Sarah Elizabeth
Now that you’ve launched your e-commerce store, you’re ready to sell … but are your potential customers ready to buy? Right now, they might not even know your product or service exists or that it can meet their needs. Content marketing can change that. In a nutshell, content marketing can make you money.
Content marketing is the marketing approach that focuses on creating, publishing and distributing content for a targeted audience. This could be exactly what your e-commerce business needs to educate potential customers about their problems and offer the solutions that position you as a trusted provider.
Whether you’re looking to attract leads, nurture those leads or convert them into buyers, content marketing can help.
Here are five tips to get started with e-commerce content marketing:
- Know your target market
- Develop original, customer-focused content
- Create an editorial calendar
- Use the right content marketing tools
- Build a great team
1. Know Your Target Market
Before you ever start writing a word, make sure you know who your ideal customer is. When you know exactly who you want to target, what their needs are, and who’s likely to be looking for the products and services you offer — it becomes easier to map out and develop the effective content that’s going to attract the right buyers.
To develop this buyer persona, you’ll need to do some market research and get real data about your current customers — who they are, what their challenges are, what publications and blogs they read, how they like to shop, and what activities they enjoy. Analyze the results of your research to identify patterns and commonalities to develop at least one primary persona. Then as you’re developing your content, keep that persona in mind and write as if you’re speaking directly to them.
2. Develop Original, Customer-Focused Content
Now that you know the type of customer you’re trying to attract, it’s time to start developing content. But, you shouldn’t just put out any type of content. To attract the right prospects and retain the best customers, you need high-quality, targeted content. Original content is just as important, whether you’re posting product descriptions, blog posts or social media content.
While it may seem overwhelming to develop so much content, it doesn’t have to be. There are many blog post formats available that can help spark ideas for uniquely formatted posts and simplify the sometimes-daunting task of writing.
But blog and social media posts aren’t the only content you should be thinking about creating. Depending on the needs of your customers and the products and services you offer, you might also consider developing:
- Pillar pages and topic clusters will help you curate relevant content under a highly searched keywords and a holistic theme
- Product and service guides and videos that will help customers make buying decisions
- Webinars to interact with your audience and build engagement
- Customer case studies and success stories to promote the efficacy of your products and services and to show how much your customers love you
- FAQs that address a prospect’s biggest buying concerns and encourage them along their buyer’s journey
3. Create an Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar can — and should — do so much more than simply list the days when and where you’re publishing your content. Every editorial calendar should include:
- The content to be published, including content yet to be developed, existing content and repurposed content. You’ll want to make sure you include information about any keywords, target personas, alt tags, meta descriptions, and calls to action.
- Look for opportunities to link to existing website content and other valid sources around the same topic.
- The channels for publications, which may include your website, social media channels, professional networking sites and more.
- The members of your team who are responsible for creating and publishing this content, which can include everyone from writers to graphic designers.
- Due dates, including dates for writing, designing, proofreading, getting approvals and publishing.
Some content marketing platforms have these calendars built into their system; you can also use project management tools like Trello or create a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet that works just as effectively.
By developing a comprehensive editorial calendar, you’ll be able to more effectively schedule and streamline content publication.
4. Use the Right Content Marketing Tools
When you pick the right partners for developing, publishing and monitoring your content, you can deliver a cohesive, effective marketing plan.
Stuck on picking a subject for your next blog post? Enter keywords in BuzzSumo’s search feature to see trending topics in your industry, or check out general Q&A forums like Quora to see what people are interested in or having problems with. Tools like Canva can help you quickly create great-looking images for your social media posts, while platforms like Hootsuite take care of scheduling and posting your content across your social media accounts at the times of highest engagement. And if you’re looking to outrank your competitors online, Ahrefs can help you grow your search traffic and monitor your niche.
5. Build a Great Team
As you start to create more and more content, you’ll probably find you can’t do it all on your own. Instead, you’ll want to consider building a team of graphic designers, writers, social media experts and video production personnel who can help you more efficiently develop and publish effective content.
You may choose to develop an in-house team to handle these tasks, or you may consider building a network of trusted freelancers and independent contractors. Either way, you’ll want to make sure you’ve established branding guidelines and a corporate style book to maintain a consistent tone, structure, look and feel to everything you publish.
And as you build your team of trusted partners, don’t forget to consider your fraud prevention solution. With so much on the line, you need to ensure your business is protected against the increased risk of card-not-present fraud.
If you’re looking for a new fraud prevention partner that can help you grow your business while keeping your customers, revenue and data safe, contact one of the fraud prevention specialists at ClearSale. We’d love to share our 16-plus years of expertise with you.
