Everything You Need To Know To Start An Ecommerce Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is an important component of any digital marketing strategy. Content marketing can be a powerful way to reach your audience and provide valuable information. It also helps improve your SEO.

What is content marketing exactly? What are the different options available in this area? How can they be used to achieve success? We have a comprehensive guide that will cover everything you need to know. This guide will help you get started on the path to creating your eCommerce content strategy.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing simply means creating and sharing valuable information with a particular audience. It should be used to educate and inform people and then drive them to buy. Content marketing is a powerful tool to communicate your brand online to customers if it’s done correctly.

Content can be found in every email, landing page, product description, and ad that you publish. How can content be used effectively in marketing to increase brand awareness and grow your business?

SEO is incomplete without content marketing. Without content, it would be impossible to optimize your ecommerce website SEO strategy. Google can use the content on your website to understand your business and the keywords that your business is related to. This will allow you to be displayed on Google’s search results page for information about products that are relevant to your business. Sites linking to other resources can help people find the information they need. It always points them to content. It is incredibly powerful!

This is the essential content marketing: creating a space for words, images, and videos to be shared with your audience to help increase your conversion rate

What is the difference between content marketing and content strategy?

It is possible to notice that you often hear the terms “content strategy” or “content marketing”, and sometimes even interchangeably. They are different things. We will assume, for our purposes, that “content strategy” refers to “content marketing strategy.”

Content marketing is all about execution. Content marketing is the process of creating, curating, and editing content specifically for marketing purposes. Content marketing can include blog posts and FAQ pages. It is designed to build trust between your company’s customers and you. It’s not about creating content people like to read, it’s about helping them navigate the buying process to make a purchase.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you understand the purpose of content, let’s look at how to create a content marketing plan. A plan is essential to the success of your content marketing strategy. This helps you to understand your business goals and how you will get there.

What is the best place to begin? Where should you focus your efforts in creating your plan for success? You need to know your business goals. These could include lowering the cost of acquiring customers, improving ROI on marketing, increasing repeat sales, and so forth. There are many KPIs to be aware of:

Attaining an AOV (average order value) target
Reduce shopping cart abandonment rate by X%
Aiming to reduce customer acquisition costs
A gross profit margin is a goal
Improve your site’s conversion rates

You need to set a goal for your marketing efforts to gauge how successful they are. Many businesses struggle to identify the goals that they should set to measure site traffic growth and overall revenue.

The key takeaway is It is important to clearly define how your business plans to use marketing initiatives to make money. You should have a clear KPI before you consider hiring an agency. This will ensure that they know exactly what you are trying to achieve with their marketing efforts. Do not rely on agencies to set your goals. They don’t know your margins and what ROI is required for profitable marketing campaigns.

What are your goals?

Before you do anything, sit down and decide what your goals are and what you want to achieve in your content marketing efforts. You can either go it alone or with your team to brainstorm, but take some time to think about what you want to achieve. This list contains questions that you can use to help you define your content marketing goals.

What is the key to our success?

What are the content gaps in our current website? (FAQ, product pages, category pages, etc.)

Do we want more subscribers or perhaps more backlinks?

Are we aiming to increase brand awareness with our content marketing?

Does creating content help us to understand our audience?

Does it establish trust? Reviews, testimonials, and social proof are all important.

Is it possible to educate our customers about our products, and the positive impact that the brand has on them, or should we just focus on our products?

What can we do with different content pieces in our marketing channels?

We want our content and customers to be more engaged. Asking for customer opinions, experiences, or general engagement will help customers feel that they are interacting with people, not brands.

How can we measure ROI using our top-of-the-funnel content marketing?

Good questions are the first step to determining if content marketing is right in your business’s favor. You should set goals that are focused on different aspects of content marketing, just like any other initiative. Keep track of your goals. To help you stay focused, you might consider placing your goals where you will see them often. Content marketing can be a great fit if you understand your audience and what they need. Then make sure that the brand is at the center of everything!

Define your Target Audience

Knowing your target audience will help you stay focused on your content marketing goals. It will also make it easier to create and brainstorm content that best serves your customers.

You must know who your audience is and what they like before you start a content marketing campaign. Without a clear understanding of your audience, you will not see the results you desire with your content marketing efforts.

Consider these elements of your target audience.

Age
Localization
Gender
Habits
Likes and dislikes
Spending habits

These details will allow you to identify your best customers and help you create a content marketing strategy. Do not fall for the trap of too broadening your target audience.

