How to Maximize Content Marketing Benefits for your Ecommerce

Content marketing is absolutely crucial for growing your ecommerce business. But are you getting the most from your current content marketing strategy?Are you worried that your blog posts aren’t driving any relevant traffic, or that your longform content is not leading to any sales? Don’t worry if that’s the case — maybe you just need to rethink your strategy to make sure you’re maximizing results across all key channels.Read on for some handy hints and tips on how to squeeze max value from your content to see your ecommerce store grow.

Plan ahead for your seasonal content strategy

There’s a lot of emphasis in content marketing circles on evergreen content: content that stays fresh, engaging and readable 24/7, all year round. While evergreen content certainly has its place, it’s still okay to mix up your blog a little with seasonal content too.Why?Because seasonal content sells. It uses real-world events to capture consumer attention and increase branding, and it’s one of the reason why the Coca-Cola Christmas truck generates so much hype during the festive seasons.

So how can you use seasonal content for your brand?

1. Firstly: do your research. It’s not just traditional events like Christmas or Thanksgiving either. Think about special events like the World Series or the Super Bowl.
2. For ecommerce stores, key events or periods such as Black Friday or festival season will be of particular importance to you too.
3. Once you’ve done your research, create a content calendar for the year that caters to each seasonal event. For example, fashion brands might create a promotional series on a summer collection that’s perfect for festival season. Or you could create a family gift guide for Christmas featuring your products.

Creating your editorial calendar around seasonal periods or events can boost traffic to your store by providing your readers with interesting and topical content. Do some solid research and identify what’s popular and what angle you should take to make it relevant and commercially viable.

Share and share alike with content syndication & seeding

1. Once any content piece has gone live, employ your automation tools of choice to promote it across all possible social networks and places of interest like Quora. It’ll help to get your content seen by more people, which in turn means higher potential visibility for your store. There is no point in publishing content without a proper promotion plan.
2. Take your promotional strategy even further with content seeding. This is a process through which high-value and targeted content is shared by relevant influencers within your network. If you get customer and community backing for your content, it will become a much more powerful marketing tool for your brand. Email or social media outreach work best for this tactic.
3. Let’s say you’ve just written a killer piece of content that’s well-researched, keyword-optimized, and super engaging. Why keep it to yourself on your own blog when you can share the love with other brands, websites, and blogs? Content syndication is a process in which you share your blog, article, video, or similar with a third party publisher. This could be an industry news blog, a friendly brand’s onsite blog, or even a mainstream news site.
4. Content syndication is a great way to expand your ecommerce store’s online presence:  getting your brand out there, and scoring a link back to your own store. If you’re going to do it though, make sure you do it right: ensure canonical tags are added on the shared piece to let search engines know which content to rank.

Invest in video content

Content is king... But video content is better! 81% of brands use it as one of their marketing tactics, and the average amount of time spent watching video content is 1.5 hours a day. Not only that, but it can increase ecommerce conversions by 64-85%.Video content is very popular and will only grow in popularity as time goes on, so how can you use it to grow your ecommerce business?

1. Start creating videos that showcase and explore the product and service you have to offer. It could be a product review: exploring the pros and cons of your product and explaining who it might be suitable for.
2. Or if you’re a fashion brand, you could create a video lookbook that shows off your new product launch.
3. You could even tell your brand’s story through video, exploring the roots and history of your brand and how you go to where you are today.

Think about your audience and what they’ll find interesting or useful, then create your video content around that. Do it right, and visitors will flock to your store.One of the great things about video content is the return on investment for your brand. Video is relatively cheap to make, with a range of affordable digital cameras and free video editing tools readily available. However, it also provides great results, like 66% more qualified leads and a 54% boost in brand awareness. With stats like that, it’s an avenue well worth investing in.

Take a deep dive into data segmentation & personalization

No matter what it is you’re selling, you should have a deep understanding of who your existing customers are, and who your future customers will be. You should always have a good idea of their needs, fears, wants, and desires. This information can be gleaned through the built-in analytics in your chosen store builder (or with a plugin like Segmently) or with tools such as Clicky or Mint.This data can be used to create specific customer segments, which in turn can be used to personalize elements of your website. Beamer lets you create segmented notifications that send targeted message to specific visitor groups, for example to paying users, first-time visitors, and so on.You should always create highly-tailored content that is personalized to each of these individual customer segments. What you create should cater to each stage of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness stage: create blog posts and educational content that gets your product or service seen by your potential customers.
• Consideration stage: build general comparison guides and reviews that provide the customer with further information about the product or service on offer across the market.
• Decision-making stage: create more focused reviews related to your brand’s product or service, including product reviews and customer testimonials.
• Loyalty stage: write content that will draw customers in by showing off your brand’s expertise, quality, and knowledge. This will include how-to guides, newsletters, industry news, and special offers.

Generating content that clicks with your audience can make or break your marketing strategy, so take a deep dive into each customer segment and create content that resonates. It’s the best way to ensure your content marketing investment maps onto the sales funnel and will generate commercial results.Don’t let your content marketing go to waste. Maximize content marketing benefits for your ecommerce store by branching out into video, or by creating a seasonal content calendar that resonates with your audience. The more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it for your brand.