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A Quick Step by Step Guide to Developing Your eCommerce Content Strategy

CopySmiths May 30, 2022

Content is the lifeblood of all online activity. The internet as we know it depends entirely on content for its existence and operations.

But all content isn’t equally relevant to everyone. Some of it gets out of date, search intents and content consumption preferences vary. And some of it is simply not helpful.

For example, videos may be having a hay day during a particular era. But tables turn along the road, and the same video-loving audience develops a knack for text. Or, these folks are into social media while others are Google adherents.

As an eCommerce entrepreneur, you need to know what works best for your target audience. Only then will you tune up your strategy in order to win with them quickly and cost-effectively.

This is where a well-thought-out content strategy is critical. Here is a step-by-step guide to developing your eCommerce content strategy in which we cover the following sections:

Defining your goals
Understanding your target audience
Analyzing your competition
Identifying and making the most of your company’s strengths
Carrying out a capital audit
Using KPIs and metrics

A balanced consideration of the above factors will greatly influence the nature and impact of your eCommerce content strategy.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

An effective content-developing strategy must keep you and your resources focused on your goals. Begin by evaluating your brand’s core objectives and values. Then let your content be a means of promoting these aspirations as well as meeting your business needs.

Involve your marketing department and other stakeholders such as a content creation firm in the content strategy development process. This will provide an excellent opportunity for more beneficial brainstorming.

In the process, you’ll end up with an effective content strategy that can aid you in:

Building customer loyalty
Creating brand awareness
Encouraging subscriptions
Re-attracting repeat customers
Nurturing leads into conversions

Always remain open to the possibility of adjusting your strategy. In time, your business will meet some of its initial objectives—but you’ll need to realign your strategy to your present goals.

“I highly recommend working with Copysmiths to increase the quality of your online content. We are happy repeat customers of Copysmiths after initially contacting them to see if they could help us improve our web presence.

The team was a joy to work with: highly responsive, innovative and full of intriguing multi-faceted ideas. Their suggestions were based on research of our site, niche, products and competitors. After we gave the go-ahead to pursue one of their ideas, they delivered quickly, meeting the specifications we set, while remaining in close contact with updates along the way.

Their blogs that we have published have been very well received by our customers, using keywords that help with our search ranking. If you are looking to improve your copy, obtain high quality keyword-rich blogs, or for other copywriting content, you won’t go wrong with Copysmiths.” — Hilary, eCommerce Business

Step 2: Understand Your Target Audience

The success of your eCommerce content strategy will largely depend on your adequate understanding of your audience persona.

To create a proactive content creation strategy, you need a deep understanding of your audience’s:

Challenges
Expectations
Favorite topics
Position on the sales funnel

You can achieve this by:

Creating persona information extraction forms on your website
Getting feedback from your leads through your sales team
Talking to customers on what interests them the most

Then think of how your business’s contribution provides relief to their predicaments. If your content strategy doesn’t touch their pain points, that’s your opportunity to restructure it accordingly.

Knowing your target audience’s content consumption preference will inform your choice of content genre and channel.

What draws their attention? Is it social media or videos? Do they oscillate between Google and other information channels like newsletters?

Step 3: Examine Your Competition

Find out what’s making your competition tick. See what keywords they’re ranking for. Get to know what’s giving them an edge. If it works for them, it’ll work for you.

Alternatively, spot something your competition is not offering that may resonate with the target audience. Add it to your content portfolio, and you’ll be a step ahead.

With the use of SEO tools such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Semrush, BuzzSumo, and MozBar, execute an anonymous site view to gather data on your competitor’s:

Popular keywords
Backlink summary
Audience interests

These metrics will give you an understanding of audience persona, which is valuable in developing your eCommerce content strategy.

With online businesses, trends change rapidly and preferences shift pretty quickly.

For this reason, CopySmiths carries out continuous SEO research, including keyword trends and search engine analytics. This is how our work has managed to stand out from the crowd.

Step 4: Identify and Maximize Your Strengths

Find your existing unique attribute and run with it. It may be an unpublished breakthrough or a bold and charismatic founder who inspires a fanatic following effortlessly. Perhaps it’s a sales executive whose perspective consistently hooks the audience.