Key Takeaway – If you focus on generic content, your site will attract the wrong traffic. Isn’t all traffic great? It’s not always true. The problem is that you start to see a wide range of visitors to your site, but they aren’t taking any action on your site. This leads to a higher bounce rate. Your traffic is great but all other metrics suffer.

When asked about their target audience, some business owners and marketers use broad phrases like “everyone” “all parents”, “people who exercise” or “people who are interested in exercising.” You might target a 65-year-old female swimmer, or an 18-year-old football player, with different targeting strategies.

You must define your target audience to develop your strategy. This will help you determine who your target audience is, what content you use, how you phrase it, where you place it, and so on. This will determine the direction of your content marketing strategy.

Many people find it helpful to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona describes the person who best represents your target audience. This persona is fictional and is not representative of a real customer. These resources can help you create a buyer persona.

Buyer Persona Profile Epic Content Marketing
- Epic Content Marketing offers a quick worksheet that will allow you to capture a buyer persona. It includes their job description, priorities, challenges, and job responsibilities.

Five Rings of Buying Information Template From the Book Epic Content Marketing
- The 5 Rings of Buyer Insights template can be used in conjunction with the worksheet. It will provide additional insight into the buyer’s journey.

How to create buyer personas for your business Hubspot
- Hubspot offers a step-by-step guide and downloadable template that will help you create buyer personas.

To understand how your buyers would search for information about your products, you’ll need to map some keywords to your buyer personas as you create them. You don’t need to dive into the details right away (we’ll discuss keyword research later in this guide), but it is important to start getting a feel for how consumers would search for products that are related to your business. This keyword research will give you additional information about each persona.

It can be helpful for buyers to give their persona a name, or find a stock image that matches the person. This persona is meant to personalize your marketing experience with your audience.

After you have established your goals and created buyer personas, the next step is to conduct a content audit. The content audit will allow you to identify the content that you need to work with. This is a process that ensures your website content aligns with the needs of your buyer personas.

Content Audit: Take inventory of the content you have

A content audit is a crucial step toward perfecting your strategy. A content audit is a comprehensive look at the content on your website.

The content audit’s purpose is to:

To ensure that the revenue-generating pages are the right ones, identify the pages that drive the most traffic.
To improve the consideration phase, identify new content in the middle of your funnel.
Identify new content opportunities at the top of your funnel. Some of these opportunities might have been discovered while keyword research was being done.

You should conduct a content audit as part of your content strategy. While a content audit is an important part of your content strategy it does not replace your entire strategy.

1. Take inventory

Your audit starts with an inventory of the content on your website. This can be done using Google Analytics data, or by looking at site crawlers such as Screaming Frog. This will provide you with a list of URLs from your site, which is great for getting you started. Start by crawling all of your websites for content.

Use ScreamingFrog for crawling your entire website looking for content

Screaming Frog can’t crawl an entire website. (crawling, a fancy term for pulling all data e.g. – Metadata, URLs, word count, CSS, and any other data that is available on a website. After crawling your entire site, filter the data using HTML pages.

This will delete all JavaScript, Images, and CSS files you don’t use for your content audit. Export the data. You will get a ton of information for each URL in the CSV file you export. We recommend that you only focus on the URL and Title tags. These will be used to further analyze. You can use Google Analytics to collect URL data if you don’t have Screaming Frog.

Google Analytics for Content Data Collection

You can perform a content audit if you have Google Analytics installed. We recommend installing Google Analytics to get started collecting data for your company. To collect revenue, AOV, and conversion rates, you must set up eCommerce tracking .

You can do a content audit within twenty minutes if you have Google Analytics installed.

Select ACQUISITION > CHANNELS

Assign the primary dimension to the Landing Page.

If you have data, ensure you have at least one year of data.

Sort revenue pages (highest to least revenue-driving) and export the top 250 URLs in Excel (XLSX).

NOTE: If you don’t have 250 URLs that generate revenue, then take a look at the 50-100 most popular pages. Export what you have to the spreadsheet if there are less than 5-10 URLs (or a small amount).

Next, take a look at the top pages that have received unique visits. This list can be exported and added to the original spreadsheet with revenue URLs. Before moving on to the next step, sort and remove duplicate URLs.

The following columns should be retained in the Excel spreadsheet exported from Google Analytics.

URL
Column empty
Users
Transaktions
Revenue

Verify all URLs. Remove URLs with campaign IDs (CID).

/checkout/
/cart/
/account/

Add the domain to the cell left of the Landing Page URL in your spreadsheet. Don’t forget to include the trailing slash at the end.

