How To Build A Winning E-Commerce Content Strategy

In today’s digital marketplace, a winning e-commerce content strategy is the cornerstone of success, with 51% of content consumption coming from organic search and 90% of marketers incorporating content into their marketing strategies. 

E-commerce brands won’t go far without investing time and resources in a well-thought-out digital marketing campaign. The past years saw an uptick in the number of new e-commerce brands that sell anything from pet care products to organic food items. It would take some time for any new business to cut through the noise and become more visible to its target audience.

It’s a difficult journey, but success is possible if brands develop their content and create a winning content strategy. In this guide, you will learn how to build one that can help your business overcome the competition and get the attention it deserves.

Why is Content King?

Let’s first talk about content and why digital marketing strategists throw around phrases like “content is king.” Content is the form your business’s message takes. It delivers the potential value your products or services can bring to customers.

More importantly, it’s the message itself. You can never communicate your brand’s best strengths without content, so e-commerce businesses must consider it an essential part of their online marketing efforts. To know if the content you produce generates returns, look at these indicators:

• Audience trust: Your business thrives when customers love the solutions you offer to them. As they become exposed to the content you post, they are more likely to trust your brand. This also means that they will refer your brand to others. 
• Lead quality: Well-crafted content can help narrow the people who stumble across your brand into a few high-quality leads. These customers have a strong need to purchase your products or services. You will spend less time and resources trying to convert these types of leads. 
• Sales conversions: When it comes down to pushing customers towards buying your offers, you need content that amplifies their demand for these products or services. Determining the right type of content to push at the end of the sales cycle is crucial to closing a sale. 
• Brand awareness and reputation: Apart from closing deals and expanding your client base, great content helps your business become more visible. It helps your target to find you and determine if you’re the best brand to reach out to. Using content to build your brand reputation also helps you address controversies and maintain a clean image to ensure your business’s long-term success. 
• Business growth: Content doesn’t directly affect your business’s growth potential, but it sure does support its expansion. When done writing, your content marketing strategy can help your e-commerce brand prosper in terms of sales. As your bottom line grows, so does the capital needed to finance your expansion plans.

There’s more that content is capable of providing to e-commerce businesses, but the content itself isn’t enough to drive sales and tap into your business’s growth potential. It’s the way you organize, craft, publish, and monitor content that makes all the difference. To accomplish all of your e-commerce goals, you need to craft a content strategy that matches your business’s appetite for success and accomplishes all other goals down the line.

What Is a Content Strategy?

Every business initiative should be supported by a concrete plan. Without one, you could end up spending an unnecessary amount of time and money on gimmicks and campaigns that fall short of your goals.

Online marketing isn’t something you set up, expecting it to magically provide the results you want. It needs to be a systematic process based on a clear game plan. In this case, we’re talking about a content strategy.

Your content strategy outlines not just the goals your business needs to accomplish at the micro-level. It also includes a structured step-by-step process that informs the way you plan, design, and execute the right activities. 

A content strategy helps you create content with a purpose and a definite goal in mind. It enables you to allocate resources properly and direct your efforts towards activities that generate the best returns.

The Elements of an Effective Content Strategy

Before crafting a content strategy, you should have a clear idea of what it looks like. Different businesses have different views on the structure and underlying goals of a content strategy, but the following elements are almost always present:

1. Research and evidence

Sound research is needed to ensure that a content strategy is based on real-world situations. Otherwise, you could end up with a game plan that’s detached from what unfolds in the playing field itself. Taking the time to research your market provides your strategy with sound insights and improves the accuracy of your promotional efforts. 

2. Storytelling

Content isn’t just about sharing information. It’s also about tapping into your audience’s pain points and making them feel as though your brand is the only solution they need. This requires expert storytelling which involves framing the best parts of your ecommerce products and leading customers toward a definite conclusion.

3. Multi-channel approaches

These days, relying on only one communication channel won’t guarantee success. While social media provides you with an affordable means to share content about your business, it shouldn’t be the only platform in your arsenal. A good content strategy recognizes the value of multi-channel marketing. This amplifies your brand message across a wide variety of platforms, from social media to search ads and livestreaming.

4. Sales Enablement

Content is never separate from sales. Your sales team needs content to strengthen their convincing power. Brochures and whitepapers play a crucial role in helping clients (especially those in the B2B sector) make informed decisions. Along with powerful sales platforms like Dynamics 365 Ecommerce, your sales team can use content more effectively to generate more sales conversions.

5. Analytics

Your content strategy will always be subject to improvement. No game plan is perfect, so be prepared to implement necessary changes to your promotional activities. You should know this when you measure your strategy’s performance. Seeing a drop in organic impressions, click-throughs, and site conversions indicates a need to overhaul your strategy or revise some parts of it. Now that you have a clear view of what a successful content strategy looks like, the next section will help you build one from scratch.

