed in this space.
The greater your engagement on these platforms, the better your results will be so listen carefully for what your target audience wants and find ways to accommodate it.
6. Develop Content with an Eye Toward SEO
Content marketing isn’t entirely about SEO. But SEO should inform some of your content decisions. Including SEO research in your content development plans will help you outrank your competitors and increase your reach and exposure.
Optimize your website’s content around relevant keywords, and you’ll likely start seeing organic traffic. Of course, the content must provide clear benefits to your target audience. But that’s your goal with any content, so adding SEO should provide dimension to the mix.
Understanding what your customers are searching for can also offer insights into what they are struggling with or what’s bringing them to your website. This will add context to your content and make it more valuable.
7. Engage in Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting campaigns help you respond to visitors who might not have had enough information to convert when they first visited or weren’t far enough along in their research to leap just yet.
When you have an active retargeting campaign, you can reach users who visited your eCommerce website but didn’t purchase or take the next step. You know these individuals are interested in your products or services but perhaps got interrupted from finishing their research or purchase or just weren’t quite ready.
Targeting these individuals will likely have a better ROI than targeting cold customers with online ads. Remind customers about the products they were browsing or share a special promotion to help seal the deal.
In retargeting ads, use information you know about the customer to personalize the message to increase the visitor’s likelihood of converting.
8. Make It Visually Appealing
Visually appealing content will hold your audience’s attention. Use graphics, create tables, and include photos throughout. You want your content to be attractive and easy to read.
While it won’t necessarily make your content pretty, using headings and subheadings as well as bullets and numbered lists will make your content more inviting to read.
9. Experiment with Various Content Types
Depending on what you sell and the audience you’re working to attract, different types of content might resonate with your audience.
For example, some brands find that video is the best way to attract new customers, while others find that a step-by-step blog offers the greatest value to their customers. Test out various content types and find what works best for you.
To do so, you’ll need to dig into analytics and better understand your audience’s behavior to find what content delivers the best results for your company.
10. Make Content Easy to Share
Once you’ve created valuable content, encouraging sharing is an effective way to get more eyes on it. That way, current customers can send a link to a friend or publish their favorite product on their social media profile.
You can easily add social share buttons to a Shopify website or use a WordPress plugin within WooCommerce. Regardless of the platform your website is built on, there is likely a simple social share addon that can provide value to your content.
Turning Traffic into Sales
Ultimately, content marketing is a tool to generate traffic and interest in your brand. You’ll also need clear calls to action and high-quality products to see that traffic translates into sales. The best way to build an effective eCommerce content marketing plan is to create content that answers customers’ questions and responds to their needs.