To make sure there are three columns in total before user metrics, add a column to the right of the Landing Page column. To combine the partial URL from the “Landing Page column” with the domain, use the following formula: =CONCATENATE (A2, B2)

You can copy the formula and paste it to combine the domain and partial URL.

After all, URLs have been completed, copy the entire column and click “Paste Special” or “Paste Values Only”. This will replace any URLs with the entire URL.

To pull title tag data from another column, you can copy and paste the Excel sheet information into the Google Sheet.

Use the following formula to find the page title:

=ImportXML([cell number], “//title/text()”)

Example:

=ImportXML(A4, “//title/text()”)

This should pull in all title tags for each page.

2. Organize, Tag Your Current Content

It is worth taking the time to organize your content. These are some guidelines we recommend for describing existing content:

Topic

You can identify different topics in which your content may fall. What’s the content about? Is it about your products? Is it teaching readers about your brand? Make a list of categories that cover what you discuss in your content. This will allow you to identify what you are most interested in and what you don’t need. This will help you to determine where to begin your strategy.

Length

What length is the content? How does the length affect how people view it? Is it easy to share? While some audiences like long, detailed content, others prefer short, concise content. Are you reaching the right audience?

Tone

How do you describe the tone of your content? Is it humorous, professional, or somewhere in between? Is your tone of content effectively communicating with your audience? It’s another place where it’s a smart idea to create descriptor buckets. This will help you organize your content more effectively and determine what is achieving the greatest success.

Relevance

Do your topics relate to your business? Who do you serve? Are your products and services highlighted in your content? Are you finding that your content doesn’t reflect the products and services you offer?

Datedness

We touched earlier on Evergreen content. Some content can last forever while others are not. Be open-minded and consider what content should be retained and what can be removed.

Type of Content

What additional features do you include in your content? Are there images, videos, or infographics in your content? Which of these add-ons speaks to your audience the most? Are you ensuring that all your SEO boxes are checked (title tags and headings, meta description, etc.)? )?

Buyer Stages

You can add a new column to the document and identify the buyer stage.

TOFU – Top of Funnel
MOFU – Middle of Funnel
BOFU – Bottom of Funnel

Here’s how it would look:

TOFU – Blog posts
MOFU – Category pages, FAQ pages, and Informational pages (how it all works).
BOFU – Product pages

You will begin to notice patterns in which pages drive traffic and how much revenue. BOFU pages should receive more traffic than TOFU pages, while BOFU pages should get more revenue.

It is possible that you also noticed that there aren’t many TOFU pages (blog posts).

3. Analyze the Data

You can spot trends in your data and identify what is working well. Also, be aware of gaps in your content. It is possible that the content that you are most interested in, and that will drive traffic to your website, may not be available on your site. When it comes time to brainstorm new content, this is where you will find your inspiration. Be aware of duplicates. Do you have 12 posts on getting ready for school? It’s time to think about how you can reduce them. Analyzing your data is an essential step in this process.

After these groups have been separated, you can begin to analyze the revenue and traffic impacts of each URL. Once you have done your analysis of how each URL impacts potential customers at each stage in the journey, you can create a huge content audit spreadsheet similar to what Kobe Digital did.

Once all content has been tagged, it is time to do an inventory. This will be based on buyer personas and stages as well as the number of resources that correspond. To get an idea of the content that you have for each person, filter your large content audit spreadsheet first by persona and then by buyer stage. You can create an additional spreadsheet as you go through each persona to link the content pieces to the stages of the buyer’s journey. This will give you an overview of where you are at the moment.

It is easy to see which areas of the buyer’s journey need attention. We can make the buyer’s journey more seamless and give them all the information they need to buy your products.

4. Competitive Content Audit

To see what your competitors are doing in the same space, it’s a smart idea to do an audit. While you don’t have to do the same for your competitors, it will help you understand the market and position of your company or product. It is important to identify the reasons why your competitors are doing well in search and on social media platforms. You must identify the need that it fills within the buying cycle. This step is the most crucial in the competition audit as it allows you to understand why and how the competition is succeeding.

Your success depends on your content audit process. You can create a comprehensive content strategy by taking the time to research both owned and competing content. For a successful online presence, content marketing is one of your most valuable tools. Customers are searching online for information, often via blogs or other content resources to make informed decisions about which products they want to purchase. You can create content ideas that will increase your visibility and make an impact on potential customers by using a content audit process.

After you have this information, it is time to decide what your content voice, style, and guidelines will be. This will allow you to align external and internal resources to maintain consistency with your brand voice.

You can match your brand with your style

Your strategy will include defining your brand’s style and voice. It is a smart idea to keep track of all this information so you can easily refer to it in the future.