Every business is likely to have an inherent tactic it can leverage. Find it and make it your content creation springboard.

As you look for these strengths, be on the lookout for those out of your reach due to resource limitations. Strike them off your list early enough to focus only on what’s viable.

Here’s a useful SWOT analysis guide to help you identify and take relevant action on your business’s:

Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats

Expert Tip: The relevance of your content depends on a workable understanding of your audience before publication on any outlet.

Step 5: Do a Capital Audit

Calculate the number of resources you require to roll out your strategy successfully. Compare them with what’s at your disposal. If they add up, you’re moving towards your goal.

But what if there’s a deficit?

Decide what part of your strategy to outsource, then actualize the remainder internally.

Ensure you’ve got enough resources to run a successful content marketing campaign from the onset. It’s better to defer the implementation of your eCommerce content strategy than to bolt out mid-course.

To avoid failure, allocate enough resources to create and promote content that can successfully:

Be consistent
Address clients’ needs
Be available to all people
Be meaningful and useful
Stay up-to-date and accurate
Reflect your brand’s objectives

The table below shows how an effective and an ineffective content strategy can impact your business:

Effective Content Strategy	Ineffective Content Strategy
Generates measurable public interest	Is unable to cause a notable rise in follower numbers
Increases web traffic by stirring interest	Leads low traffic into and through your website
Keeps visitors interested for longer spans	Holds your visitors for only a few minutes
Facilitates maximum engagement through to conversion	Results in minimal engagement rates

Step 6: Choose Appropriate Result Measurement Means

You’ll want to keep a constant eye on the SEO growth, online marketing performance and social media progress of your content strategy. Use specific KPIs and metrics to establish a continual evaluation.

KPIs are like milestones that show you how much ground you’ve covered. They’re also essential in keeping you focused on the remaining objectives.

Even when you’ve achieved your desired goal, KPIs will help you analyze your gains or losses. From here, you are in an excellent position to decide what worked and what to avoid next time.

Here are some of the most frequently used metrics in eCommerce content strategy:

Cost per lead
Conversion rate
Engagement rate
Brand awareness
Customer retention
Sales qualified leads
Customer lifetime value
Marketing qualified leads
Customer acquisition cost
Return on marketing investment

At CopySmiths, we provide large-scale, thoroughly-researched, and SEO-compliant content on demand. Our writers produce ROI-driven content that is attractively formatted for audience edification. Find out more information on our services.

“After reading many positive testimonials online, we contacted CopySmiths to assist us with creating numerous pages of supporting content for our websites. Communication with them from day one was fantastic and they delivered above and beyond our expectations. Their thorough process for creating engaging content with SEO best practices in mind is very impressive and certainly makes them stand out.” – Miskawaan Health Group

Frequently Asked Questions

What type of content is the best for my eCommerce website?

The type of content you choose for your eCommerce content strategy will largely depend on factors such as:

The cost of content production and promotion
Your target audience’s preferred type of content
Your company’s resource allocation to content strategy

With enough resources, you can spread your marketing campaign across all marketing platforms such as YouTube and social media. This will require you to customize and convert your content for the chosen outlets.

Is content marketing different from SEO?

Content marketing is a vast effort spread across multiple channels such as social media, websites, and email, and it’s tailored to keep users engaged at every step of the interaction. The key is to understand the channel on which a specific form of content thrives the most.

For a universal presence, you can package your content into genres appropriate for all or some of the channels.

On the other hand, SEO is more concerned with making your content as available to the audience as possible. This is accomplished through content optimization and the fulfillment of search engine technical requirements.

Is content marketing a must?

Yes. Content is the essence of online life. It’s content that funnels people from searching to buying. Web pages, online reviews, search results, videos, and social media exist in content form.

To cut through the clutter, you need high-quality content that resonates with your target audience and provides real solutions to their problems. Besides being factual and engaging, it must be optimized for the respective channel of choice.

Contact us, and we’ll supply your eCommerce website with quality content. From research and title creation to publishing on your website—we’ll do it all for you.

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CopySmiths

I'm Katrina McKinnon, founder of CopySmiths and Small Revolution. In my 20 years of experience, I have helped online businesses create high-performing content specifically on an eCommerce store's blog. Find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.