Growing Shopify E-com Store with Content Marketing – Tips from Experts
Learn how you can use content marketing to increase your e-commerce sales. Here we have some important pointers to share.
This article can help you grow your Shopify e-commerce store. The content marketing strategy discussed here can push you ahead in capturing the attention of your potential customers.
Content is the marketing tool which can help you gain customers. However, the reach of content does not end there. By proper use of content, you can earn another valuable element. It is called brand loyalty. Yes, to grow customer loyalty this is the only tool which you can use. So, if you are running a Shopify e-commerce store, you need to have a strong content marketing strategy planned out to grow your business.
Experts, who have been dedicated to the task of researching the customer behavior, say that customers just want to have the feeling of being connected. If you can hook their attention, you have won them over.
People want to feel engaged. They want to feel valued. This is why you need to create a content marketing strategy to grow your e-commerce business, if you are really eyeing success in this industry.
Why Loyalty Matters?
To be frank, people want to know that you can be trusted. They want to know they can buy high quality product from your website. Most importantly people want to know that you care.
This is why you must opt to create content to put their minds at ease.
Fully engaged customers are more important than the ones who are not satisfied with the product. If someone is connected to your brand, they will come back for more. The ones who are not satisfied might look for the brand satisfaction elsewhere. So, it is like building your own tribe. And content is the tool to set up the connection.
So, the process goes in three stages.
- You create content
- You promote content
- You make the sale
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
Well, it should be easy. Only marketers overly complicate the process. However, it is not so easy that you can just create content, publish them and forget all about them.
No, you need to go deeper in the matter. You need to know what works and what does not work.
You need to know how to create the content which will draw attention in a way that people will stick to your brand.
Great Content = Great Success
Well, to boost e-commerce website traffic, you must attempt to create great content. Without greatness, you don’t stand a chance to survive. At least, this cutthroat world demands greatness.
So, it all begins at the beginning – it all begins with the content creation. See, the cliché is true, content is the king which reaches out, engages and creates loyalty.
People like to know about products and businesses through content. They are not really interested about advertisement. By now, everyone has come to understand that advertisements are cleverly created sales pitches. They all know that the copies of the ads are written to amplify the products and businesses.
This is why people are on search of great contents which will teach them about the businesses. So, you must have a strategy ready to publish the kind of content people look for.
One important fact to remember is – people take a lot of time before they purchase anything from a new e-commerce website. They visit the website, they explore products, they look at the contents, they search for reviews and then only they decide to buy.
This process might differ in some cases, but, it is a long journey. You need to have patience. You have the e-commerce marketing strategy to drag people to your website, to begin with. Once you have traffic, you would have to keep them engaged for a length of time. When they are engaged, you need to shoot for the sale.
These all can be accomplished with a strong e-commerce content marketing strategy.
Data to Ponder Over
If you dig into the data, you will find that more than 70% of web visitors look for information when they come to a website for the first time. Then they compare the website and the product on sale. Once these two stages are taken care of, they finally decide to either buy or abandon the website.
Create Content for Each Level
You need to understand the stages of customer behavior to create content for each stage exclusively. The objective of this strategy is – to counsel the visitors enough to turn them into buyers.
So, you must create content for
- Awareness stage
- Consideration stage
- Decision stage
Each one of the level is different. This is why each one of the level will require exclusive content. You must understand that the psychology of the customers change with each level. You must create content to suit this change.
If you try to make sale to the visitors who are at the awareness stage, you will lose them. You must create your content to lead the customers from awareness stage to the consideration stage.
You must build your content strategy for brand building. The process of sales comes later on. You must have a content mapping system implemented. Only this mapping system can help you understand your customers. Once you have understood the customer psychology, you can easily create your content to lure them to buy from your website.
The straight line content marketing strategy should go through three important levels.
- You create
- You promote
- You convert
However, in reality, going from level one to the final level takes a lot of time and effort. So, you can understand that one content will not do the work. To make the perfect sale, you would need specific type of content.
You must also understand the process of getting the content out on the social media sites. This to attract as much attention as you can. Without this promotional approach, there is no point in creating the content marketing strategy for e-commerce sale at all.
Here we are going to take a close look at the process of content creation which can augment your e-commerce sale.