This information should be communicated to everyone on your team. You might consider creating a resource to remind your writers of the parts of your brand that need to be highlighted, depending on how large your team is. To ensure everyone is on the same page about how content should be written, including personas and guidance on tone.

These guidelines should not be too detailed. You need to strike a balance between explaining your tone and style and allowing your writers to create freely. Include the most important points for your company, such as AP style guidelines, in your guide.

Guidelines for Branding

Brand name
Positioning
Color Scheme
Fonts

Tone/Voice:

Tone/Style
Descriptive words for the brand
Language
Formatting

Style of Content

Blog Post Length
Writing Advice
Title/Meat Data Structure
Structure of Content

Brand Imagery

Image Style
Image Format/Guidelines
Images with poor imagery
Examples of good imagery

How to document your strategy

Like the brand guidelines, your content marketing strategy should be brief. It is important to describe your content in a way that covers all the possible topics and clearly explains them. However, this doesn’t mean that you need to spend countless hours studying and understanding everything.

We’ve compiled some key points to help you get started with your content strategy. This is something you and your team will be referring to over and over again. Make sure you give it the time it needs to succeed.

This section covers the following:

-Content Idea

-Content Freshness

-Providing Value

What can make or break your content?

Content Idea

If you are new to content marketing, you should have followed the steps above to create a strategy and audit your content. You also need to compare your efforts with others to find out what their strategies are. You can now get to work and brainstorm more topics for the ideation process.

Content ideation simply means identifying the most relevant topics for your brand and your audience. Spending time on content that isn’t relevant to either of these topics will result in a waste of resources and could lead to your audience turning away. It is important to be credible in your content creation. This means that you should take the time to identify which topics have the greatest impact on ranking and revenue.

It can be daunting to think of topics for your content. Finding the right topics doesn’t need to be difficult. You will see results if you can find the right content ideas.

How to Brainstorm Successfully

Your first goal when creating content for your website should be to answer questions related to the products that you sell. If you sell baby carriers, for example, your content might answer questions like:

How can I keep my baby warm in a baby carrier?

How can I make my baby forward-facing with a baby carrier?

How long can a baby carrier last?

The example chart below shows how we used the simplified version of the hub and spoke content organization model while brainstorming content ideas. Other people talk about creating a huge piece of content, cornerstone, and many other models when organizing and creating content.

Whatever way you view it, the idea is to brainstorm and organize topics that address the concerns and questions your audience has when searching for a solution. This is the core of your content brainstorming. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself drifting off course and coming up with ideas for everything.

Gather your team for brainstorming sessions. This is especially useful if you’ve been creating content for a while and have accumulated a lot of content over the years. You can encourage them to open up by giving them a rough outline. This is a great way for everyone to feel comfortable and start talking during the brainstorming session.

Be open to the ideas of your team, but keep in mind that you are aiming to stick to the core topics you’ve outlined. It’s important to get into the topic and keep your conversation on a specific topic or set. Ideas can spark from one person to another.

In brainstorming sessions, assign someone to record every idea or concept. It doesn’t matter if you write them down on a whiteboard or save them in a Google doc. You need something to reference. Write them down, no matter how crazy or outlandish your ideas may seem.

When brainstorming with Kobe Digital’s Digital Marketing Director, Sean Sweeney advises:

“Behind every piece of polished content is a messy brainstorming session. There are no bad ideas when brainstorming. This is one of the most important rules in brainstorming. It is hard to maintain the momentum of creativity when someone says, “That won’t work!” So don’t squash it.

Another tip is to think of content ideas and not do any research on what has been published. Once you have exhausted all your ideas, go out and look for what is already published. This will allow you to avoid being stuck thinking about the same things you’ve already written, but still, give you the chance of discovering missed opportunities.

Competitive Research: What works for others?

It is common and even recommended, to look at the content of your competitors and see what works for them. We recommend this if you haven’t already. There are ways to look deeper at your competition to help you shape your strategy.

Let’s first talk about competitors before we get into this. There are likely to be two types of competitors when it comes to SEO and content marketing. There are your traditional competitors. You have your traditional competitors. For instance, if you are a French bakery in Chicago, your traditional competitor will be the closest bakery that also specializes in French pastries or treats.

You have one competitor type. It is the one you are currently battling on the SERPs against, and it is the one currently ranking for “Best French Bakery Chicago”.

Search results include not only local listings but also popular websites like Yelp or foursquare which list top Chicago pastry shops and bakeries. This means that even very targeted searches can be competitive online.

These two types of competitors may overlap, but it is important to keep them in mind when conducting competitive research.

