Why Content Marketing is an Essential Part of your eCommerce Success. PLUS 7 Tips to Get You Started.
Content Marketing is an essential weapon in any Marketers arsenal in today’s digital landscape. And eCommerce brands have a stellar opportunity to capitalise on Content Marketing by creating awesome experiences for their customers, that ultimately lead them to purchase.
Firstly, what is content marketing?
According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
And secondly, why should eCommerce companies care about content marketing?
SEO - Quality content on topics your customers are likely to search will help your company rank in search engines.
Community-building - Reaching new customers is one thing, retaining them for life is another. Repeat business and growing your customer’s lifetime value is the holy grail in eCommerce. Content Marketing is an exceptional way to keep your customers interested and engaging with your brand.
Growing Social Reach - Great content that gets shared on social media has the potential to reach new followers.
Revenue - at the end of the day, sales are what keeps you in business. Content Marketing can be a fantastic lead generator and selling tool.
So we know content marketing is essential and has the ability to massively transform your business. So how do you get started? Here are 7 tips to work into your strategy.
1. How-to videos and posts
The last time you had to learn how to do something what did you do? You googled it, and probably watched a youtube tutorial. You are not alone my friend. There is a reason why many of ‘how-to’ style videos rank so highly on youtube - everyone else is learning the same way.
Luxy Hair, is a great example of this. They sell clip-in hair extensions and whilst they have a tonne of videos explaining how to use their products they also use how-to videos to teach their users other things they might be interested in. A great way to engage their audience, without being too sales-y!
So why not create content that teaches your audience how to do something?
2. Content that answers your customers questions
In the buying cycle, customers typically have questions about your products, your company and how they are best suited to use your products and services. Many companies try and speed up their customer service by have an FAQ page, but this is a fantastic opportunity to create awesome content inspired by your customers.
3. Use images
60% of people are visual learners, so including a picture or video in your content (over plain text) will massively transform your audience’s ability to understand your message and convert to sale. Why do you think infographics got so massive all of a sudden? Visualising data is so much more powerful than reading it.
If you are selling a physical product the more beautifully you can showcase it to potential customers the less roadblocks there will be to a sale.
Bauble Bar do a fantastic job of showcasing their jewellery through their social media channels with vibrant, colourful and fun images. A lesson for every eCommerce store - you don't have to make your product images boring!
4. Make the offline online
Contrary to popular belief, there is still a physical world outside our digital one. And successfully shifting your brand between the two worlds and being able to interact with your customers in both, shifts the dynamic from your audience consuming the content you create, to actually being a part of creating it.
A fantastic example of this is Christian Louboutin’s #Tribaloubi campaign. The French footwear and accessories label asked consumers to download and print tribal-themed finger puppets and share their creations on social media for a chance to be featured by the brand. The brand often shares photos of its followers wearing its handbags and shoes, the finger puppets offered the chance for aspirational customers to get involved in the conversation without the price-tag.
What could you include in each one of your deliveries that inspires your customers to post on their social media?
5. Create a calendar
One of the most important things in content marketing is consistency, when your readers know when to expect new content from you, they are more likely to keep coming back to check out what’s new. But for marketers, one of the hardest things can be sticking to a routine and having an endless flow of great ideas. Creating a schedule of content can help keep you on track, and manage the flow of ideas.
6. Promote your content
If you build it, they will come. A line from a movie and a popular misconception when it comes to anything online. Sure, once you have built a loyal following, some of them will come back regularly… but you absolutely need to market your content to reach a good portion of the followers who have visited you before AND new ones. There are loads of ways to market your content including:
Post it on your social media sites
Send it to your email list
Tweet or email it directly to Influencers in your field for feedback
7. Tap into influencers
Influencer marketing is a beautiful extension of content marketing. Working with an influencer is a win on all fronts:
Someone else, who happens to create content for a living so is probably pretty good at it, is helping you create the content,
It puts you in front of a whole new audience of readers
Increases your social media following
PLUS gives you a backlink to improve your SEO.
This collaboration with Shoes of Prey, and design-your-own shoe boutique and Drunk on Shoes, a Chicago Fashion Blogger shows how a partnership helps brands distribute branded content across multi channels for maximum impact.
8. Measure what works
Producing consistent, quality content, that your readers care about is essential. But how do you know what actually is ‘quality’ and what ‘they care about’? Tracking your content and measuring it against key metrics that are important for your business - like engagement, website traffic and product sales will not only tell you what content to focus on, but will grow your business as a result. And that is the key to this whole content marketing ‘thang!
And since you’ve read this far down, scrunch specialises in number 7 & 8 - Finding the right influencers to work with, tracking your content and measuring it’s effectiveness. If your content marketing strategy could use a little nudge, sign up for free today. Or get in touch to chat about how we can help.
