Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach for increasing traffic, raising brand awareness, and generating leads and sales in the fiercely competitive eCommerce sector.
However, it’s pretty challenging, as a simple mistake is enough to ruin the entire campaign.
Are you wondering how to grow your Shopify eCommerce store through content marketing?
In this post, we’ll explore the importance of content marketing and the factors and tactics that can help design an effective content marketing strategy for a Shopify store.
Let’s get started!
What is eCommerce content marketing?
eCommerce content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing high-quality and engaging content to promote a brand or evoke customer interest in its products or services.
The content can be in different forms, such as blogs, articles, infographics, email newsletters, product descriptions, social media posts, or video guides.
Content for eCommerce stores or websites is created keeping the buyer journey in mind so they can access every piece of information they need during their customer journey phase. As a result, customers can maintain long-term relationships with brands, which leads to increased sales and revenue.
Why is content marketing a necessity for modern businesses?
Content marketing has made it easy for small entrepreneurs or big brands to reach potential clients, engage them with brands, establish authority, drive traffic, and increase leads and sales.
Let’s learn how content marketing helps different categories of businesses.
For B2C Businesses
The target audience of B2C (Business to Consumer) businesses is individual customers. If you have a B2C Shopify store, you know the struggle of attracting customers among the hundreds and thousands of other brands and stores.
As most customers look for information, guidance, or a solution to their pain points, B2C businesses can use content marketing to familiarize potential customers with the brand, which is their primary goal.
They can educate customers about their products or services or share interactive content on social media to attract customers to check out the brand or its offerings.
This way, they can achieve content marketing goals such as brand awareness, boosting engagement, driving traffic, increasing sales, and more.
For B2B Businesses
One of the core pillars of a B2B (Business to Business) business is trust. But how can B2B businesses earn the trust of B2B buyers when they have to face many difficulties reaching them?
Most B2B buyers use ad blockers, caller IDs, and spam filters. So most common marketing tactics, such as email marketing, telemarketing, or advertising, are often ineffective in reaching them.
Therefore, content marketing can be an effective way to grab the attention and trust of B2B buyers. They can use blog content, white papers, reports, webinars, etc., to stay at the Top of the search rankings and-
✔ Build brand awareness
✔ Establish trust and credibility
✔ Help buyers find the companies with a generic search
✔ Show the expertise of the business to attract B2B buyers and more.
For D2C Businesses
D2C (Direct to Consumer) businesses deal with individual customers. Their primary sources for selling online are mainly social media and eCommerce platforms like Shopify.
So, for directing potential clients to eCommerce stores, content marketing is a great technique. Like B2C businesses, D2C businesses can create strong brand values, form trustworthy customer relationships, drive traffic, and increase sales through effective content marketing strategies.
What to consider while creating content for content marketing
Let’s learn about the key factors that you must consider while creating content for content marketing.
Be Original
Do you know what is one of the critical factors in professional content writing services that can give your Shopify store the upper hand?
Original content!
The value of original content will always be in demand. Be it the audience or the search engines, everyone loves unique content that provides information they have never learned. Besides, the perks of original content include:
✔ Improved search ranking
✔ Rise in authority and credibility
✔ Increased website engagement
✔ Backlinks from influential domain authority sites and much more.
So, get creative, research, and create unique content to make your business stand out.
Interactive Content
Content marketing aims to drive traffic to your store and make them purchase your service or product.
Your content must be interactive enough to make it relatable to the audience, keep them on your site for a long time, and share it with the community.
Besides, interactive content helps increase brand awareness, customer engagement, lead generation, and conversion rate.
So, give special effort to increasing the interactivity of your content.
Length of Content
Content length is one of the essential SEO factors in content marketing. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to how long your content should be, as the ideal size depends on the content type, the taste of the readers, and the platform on which it is published.
Usually, long-form or blog content is ideal within 2000 words. This length is enough to create comprehensive content for websites or social media platforms like LinkedIn.
However, on other social sites, such as Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, etc., the audience prefers bite-sized content within 100–150 characters to consume the information on the go.
So, while deciding the length, consider the target audience’s preferences and the goal of your content.
Value to the Reader
Value is the essential element of content.
Consider yourself: Will you waste time reading something that won’t provide you with any value? Not.
What value your content can give your customers depends on their stage in the buyer’s journey. For instance, content addressing a pain point and its solutions can provide value to the audience in the awareness stage. However, prospects in the consideration stage will find deals in the product comparison content.
Hence, consider the buyer’s journey while creating content to identify who will be your content’s target audience and what insights they may consider valuable.
Visuals are Important
As a Shopify eCommerce store owner, your content must contain visuals. Visuals such as product images, infographics, 360-degree photos, or videos add interest to the content. It also boosts customer engagement and helps extract information quicker than from texts.
According to a study, 75% of customers prefer product photos when purchasing. So, when creating content, use visual elements to make the content visually appealing and draw in your audience.
Mobile-Friendly Is a Must
The reading patterns of desktop and mobile users are not the same. Since most of the audience is mobile, making the content mobile-friendly is essential.
You must write the content in chunks to enhance its readability. Try to keep paragraphs short and incorporate visuals, such as bullets, bolding, italics, images, etc., to make the content more accessible to follow and focus on the primary information on the small mobile screens.
How to grow Shopify eCommerce Store using content marketing
Let’s check out some of the key tactics of content marketing to learn how to grow your Shopify eCommerce store.