Here are some things you should be paying attention to in your research.

What does it mean to get backlinks?
What type of content do the top brands create?
What are my competitors following?
What’s currently in fashion?
Which keywords rank for top traffic earners at the moment?

Google provides a lot more insight into search results that will help you understand the needs of people. Look at the example of “Best French Bakery Chicago” above. You can see that there are other items appearing in search results. These additional items can help you understand the content strategies of your competitors and users. EX:

People search for more specific items, such as “Where can I purchase macarons in Chicago?” or “Best french baguette Chicago” or “French bakery in Old Town.” This allows them to quickly and easily gain insight into their competitors.

Take into account the tools that you have at your disposal to get this information. AHREFS can be a very useful tool for checking which pages of your competitors are receiving the most links and from whom.

Let’s take, for example, that you are a house dress seller and Dwell and Slumber is one of your potential competitors. AHREFS will give you an example of this:

This site generates valuable links from many blogs and sites that share postpartum kits. These include affiliate sites such as dealspotr, the USA directory listings, and other sites. This will allow you to see how other people use content to create backlinks.

SEMrush can help you identify keywords that your competitors rank for. It also helps you to determine what is hot and what you should focus on. It is also a great tool to discover new content ideas for your site.

If you are selling boutique throw pillows, and your competitor lists “how to spot clean throw pillow” as one of their top keywords, SEMRush will quickly give you this information. Simply enter their root domain in the “Organic Research” section of the tool.

You can then see which keywords rank them and what type of content they are ranking for. This site ranks for terms such as “how to spot clean pillows” and “how do you clean throw pillows”.

If you don’t already have this content, it might be worth writing a blog post about the best ways to clean throw pillows. This information is what people are looking for and it will help you to find your brand by using a keyword related to throw pillows.

Keep Your Content Current and Relevant

Something to consider when putting together your content strategy is how you can maintain a balance between timely content and Evergreen content. Some companies may focus their strategies on the latest news. However, this may not be what is best for your audience. You will need to look at both long-lasting and current content, as well as content that is always helpful, fresh, current, and relevant.

Let’s take a look at the health and well-being industry. One example of timely content is a recent study about coconut oil’s effectiveness and overall value. This content is relevant to your audience and will be of interest to them. You should also include evergreen content. You might think about a healthy recipe that uses ingredients that are easily available throughout the year. A mix of both these types of content can help you build your portfolio and increase your credibility with your audience. Google also shows a mixture of these types in its search results. You can find the most recent studies about coconut oil and the questions that people have asked.

Are you stuck on how to come up with timely content ideas for your website? Consider when your content will go live. Also consider other events, such as holidays or season changes. You should consider back to school if you sell children’s clothes. If you are selling niche home decor, it might not be on your agenda. No one buys furniture when they think about children going back to school unless there is a pandemic. If the children are at home, they will need desks to use.

Think about your industry and who you are targeting. Also, consider how the world’s events will impact how people search for products.

Provide Value to Your Audience

Researching your audience is the best way to make sure you are providing value to them. If you don’t understand your audience, how can you provide the services they require? Do some audience research if you don’t have the time. To help you focus and shape your ideas, it might be worth creating personas. Or let the ideas flow to you before doing audience research or narrowing down your options.

Knowing that your audience is interested in a topic is not enough. To better serve them, you need to understand their needs. It is important to understand their motivations for searching for a topic. Are they shopping? Are they doing research? This will allow you to develop a content marketing strategy that converts. Let’s say you have a matcha mask business. To help each persona identify their preferred method of researching and buying these products, you could create a basic chart.

To learn more about your customers, take a look at how they interact with you on social media and complete customer surveys. Invite selected customers to join a Facebook group. The group will allow them to discuss possible topics and open up discussion. Reach out to customers who follow you on Instagram and request their feedback. There are many ways to gather data and use it to offer more value to customers, both current and future.

What can make or break your content?

What content is required to get the results I want? Matthew Brown from Moz offers some valuable insight.

Relevant and current content is important
Long-form content is best
Targeting a specific person is the best way to go
It is important to create evergreen content
Your content should be configurable. Allow your users to customize their experience
Content should be personal and relatable.

Once you have a list of topics in mind and can generate ideas, it is time to create a content calendar to help you stay organized.

How does your content calendar look?

Once you have identified your target audience, you can now plan when and what content you will create. Also, you should decide on the platforms where you want to share your content. It is important to have a system that allows you to be focused, organized, consistent, and consistent.

You can keep your content marketing goals and plans in focus by creating a content calendar that includes your content topics, publishing dates, and any other details. This will help you stay on track and motivated so that everyone knows what their responsibilities are.

