Most e-commerce businesses understand the importance of having good content for attracting a key demographic. Effective content marketing engages more visitors and improves awareness of your products.
Content marketing is also significantly cheaper and builds more leads than traditional marketing.
In this post, we’ll discuss some ways you can use content marketing to your advantage.
1 — Email Content
There’s often a focus on social media when it comes to online marketing, but email still delivers the highest return on investment for marketing. It beats affiliate marketing, paid search, TV, radio, and social media to be the best bang for your marketing buck, so it pays to get your email marketing right.
Subject lines and preview text should be workshopped to keep email open rates high. Email marketing is a good place to perform A-B split testing to see which email designs result in the best uptake for your particular business.
Email marketing works best because people’s email inbox is one of their most trusted sources. Internet users keep their email inboxes better curated than their social media feeds and trust the content that arrives there much more.
By the time you’re offering content via emails to a customer, you already know something about them, allowing you to personalize the content too.
Start with automatic welcome emails and personalized emails that highlight your promotional events. Holiday-themed emails boost sales and you can use what you know of the customer’s previous interests to email them when an interesting item is on sale or back in stock. Some businesses benefit from sending a monthly newsletter.
Depending on your products and services, you might want to consider a drip campaign. Instead of just sending a welcome email, you’ll automatically send a number of emails over the course of 10 days, introducing different parts of the products on offer to get the buyer more invested in the product. Perhaps you offer a trial version of a piece of software, for example, and over the course of the drip campaign, you can extol the virtues of getting the full version.
2 — Guest Blogging
If your business is just starting out, it can be difficult to get natural inbound links from high authority websites. Existing sites that have earned trust from their readership are often reluctant to link directly to product pages.
To counter this, if you create engaging, useful content for use on their website they can link to your website without issue. At the same time, you can promote your brand through your expertise, increase traffic to your site, and build more sales.
Avoid being overly promotional in your writing, and always consider the relevant site’s audience, giving them something that they can use and share.
3 — User-Generated Content
Allow users to post reviews, comments, and tips on how to use your website and social media sites. Ask your customers to share their feedback using a hashtag, making it easier for the content to gain traction and for you to follow it.
To drive user-generated content, consider how you can incentivize it. A simple way is to offer a prize for the best themed user-generated content mentioning your brand. Another way is to feature the best shared content on your online gallery.
4 — Share Customer Stories
Share success stories from customers has multiple benefits. It shows potential customers that their peers love your product, it shows you care about your customers after selling to them, it’s highly authentic, and it’s inexpensive.
Keep an eye out for success stories from customers using your products or reach out to customers who have left a good review. Request permission from them to share what they’ve learned. To encourage happy customers to come forward, you can create a competition that entices your customers to share stories, videos, or photos that promote your product.
Case studies on your website that demonstrate how your product and services have worked in the past mean there’s a greater chance new visitors will choose to buy from you.
5 — Product Guides
Don’t just sell your products; include content that shows visitors how to use them.
Product guides can tell a story to potential buyers, detailing examples of what they’ll be able to do with the products you well. Make your product guides detailed and simple to follow and you’ll position yourself as an expert in the field.
Product guides can also improve customer satisfaction with the products that you sell. If there’s an after-sales question you often get asked about, put it in a product guide on your website. This not only reduces the number of after-sales inquiries you need to deal with, but it also improves customer satisfaction. People like to be able to solve problems themselves.
Don’t use product guides to sell products. They’re a place to educate customers and to show that you care about them making the best decisions. Product guides with visuals work the best, so include infographics.
6 — Videos
People are visually oriented, so your content marketing ideas should always try to include image and if possible video. Short ad campaigns can complement your e-commerce site.
For a video planned for Facebook consumption, aim for a one-minute length. Facebook's users prefer quick, snappy videos that they can view quickly before scrolling to the next post. For YouTube, two minutes is the perfect length.
Ad videos should have a hook, so they encourage people to share them, increasing the chance they’ll go viral.
You can take this further by offering a full video course or an interactive webinar. You can record yourself interacting with some of your favorite customers and record it to offer later on YouTube.
Plan out your content marketing correctly and you can maximize its reach. When a new piece of content is created, consider how you can use it in your email marketing, onsite marketing, and social media marketing to get the best return on your investment.