Crafting Your Content Strategy: A Gameplan for E-commerce Businesses

From the get-go, you need to keep in mind that your game plan won’t be completed overnight. A great deal of preparation is involved in making sure you have a strategy that works. Follow this guide that will bring you closer to a full-proof plan that benefits your e-commerce brand:

1. Set Goals and Objectives

In developing a strategy, a well-defined set of goals should always precede the processes necessary for accomplishing them. When setting these goals, remember to follow the principle of SMART:

• Specific: Don’t aim for a general idea of success. Develop a concrete concept of success. If you want to expand your business, do you mean expanding to a new location or a different market? Specificity narrows down your actions and ensures that you’re not wasting time and resources.
• Measurable: Ensure that you have metrics in place that allow you to determine the strategy’s potential for success. Select benchmarks and targets that align with the goal so you will know if your strategy is moving your business on the right track.
• Attainable: When setting goals for your content strategy, you wouldn’t want to aim too high. Considering the current size of your business and the resources available on hand, set targets you have a good chance of accomplishing. From there, you can proceed toward attaining higher goals. 
• Research-based: You can’t set goals if you’re not backed up by real-world data. Market research is invaluable to your efforts, so take as much time as you need to understand your audience and analyze the campaigns of your competitors. Find out what these are missing and come up with ideas that fill up these gaps. 
• Time-bound: Finally, the goals you set for your content strategy should follow a definite schedule. You will need to identify long-term goals that take a long time to accomplish. You can then narrow this overall goal down into sub-targets with deadlines you can accomplish in the short term.

When setting goals for your content strategy, ask yourself what matters to your business right now. Below are just some of the most common examples of goals you should aim for:

1. Build brand authority and become an industry leader
2. Grow your customer base across new markets
3. Outrank your competitors in the search engine results pages
4. Increase your business’s profitability
5. Raise brand advocates and nurture brand loyalty

2. Develop a Compelling Brand Identity

When you create a content strategy, you need to nurture your brand identity. This is crucial since your brand identity determines the tone, look, and overall personality of the content you’ll be publishing. Your brand identity should include the following:

• Color scheme: Your brand logo isn’t the only visual element that helps your audience build familiarity. You also need a color scheme to use across all collaterals. Limit the color scheme to two or three.
• Voice: Perhaps you want your messages to come across as professional. If your e-commerce brand sells toys, then a more upbeat tone would be ideal. Whichever the case, determining the tone of your brand helps you craft content that resonates with your target audience. 
• Value proposition: In developing a value proposition, consider what you think would be the biggest problem your products could solve. It’s also important to show what sets your products apart from those offered by your competitors. Adding a well-crafted value proposition to the content you produce will help your strategy accomplish its goals. 

3. Build your content mix

Once you have laid down your brand identity, you need to identify the types of content to include in your campaign. While it helps if you could use a multi-channel approach, you need to realize that not all channels can benefit the type of products you’re selling.

For instance, if you’re planning to start an email marketing campaign, you need to understand that your target audience might not open their inboxes often. It might work for professional clients like lawyers and doctors, but it could hardly get the typical consumer excited. Consider the results of your market research and find out the types of content that get your target audience engaged. Your content mix should include the following:

• Social media posts
• Search and social media ads
• Search-optimized blogs
• Landing pages 
• Short-form videos or reels
• Brochures

With the creative muscle involved in implementing your strategy, you will need a team of experienced digital marketing specialists to help with setting up a sales funnel. This ensures that cold leads engaging with your brand message will be continuously nurtured until they decide to purchase.

4. Build a Content Plan

After laying down the types of content to produce, you will need to build a process for creating, checking, and clearing content before publishing. From relevant blogs to landing pages, you need to come up with a workflow that starts with an idea that goes through numerous development stages. To streamline your content production process, consider utilizing tools such as a sentence checker. An AI-powered grammar tool catches errors and optimizes your text’s structure, ensuring your communication resonates with audiences effectively and correctly.

In addition, you also need to come up with a content calendar. This will help you set deadlines and schedule recurring social media content. Determine who leads the team in brainstorming and who has the final say in editing and finalizing content.

Your strategy should also have a system for repurposing content. This would come in handy when your team can’t come up with fresh ideas. Through repurposing, you simply use previously published content as the basis for new content.

5. Set and Monitor KPIs

No strategy can ever prosper without tracking specific metrics. These serve as the basis for possible improvements to your strategy. For this, you need to determine your campaign’s key performance indicators or KPIs. Here are some that can help you track the performance of your content strategy:

• Engagement rate: This refers to how frequently certain types of content (e.g. social media posts, blogs) get read. A high engagement rate would mean people are interested in your messaging.
• Click-throughs: These refer to the number of clicks you get from each type of content. A click indicates a strong desire to learn about your product, so it’s a good indication that people are interested in your offers. 
• Conversion rate: Converting customers isn’t just about making a sale. Your content can inspire them to take action, whether it’s to learn more about your business through your website or schedule a consultation.
• Feedback: Reviews and testimonials give you a better understanding of audience sentiments. Getting more positive than negative feedback is a good sign that your e-commerce products are catching on. The problem starts when bad impressions outweigh the good ones. In that case, take them into account and use them to revise your value proposition in case you’ve been overselling the product. 

With these KPIs, you can determine if your content strategy is working to beef up your business or causing it to stumble.

Endnote

A content strategy is crucial to the success of your e-commerce brand. Crafting the best possible one can bring your business to the forefront, overcome the competition, and tap into its potential for greater growth.