Content marketing spreads the word about your eCommerce business among the right crowd that gets you more customers.
Creating and executing the right content marketing plan for your eCommerce business have the following advantages:
- Improves SEO: This means your website will be loved by search engines. You will attract more traffic by ranking higher on the SERPS which will increase your brand awareness.
- Connects the customer journey: Your content will guide your customers through all steps in the sales funnel. This will increase trust and build long-term loyalty among your audience.
- Establishes brand positioning: To get picked by your customers you need to differentiate your eCommerce brand from your competitors. A tailored content marketing strategy will create a unique brand identity for you.
- Increase loyalty: Customer retention is necessary for the short and long-term success of an eCommerce brand. Your content will strengthen relationships with your customers and will motivate them to keep coming back.
Now the question is, how will you create a content marketing plan that will work for you?
Let’s dive in.
How to create a content marketing plan for eCommerce
Your content marketing plan will cater to the unique needs of your eCommerce brand. That’s what the first step is all about.
1. Set your goals
What will determine that your content marketing plan is a success?
Of course, the simple answer is to get more customers who keep buying from you. However, to set goals you need to dig a little deeper.
For instance, let’s say you want to double your monthly organic traffic. You can do so by seeing which of your content pieces are doing good and producing more of that. Another tactic is to distribute your content in channels where your target audience hangs out.
Don’t know your target audience’s preferred channel? That’s what the next step is about.
2. Identify buyer personas
A buyer persona for your eCommerce brand is a semi-fictional representation of your customer.
This helps you by:
- Understanding their needs and expectations
- Seeing your brand from their perspective
- Recommending them products they are more likely to buy
- Creating content that they like
- Delivering the content in the format and channel they want
Here’s a great guide on creating detailed buyer personas for your business.
3. Competitors’ research
This will act as a reference point. You can see how your competitors are aerating a brand identity through their content. For example, Amazon’s tagline “earth’s most customer-centric company” positions itself as a very customer-centric brand.
Competitive content research will help you generate lots of ideas that you can soft-test and choose based on the resources available.
4. Track key performance indicators (KPIs)
Monthly traffic, newsletter signups, cart abandonments, etc., are a few of the metrics that you should be tracking closely. Although not all of them are directly related to content marketing, you can definitely know whether you are reaching your target audience.
For example, if more people are viewing your content but are not making a purchase, maybe you are not targeting the right audience.
KPI data will give you valuable insights which will help you make adjustments to your content marketing plan and improve its efficiency. In a survey, 78% of content marketers revealed that their campaigns were successful because they were documented properly.
But, where to get started?
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are plenty of such strategies that you can take off the shelf and hit the ground running. Let’s take a look at four such eCommerce content marketing plans.
Examples of best eCommerce content marketing plans
The following suggestions are already tried and tested by lots of brands in the eCommerce industry. These are a great starting point for growing eCommerce brands and you can continue to modify them as you learn more about your audience’s preferences.
Knowledge base
Knowledge bases are digital libraries that equip your customers to self-service. For example, one of your customers got stuck at checkout. Contacting the helpdesk will take much longer compared to finding the solution by themself through the knowledge base.
Not to mention, it will keep your overall customer support costs low. You can opt for customer service software, like Hiver, which also allows you to create knowledge bases with help articles that empower customers to self-serve and let support reps deflect repetitive queries.
Topic clusters for your blog
Topic clusters are a method of content organization that is increasingly preferred by search engines. Here, various content pieces are created around a core topic, also known as the pillar content, that is interlinked for a great reading experience.
For example, if your eCommerce store is selling gaming computers, you can create a pillar topic along the lines of “introduction to gaming computers”. Then, you can create cluster topics on smaller topics that you can link to the pillar content.
User-generated content (UGC)
Earlier we mentioned that “people buy from people”. This shows the importance of UGC. 93% of customers agree that UGCs help them make the right purchasing decision.
Recall the last time you purchased anything from an eCommerce store without reading the reviews! Now imagine yourself in your customer’s shoes.
Your customers are just like you when it comes to making a purchase. They want to buy things from a store where other people had good experiences. User reviews, social media mentions, hashtags, etc., fall into this category.
As an eCommerce business owner, you can incentivize UGC to increase the buzz about your brand on social media.
Video content
Videos are the most preferred type of content among all demographics. Particularly short videos. There are many kinds of videos you can create, and some of them are:
- Tutorial videos: These videos will show your users how to use the products you sell and how they can get the most value out of them.
- Testimonial videos: Here your happy customers can mention their experience shopping on your eCommerce site or how easy-to-use your products are.
- Influencer videos: You can promote your best products through social media influencers and celebrities.
To leverage video content marketing and make the most out of it, you will need a platform that addresses all your needs. Cincopa’s video marketing solution helps businesses track key metrics such as engagement level and watch time to increase conversions.
Summing up
A carefully executed content marketing plan will help your eCommerce business attract the right audience that keeps returning. To create a customized content marketing plan you need to:
- Identify your objectives and set expectations
- Create buyer personas so you understand what your audience wants
- Research your competitors which will give you ideas
- Track crucial metrics so that you can continue to improve your processes
To get started, you can start by creating a knowledge base, clustering your content, incentivizing UGCs, and investing in video content.
Good luck.