Shoot for the Extraordinary
In the web world where every day thousands of e-commerce websites are emerging out, ordinary will not work. You need to shoot for the extraordinary approach which will earn awe and admiration at the same time. Such contents can turn your web visitors into positive leads.
To understand – how to get hold of the target audience, you need to understand that in a minute at least 500 videos get uploaded on YouTube, around 30 million messages get sent through WhatsApp, around 3 million Facebook posts get published and more than 4 million tweets get posted.
So, you can understand that to make your content to standout in this crowded world, you need to be really good. No, you would not have to be good at everything. Yes, you need to be exceptional at something.
This is the way, authority is built.
Therefore, your journey to exceptional content creation starts from planning out the content creation process.
You need to determine the topic of the contents. You will also have to determine the form of content which you will use for your content promotion process.
To determine the topic and the content form, you need to first understand your customers. You need to understand what kind of contents will work for the type of people you are targeting.
So, here you need to explore few essential factors.
- You need to explore the target customers
- You need to explore the target market
- You need to explore the kind of content that are getting created
Yes, this means a lot of research. However, to create something exceptional you need to invest time in research. When you have explored the above mentioned factors and found satisfactory data, you would have to dig into another essential factor.
You need to find out what your target customers are looking for. You need to understand their problems. You will also have to know how you can produce solution to their problems.
Therefore, let us focus on the first essential task at hand – generating content ideas.
- Videos and podcasts are exceptional tools. These are loaded with information. You need to listen to enough videos and podcasts in your niche that lets you learn about the diversity of the content topics.
- If you think only blog posts and online resources are going to help you in this, you are mistaking. You need to understand that there are other resources like books and newspapers. It is essential that you explore other e-commerce portals, Amazon especially, to see what kind of books are getting sold. It would not hurt to buy some of these books and dig into the depth. Nothing helps in content topic generation like voracious reading. Therefore, indulge into reading. This habit will benefit you in two different ways.
- Facebook groups are also amazing resources which can help you understand what people are talking about.
- Second, your writing skill will get enhanced due to continuous reading
- Facebook groups are also amazing resources which can help you understand what people are talking about
- You can ask the customers to help you with topics. You can get ideas by sending them emails and asking for content topics.
If you can follow these rules, you will be able to generate shareable contents. People usually share contents to grow personal relationship or network. They also share contents to get information out. Entertainment is another reason for which people share contents.
You need to suit these needs if you want people to share what you are creating. So, you need to target engagement. This should be your priority.
For the success of B2C contents, you need to follow the stages given below.
- Engaging content creation
- Understanding of content effectiveness
- Creating right visuals
- Creating ways to reuse contents
- Optimizing each content
So, what kind of content will be engaging? There are some common types that have been proved to be better at engaging people.
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Social media contents
- E-books
- Podcasts
Yes, these are some of the most effective form of contents. Most of the B2C businesses are shooting for these types of contents. According to the recent study, videos are the best tools to get hold of the potential customers.
This trend is flourishing. Therefore, you need to follow this trend if you really want to make an exception in your business approach.
Create Content Reach
If you are not strategizing for reach, your content marketing effort will be lost. So, the question is – once you have created your content what will do. How will you promote the content for better reach?
You can post the content on your site directly. You can post it on social media. You can also send the content through email.
Emails are still the best ways to deliver information. There are e-commerce businesses that ignore the need for email marketing. However, this is a wrong approach. If you follow this approach, you will be missing out on important customers.
Therefore, to grow your Shopify e-commerce store, you need to have an email marketing strategy ready. This should be added to the e-commerce content marketing strategy.
However, how you are approaching your target customers through email is a question. You need to create different approaches each time you send out emails. Only talking about your products will not help.
Social occasion emails are immensely effective. These emails are sent out with greetings and offers.
Amazon sends out reminder about cart abandonment through emails. You can do this too.
Educational emails are sent out to offer information about the products. These are effective emails which can get people to visit your website. However, you need to create these emails carefully.
Lastly, you would have to create fresh contents. Yes, there are times when you should repost old contents. But, the overall approach should be fresh. Study shows that brands that post more than 16 blog posts each month get a lot of traffic. So, be committed to your content posting schedule.