Define Your Content Marketing Goal & KPIs
The first step in creating an effective Shopify content marketing plan is identifying your marketing goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Every goal requires different marketing strategies, target audiences, and channels. And tracking the KPIs helps identify whether the content achieves its desired results.
What can be your content marketing goals and KPIs?
| Content Marketing Goals | KPIs |
| Brand awareness | Content views, social shares, audience engagement, follower or subscriber growth, etc. |
| Drive traffic | Content and website visitors per month, bounce rate, engagement time on site, etc. |
| Lead generation | Click-through rate, cost per lead, form responses, download numbers, etc. |
| Increase conversion | Conversion rate, revenue generation, new lead generation, sales cycle length, etc. |
| Improve engagement | Referral traffic, session duration, follower growth, engagement (likes, comments, shares), click-through rates, etc. |
Creating Your Audience Personas
The audience or buyer persona provides a detailed understanding of the prospective customers. When you know your target audience better, you can design your content marketing strategies based on their pain points, needs, and preferences.
So, how do you create a buyer persona?
You need the following four categories of information:
- Demographics: Age, gender, educational qualification, income, etc.
- Psychographics: Interests, personality, lifestyle, etc.
- Geographical location: Country, area (city or rural), etc.
- Behavior: Brand interaction, competitor interaction, buying goals, spending habits, purchase decision influencing factors, etc.
You can collect all this information from your website visitors or market research. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for researching competitors and learning how customers behave with similar brands. This can come as a great help in identifying your audience base and designing their personas.
Create Content That Your Audience Will Love
Content that resonates with your target audience receives the most engagement. That’s why, to grow your Shopify store, you need to create content that aligns with the preferences of your target audience and encourages engagement.
You can conduct a customer needs analysis to understand your customers’ needs and pain points. It can be started by tracking customer reviews or conversations about a brand, product, service, or competitor in different social platform groups. You can use social media analytics tools to monitor them.
The better you know your target audience, the more valuable content you can create for them. So, create content keeping their search intent, needs, and interests in mind.
Make Your Content Work on Different Channels
Your prospects are not limited to one or two platforms. If you are creating content focusing on only one platform, then your marketing strategy is like a tortoise that needs to catch up to the competition.
To reach a wider audience, you must be active simultaneously on all the platforms where your prospects spend the most time. But for that, you don’t need to create new content from scratch for every platform. Just make one piece of SEO-optimized content and repurpose it for multiple channels.
For example, create one blog post for your website. Take the key takeaways to create infographics for social media posts and stories, convert the blog into a podcast, create a YouTube video, use it as a newsletter, run paid ads, and more.
Figure out the best content types.
Another critical factor in an effective content marketing strategy for an eCommerce store is the type of content. Every customer conducts searches with different purposes.
Some may look for educational content, while others may prefer product recommendations. Therefore, conduct proper research to identify which type of content can most effectively engage your target customers.
Here are a few content categories you can try to promote your Shopify store.
- Product usage guide
- Product suggestions
- Product reviews
- Customer stories
- Trends
- Gift ideas
- Educational or informative
Moreover, collaborating with professional content writing services can help produce high-quality audience-based content from all these categories.
SEO And Advertising (Paid Ads)
If your Shopify store has a smaller audience, driving traffic through organic search can be considered nearly impossible.
However, it’s not an issue when you can use PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads.
SEO-optimized paid advertisements are great for attracting traffic faster. Create engaging headlines with keywords and killer CTAs that your customers will find tempting to click when the ad appears on the screen.
And the best part is that the ones who will click the ad are mostly the ones who are interested in your product or service.
Research Your Competitors
Competitor research is crucial in creating a successful content marketing strategy. It provides valuable insights into their content marketing strategy and tactics, allowing you to learn from them and improve your plans.
What metrics should you consider when analyzing competitors?
- On-site content:
✔Content categories
✔Content formats
✔Content quality and quantity
✔Content length
✔User Acquisition
- SEO metrics:
✔ Top performing keywords
✔Organic website traffic
✔Domain authority score
✔Average time on site
✔Backlink profile
✔Social media performance
You can use tools like Google Analytics to get the data mentioned above. This can help you identify what works well for the competitors, the target audience’s interests, your strategy gaps, and more.
Update Your Current Content
Content that doesn’t serve a purpose to the readers gets decayed over time. No matter how high quality your content is, it will fall out of the search rankings if it doesn’t resonate with the current trend and searcher intent.
Another essential reason to optimize your content is the constant change in Google’s algorithm and SEO metrics.
If your content doesn’t qualify in the recent matrices, it’s usual that searchers won’t find it in the top searches.
So, make changes to show Google and the target audience that your site is active and provides valuable content. This will help to give your readers a better user experience, keep their confidence in your site intact, and maintain consistent website traffic.
Collect And Analyze Performance Data
Last, you must collect the performance data to measure how well your content marketing strategy works and where you need to improvise.
You can use free tools such as Google Analytics to track your focused KPIs.
Engagement metrics such as page views, time on page, top-performing keywords, click-through rate, likes, comments, shares, bounce rate, etc., will provide an overview of how your target audience consumes your content.
Learn from the data and optimize your content marketing strategy over time.
Conclusion
In this comprehensive guide, we have covered all the essential aspects of content marketing, from creating top-notch content to planning and tracking your marketing metrics, such as defining your marketing goals, identifying KPIs, developing audience personas, determining content types, conducting competitor research, and choosing the right marketing channels.
Implementing the tactics outlined in this guide allows you to take your Shopify store to new heights and watch your business thrive. Don’t wait any longer; start implementing these strategies today!