You can create a separate Google Calendar for content creation or keep everything in a spreadsheet. It doesn’t matter if you do it either way, but you need to consider how you will be able to keep yourself and your team on the same page. . A more robust solution is DIVVY or Contently. Or ClearVoice. You must have a way to monitor the content that you produce and how it is used in your marketing efforts.

You will find the best system for you.

Once you have organized the content, you can begin the creation process. When creating content, it is important to prioritize quality over quantity.

Quality over Quantity

Your cause will be hurt if you use mediocre content

Less is often more. This shouldn’t mean you should only post once or twice per month. However, it should remind you to be aware of how often and about what you are posting. You shouldn’t publish a Thursday post titled “At home Exercises with Baby” if you published a Monday post about “How to Exercise at Your Home with Baby”. Be strategic and intentional.

Editing

After your content is written, you should have it go through at least one edit cycle. This should not be done solely by the author. If possible, it is best to have someone on your team who can handle the editing. It is a good idea to have another person look at the content to ensure that everything is in top shape.

We know that publishing content is both exciting and time-sensitive. Sometimes, you might be tempted to skip the editing process. Quality is our top priority. The first draft of your content will make it more valuable and useful to your audience. Editing is something that you should not overlook.

A blog is a great place to begin sharing content if you have a website. We recommend that you get a blog set up for your website and publish some content stats. A blog on your site can be a powerful tool. We’ll get into it later. It’s also quick and easy to post content.

What other channels are available for distributing your content?

Organic Content Distribution

It is always a good idea for your company to share your content via social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. LinkedIn is a great place where you can start. Encourage your team members to share links from your posts to their LinkedIn accounts. This will allow you to gather those valuable backlinks and it will also help spread the word about your company, what your do, and who you serve.

Commenting on Blogs and Forums

Guest blogging might be an option. Guest blogging is a great way for you to increase your search engine rankings by creating high-quality, useful content.

Quora was used to answer questions about diaper bags.

PR and Outreach

Earned media is another option. This involves reaching out and pitching bloggers and media about your company and asking them for their opinions. You should research their platforms and interests before you reach out to bloggers and media. You might consider reaching out to a blogger who focuses on activities for children and sells health supplements.

Most people will ask for something in return for you talking to them. This usually involves a special deal or a free product. Bloggers and media often have submission guidelines. Make sure you research them before you approach them. You might also consider HARO. This is a great way to get backlinks to your site and they often need quotes and resources to include in their articles.

Promotion of Paid Media Content

Paid promotions can be used in several ways and it is worth considering when deciding where to publish your content. These include paid social media, paid display ads, and Pinterest ads. Before you jump in, it’s important to identify your target audience. This will help you to get the best return on your investment.

The social media platforms we use most are the best and most efficient places to find up-to-date information. This gives us a lot of information about our target audience and their preferences. It’s a smart idea to budget some of your advertising spend for promotion on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. These platforms offer many ways to target people for your ads. This is a huge game-changer. An ad will appear in their Facebook feed if they have recently searched for children’s cardigans. It’s that simple.

Understanding the Journey of the Buyer

You will need to match your buyer’s journey to determine your content marketing goals and content marketing strategies. This will help you to plan your strategy.

You’ll see content that focuses on awareness at the top of your content funnel. This is a great place to begin attracting a broad range of visitors and viewers with your content. Content such as:

Blog posts
Quizzes
Infographics
Posts on social media
Downloadable assets
Intro and new product videos

The content at the top should focus on building brand awareness during this stage of the buyer’s journey. It should be informative and serve as a way to build brand awareness and establish a connection with potential customers. The content at the top of your funnel is used to generate interest and curiosity about what you do.

You’ll find evaluation information in the middle of your content funnel. This is where customers and page visitors start to look at your brand as a solution to their problem. This is the best place to present content that will allow them to gain a better understanding of your products. The middle of the funnel usually includes:

Blog posts
Education resources (fit and size guides, product style guides, etc.
Quizzes
Get special offers
Email collection
Videos (product reels, highlights)
Descriptions of the products

These resources can be used to teach and inform customers tactically about the capabilities of your products and services. You are a valuable resource they won’t want to miss. This vital part of the funnel deserves your attention, no matter if you are offering a discount for new customers or free downloads related to your brand and products.

