How to Create Killer Content For Your Ecommerce Store On A Budget

In the always-booming Ecommerce world, content remains king. Good content that drives results remains king, meaning it’s data-driven, relevant, goal-oriented, and optimized for search engines.

When you think of all that, it is no surprise that creating, publishing, and distributing quality content often demands a big budget and plenty of creative resources. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and there are certainly ways to create great content if you’re on a budget.

You don’t have to be a content creation powerhouse to rank high on Google or to compete with the bigger stores. You need to understand what your customers want, diversify the content you create, and leverage some new tech to cut costs while getting the content out on time.

Let’s examine these steps individually and discuss how you and your team can create killer content for your E-Commerce store when you and your team are very budget-aware. Here’s what you can do.

Save Time and Money by Doing Research First

Quality content that moves people and delivers visual or written results stems from knowing and understanding your audience. This means tapping into their goals, pain points, and content preferences.

While many of your competitors will focus solely on solving their problems, they must remember that different target audiences consume various types of content. What does this mean?

Well, consider millennial vs Gen Z buyers. 

These two demographics grew up on different types of online content. Millennials typically enjoy highly informative and personalized content, while Gen Z-ers demand corporate honesty, accountability, and humor. In a nutshell, the younger audiences are tired of corporate jargon and their facades.

What does this mean for you? For one, it means that if you can give your brand a relatable image, a personal one instead of a corporate facade, you will have a much higher chance of resonating with younger buyers.

And that’s one of your main pillars for content creation—knowing the type of content people enjoy. Understanding this will set the tone for your website, blog, lead magnets, emails and DMs, ad copy, and more.

Considering all this, dig deep into your target demographics first to save time and money on content creation. 

Build Authority and Social Proof with UGC

Before creating original content for your website and other online platforms, let’s tap into one of the most cost-effective content types: user-generated content.

UGC is any content that people create about your brand and products. Here’s a quick list of some popular types of UGC:

• Social posts, shares, and mentions
• Customer reviews
• Testimonials
• Product showcases
• Referrals
• Community forums
• Webinars or podcasts
• Online groups

Whenever a customer posts something about your store, you want to leverage that for your marketing and content creation efforts. For example, you can embed customer reviews on your site and turn them into social media posts.

You can ask for more personal testimonials that go in-depth on the customer’s entire experience with your store. This is an excellent opportunity to showcase that feedback across your online channels and tag the creator.

The great thing about UGC is that producing it is not expensive or time-consuming because your customers are doing it for you. The only thing you need to do is to inspire them to create it in the first place.

You can do that online and offline. For example, with every delivery, leave a personalized note thanking the customer for their purchase and asking them to leave a review or tag you in an Instagram post.

Leverage AI to Analyze, Create and Publish Content

With the rise of generative AI and artificial intelligence technologies, we see a surge in cost-effective opportunities for budget-savvy Ecommerce businesses.

But whether you’re on a budget or not, leveraging AI is still a great way to reduce operational expenses while elevating productivity. And that goes for content creation, analysis and publishing.

For example, AI is an excellent tool for content repurposing and content transformation. If you have white papers, research, or reports from which you can extract snippets or summaries, you can turn them into engaging content for your audience. 

Artificial intelligence is great at summarizing content, and using an AI content analysis generator is an easy way to create snippets and summaries you can repurpose online. You can use these snippets for social media posts, email teasers, and promotions or to enrich your product descriptions and make them more data-driven for your potential customers.

The possibilities for AI are virtually endless, and of course, you can also use the technology to create long-form content like articles and blog posts. That said, it’s still best to use AI for ideation, summaries, and workflow, as the technology is still not at a level where it can consistently create high-quality, branded content.

Nevertheless, AI is excellent for minimizing time and financial waste.

Visual Content is Easy and Cheap to Create

While we’re on the subject of content creation, it’s important to remember that visual content is just as important as written content.

Original images, infographics, videos, and any other type of visual content are all great for engaging modern online audiences. The best part about visual content is, however, that it’s often easier and cheaper to create than written content.

This is because, at least at the beginning, you don’t need much more than a smartphone with an excellent camera to create original images and powerful videos. You can post these on your website and product pages, yes, but you can also use them to drive your social media and email campaigns. 

The key is to be consistent in your content output and show your audience how they can use and enjoy your products. You don’t need a professional studio to create product videos, snippets, guides, tutorials, or showcases – you just need consistency and a quality smartphone camera.

Use Your Expertise to Create Lead Magnets

Building your own online store means that you have a passion for certain products and that you have spotted an opportunity to solve certain problems for customers in a specific niche. This requires a lot of research and education on your part, so why not use what you have learned to create free downloadable content for your target audience and existing customers?

This type of content is what’s called a lead magnet, which encompasses all content that you give to people for free in exchange for their email address. A lead magnet is a powerful tool in the whole conversion cycle, as you can integrate calls to action that will inspire potential buyers to check out your products, enable first-purchase discounts, and make a quick decision to buy.

In order for lead magnets to be successful, however, they need to deliver a lot of value upfront. 

Here are some types of lead magnets you can consider creating:

• eBooks
• Guides
• Product tutorials
• Use cases
• Templates
• Checklists
• Reports and industry data

You can optimize all of these to fit your brand and niche, solving a problem for potential customers and giving them an opportunity to get to know your business and products. 

Don’t Forget About SEO

Last but not least, every piece of content you create should be optimized for search engines. The role of SEO is to boost your store’s visibility, authority and trust in the competitive and saturated Ecommerce market.

In order to harness the power of SEO, you will need to create relevant content while integrating keywords that are relevant for your customers, industry, and your brand. Luckily, you don’t need to subscribe to any tools in order to do good keyword research, and you can optimize your content without any software if you follow some essential rules:

• Create long-form content that’s relevant and informative
• Use short paragraphs and write concisely
• Create a list of relevant keywords and implement them in your content
• Don’t stuff keywords and only integrate them where it seems appropriate
• Properly format your content with headings, subheadings, and bullet lists
• Make sure to include keywords in headings, meta descriptions, and article body
• Properly attribute images and optimize them with alt-text
• Optimize content for the featured snippets by answering important questions clearly and concisely

Of course, there’s a lot more to SEO than this, but when it comes to content creation specifically, this is enough to get you started on the right path. Over time, you can start branching out into guest posting, link building, and other SEO practices.

As your budget increases, you can use paid SEO tools to take your content to the next level. 

Over to You

Quality content in Ecommerce is not just about creating good product descriptions. Content creation encompasses everything from website content to articles, emails, and social media, all the way to visual content and UGC.

Yes, there’s a lot to cover here, but it doesn’t have to be a costly investment. You can achieve a lot by simply knowing your audience and tailoring your content creation to their needs and goals.

Make sure to divide your time between creating visual and written content to leverage both. Don’t forget to repurpose all the content you create for different online outlets and social media platforms.