Conversion-oriented content is found at the bottom of your content funnel. The bottom-of-the-funnel content should be focused on conversion. This is the narrowest part of your funnel. You have removed all other visitors who aren’t ready for the plunge and left only those who are on the verge of purchasing. The bottom of the funnel usually contains:

Social proof (customer reviews, testimonials, etc.
Comparison/spec sheets
Video clips of products
Copy for landing page
Email workflows

Perhaps you include customer reviews about your brand or product. Or, you might consider creating a comparison sheet that compares your product to other products in the same field. No matter how you manage this section of your funnel, it is important to give your customer the push they need to buy. This spot in your content funnel is the best place to include this information.

How to optimize your content for ranking

While creating content and getting it out there is important, the most crucial aspect of your content marketing strategy is making sure that your content is correctly optimized to attract as much traffic as possible. It’s worth taking the extra time to implement some SEO on-page, do some keyword research and create some useful backlinks to make your content more searchable.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is important. Make sure you are careful about the titles, meta descriptions, H2, H3, and H4 tags, and H2 and H3 tags. To make it easy for page visitors to understand and navigate your content, including keywords. It’s important to ensure that your content is accurate and readable. Consider the customer’s point of view when reviewing your content.

Breaking up your text is a simple way to make your content easier to read and more manageable. Your content should be structured well, but not overwhelming. It is important to break up the text, use the correct types of header tags and include images, videos, and graphics. This will help you achieve the right balance for your content. STITCH FIX is a good example. STITCH FIX is an excellent example of this. They use text and images to address the needs of their customers while optimizing for search queries.

Keyword Research

A keyword is a term or phrase that an individual enters into a search engine to find the information they are looking for. Your content marketing strategy will be greatly improved if you know what keywords are ranking well and which keywords you want to rank higher for. Do some keyword research to build your content around the keywords you can find.

Keyword research can also help you understand your customers better. Although you might only refer to your product in one way, your research may reveal that customers use a variety of terms to find what you offer.

If you sell organic baby swaddles made of muslin, customers might search for baby blankets, soft baby blankets, stretchy baby swaddled, and baby swaddles. This will enhance your content and help you understand your customers better.

Backlinks

Google loves backlinks. You should consider which links you can include in your content from both your website and external sources. Linking to other pages on your website builds your site structure. You are showing Google that you are reliable and thorough by linking to external sources.

Different types of content marketing

Now that we have covered the recommended approach to content marketing for eCommerce websites let’s look deeper at some of your options. There are so many options available, it is important to know what your options are.

Be aware that not all content will work for every campaign. The content that you choose to use will depend on the audience you are targeting, the platforms you plan on sharing it on, and your overall campaign goals. Let’s look at each type of content and show you some examples.

Blogging

We recommend you begin blogging if you feel overwhelmed by the idea of content marketing. Although it might not be the most lucrative and popular form of content marketing, it will quickly prove to be a great way to increase your SEO.

If someone searches Google for answers to their question about whether it is safe for their baby to sleep in a stroller, and what the pros and cons are to their choices, this post will appear and answer the question. It is important to remember that visitors can navigate directly to the main website via their blog.

It’s important to understand that eCommerce businesses are competing with many other brands. Your Miami digital marketing strategy should not be based on people visiting your site directly to purchase. A blog is a great investment in your online presence and a great way of driving more traffic to your website.

Notice how Ergobaby ends their blog post

Two items are particularly noteworthy. Strollers are the first word of the paragraph. It links to their stroller page. A CTA is included that focuses on stroller safety. There’s also a bright button that links readers to their stroller pages. This simple, yet effective content marketing strategy is easy to replicate for your blog posts.

Photos

Selling items online can be difficult because your customers won’t be able to touch or feel the product. This is a big selling point for people who buy items in person. Online marketers have found ways to meet this need.

Visuals are key here. Visuals are crucial for customers to be able to see the product from all angles before making a purchase. It is important to have the right photos for your category pages. However, you should also remember that photos can be used elsewhere.

You might take one example: you have done some research and discovered that most of your target audience uses Instagram as a shopping platform. A lifestyle photo of a model wearing only clothing from your shop could be taken and shared on Instagram as a shoppable post.

You can share your images on Instagram and other social channels. Images can also be used for paid ads and included in blog posts. You will always need product photos so make it a priority to take pictures of your products.

Video

Customers love to visualize their product in real life and see it before they make a purchase. Images are effective but limited. Video content is the answer. Video content allows you to tell a story about your product and how it solves problems for customers.

Video content has the advantage of being easy to share across multiple platforms. Video content can be shared on social media, blogs, product pages, and email campaigns.

Video content delivers results. Customers will often look at reviews to determine whether the product is worth their money. Collecting reviews and compiling customer testimonials should be an important part of your content marketing strategy.

There are many ways you can gather customer experience and turn it to your advantage.

Review
Testimonials
Customer videos

There are many formats for customer experiences. It doesn’t matter if they are in text format, images or videos, or blog posts. All of them are valuable and worth sharing on your website and social media.

Take a look at the content marketing funnel we discussed earlier. Customer experiences are a major component of the content marketing funnel. This is because they can make customers buy or bounce. ..

Content Analysis and Reporting

You can always improve and make improvements to your content marketing efforts, no matter how flawless or perfect they may be. Some content is extremely successful and delivers amazing results while others are not as successful and produce very little. You should take every opportunity to evaluate your content and make improvements.

The content marketer should be able to track and identify what’s working and what’s not.

What should I do?

You know that you must analyze your efforts. But what should you focus on? It can seem overwhelming. You have many options. However, we recommend that you stick to the core metrics. These metrics are often used to measure success.

Traffic metrics

Traffic to your website is one of your primary goals, right? You’re publishing content to drive traffic. You will need to monitor how your content drives traffic. This is something you should do regularly.

Page views
Average read depth
Visitors can access specific parts of the content
Page time
What is the bounce rate?
Conversion rate

But, content creation has key benefits that will provide tangible results. These benefits are both rewarding and easy to measure.

Here is a good example of what good content can do for the traffic to a website: https://www.verywellfamily.com/

Verywellfamily has produced thousands of pieces on their website, ranging from topics such as baby girl names to best packs-n-plays. Their website traffic has increased from thousands to millions of visitors due to the content they create. They rank for over 100,00 keywords in position 3 and more than 150,000 terms in positions 4-10, according to SEMRush. This means that there are over 200K+ keywords on Google’s first page.

How to Scale Your Content Marketing

Now you’ve set your goals and published some content. You have seen some positive results. It’s now time to think about how you can scale up your content marketing to achieve even greater growth. This does not mean you need to increase your blog post count from 3 to 30 per week, but it does suggest that there is still some growth potential that you can take advantage of to get a greater ROI.

To scale your content marketing, you might consider hiring freelance writers or editors to create more content. This could mean hiring full-time employees to increase your content market team or hiring specialists to explore different types of content. You need to keep the momentum going with the areas you have had success but also be open to new ideas and explore other areas.

Scaling your content marketing does not necessarily mean seeking more traffic opportunities. This is an important goal, but it should not be the only one. You should be focusing on more content and higher-quality content as well as continually improving the content and resources you have. These are some suggestions to help you sell your content marketing.

Hiring specialists can make your team a great asset. People who are experts in their field can be a huge asset. This could include writers and video content creators.

Check your past work. Make sure you have updated your links and that your anchor text is still relevant. Double-check your keywords. Check that everything is in order

Reassess your brand voice. Is it a priority for your team? Are there any things that need to be changed since your last evaluation?

I don’t have a lot of money or a team. Can I still succeed in content marketing?

Do not believe that success requires endless resources. But you can still make it happen for yourself. We recommend that you focus on “evergreen content” if you don’t have the time or resources to produce content regularly.

Content that is evergreen is content that is timeless and can be used to help clients. Although it is not as relevant as other content, it requires minimal upkeep to keep it current over time. While you may need to occasionally add some evergreen content to your site, you’ll also discover that these pieces are content that drives traffic to your site and helps you achieve success.

Let’s not forget the positive side! This forces you to target your content more precisely and creates a better user experience. You can focus more on the most effective content if you don’t have time or money for it. This results in content that is more effective, focused, and results-driven.

Your content is the best tool to help people find what your company has to offer. Each touchpoint is important. Site visitors often make the purchase decision after reading discovery-level content. We will be discussing the content marketing funnel in more detail.

Let’s take an example. Presley Couture sells clothing for little girls, from princess dresses to everyday wear essentials. The blog covers many topics within its niche. They focus more on their products with some posts highlighting cute outfit ideas or how to create a back-to-school wardrobe.

They also have blog posts about birthday party planning and playdate ideas. Is this relevant to little girl clothing? Not necessarily. It could be helpful for a mother to purchase her child on the site. It could.

A Chance for Growth

It has been proven repeatedly that content marketing is essential for a successful eCommerce company. You can increase click-throughs, improve conversion rates and build trust and reliability with customers by using content marketing.

Are you looking to grow your eCommerce business? We have helped Utah.com consolidate its old content to boost its SEO growth after a major website redesign.

Do you need help with content marketing? Book a consultation today to discuss your content marketing needs. If you are not ready, but still curious about what makes a Kobe Digital client a good one, take a look at our ideal customer description.

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