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How to Choose Content for Ecommerce Marketing

CopySmiths June 22, 2022

Creating content without a strategy rarely produces positive results. It just becomes text, images, and videos mixed together but with no benefit to the business.

With many eCommerce stores turning to content marketing channels like blogging as a traffic-driving strategy, it’s now more challenging than ever to stand out from competitors.

Answering these 4 questions, can help you create content that stands out from the crowd to effectively market your eCommerce business:

Who are my target buyers?
How do your target buyers prefer to consume content?
Who are my competitors and what are they doing?
How do various metrics compare during different periods?

Tip 1: Know Your Target Buyer Persona

Understanding your buyers helps grow your brand by allowing you to implement successful marketing strategies. It also enhances the brand’s equity, which eventually drives sales.

Furthermore, it helps you gain your customers’ trust and loyalty. That’s because, it shows your target audience you understand them and respond to their needs or worries.

To formulate your buyer personas, you’ll want to consider factors like:

Personality: Are they productive? Optimistic? Skeptical? Knowing their personality profile helps you understand their shopping patterns.
Preferred content medium: Knowing their preferred social media channels helps you determine how best to reach them. Have they recently embraced Instagram or TikTok? Or do they still prefer Facebook?
Pain or Worries: What frustrates them? Knowing this helps you create solution-oriented content.
Motivation: What is their aim? Are they looking to educate themselves on your products? Do they want to buy or are they just window-shopping? This helps you customize your marketing content appropriately.
Demographics: Consider gender, age, and location.

Every unique business has unique buyer personas. Whether you’re a large-scale business or a solopreneur, knowing your buyer personas helps narrow down your focus to producing content that fits only your target audience’s needs.

Tip 2: Learn Ways Your Target Buyers Consume Content

From an analysis of your brand’s data or trends, you can determine ways your target audience likes consuming content and reach out to them in the same manner.

Use the analysis to seek answers to questions like:

Are there particular types of content your audience prefers? Like long-form blogs, listicles, or short videos? This helps you know the type of content to concentrate on.
Which social media channel do they relate with the most? For instance, if they like Instagram, post pictures of your brand on the platform and provide links to your blogs so your audience can read more about the products.
Do they prefer making purchases through the phone? This helps you create engaging content that’s mobile-friendly.

Once you know the ways your target audience consumes content, proceed to choose the right channels. Always aim to go where your audience is and constantly engage them.

Tip 3: Research Your Competitors

Every business operates in a competitive market.

The actions of your competitors often influence what works for the industry. They let you in on the topics gaining massive attention and those being shared the most.

When doing a competitor analysis, it’s necessary to pay attention to the website’s content by checking:

The quality of the texts: It’s assessed by the texts’ volume and uniqueness. If your competitor has low-quality content, you can use this to your advantage and produce useful and high-quality content.
Pictures and videos: Blog posts that lack visual interests rarely attract readers. These work even better for you if your competitor’s content doesn’t include these visual elements.
Structure: Readers enjoy text that’s divided into short paragraphs, bulleted lists, and bolded. These elements make it easy for readers to skim through the content.
Search intent: Put yourself in the reader’s shoes and evaluate if your blogs convey their intentions. What message is the text trying to convey? And have you delivered the message with depth?

Through competitor analysis, you’ll know areas to improve and the content that best fits your audience.

With your competitive advantage, you can create content that stands out even more and is valuable to your customers.

CopySmiths can help you create content with a competitive edge. Whether you want blog articles, pillar posts, or how-to guides, we’ve got it all.

We release fresh content in batches of 10, 20, or 50 articles, so your audience if assured of new content whenever they’re on your website.

With our simple and transparent pricing, we’ll do all the work for you—from creating content suitable for your business to publishing it.

Here’s what our client Chris says about us:

“We have used CopySmiths on several occasions to assist with blog content for our website. Their approach is strategic and SEO results driven, which is exactly what we needed.”– Chris Harris, Red Kite Design

Tip 4: Compare Your Results

Creating content for your eCommerce store is a continuous process. This means you’ll have to compare current results with past content to improve as you move forward.

If the metrics are great, you’ll identify the kind of return on investment (ROI) you’ve achieved so far. You can gauge success using measures like:

Web traffic: Is your content reaching your audience organically? Or is it through referrals from other sites?
User behavior: This includes bounce rate, time spent on page, new or returning visitors, and number of pages per session.
Keyword ranking: Improvements in keyword ranking tell how your content is performing, particularly if the keywords are highly competitive and of high value.
Social media shares and backlinks: They help determine whether people are influenced or encouraged to share your content with their own audiences, friends, and family.
Impressions: These help you figure out whether your content’s keywords translate to clicks and impressions when searching organically.

Every measure varies depending on the type of content.

For instance, the key performance indicators (KPIs) for blog posts or articles include page views per visit, new visitors, website traffic, and geographic trends. Email marketing, on the other hand, values KPIs like conversion rate, open rate, and click-through rate.

With this, you can analyze different types of content to determine your high ranking blog posts and those that require updates.

Expert Tip: Setting realistic goals for your eCommerce content marketing strategies is as crucial as comparing your metrics.

For instance, if you had 1500 visitors to your website in 2021 and wish to reach 9,000 organic visits in 2022, would it be realistic to do so with the same budget and deliverables? Probably not.

Blogging vs Social Media–Which Is the Best Fit for eCommerce Content Marketing?

As you create content for your eCommerce marketing, there are two primary types of copy you’ll need: blog posts and social media posts.

Blog posts are articles published on a webpage to increase traffic due to their continuously interesting, relevant, and updated content. Most blogs contain pictures, links to other products, and keywords. Some are used as advertising tools to drive sales.

“I’m really impressed at the quality of content that CopySmiths produces. My niche is boring, but CopySmiths is very creative and consistently comes up with unique angles to address the topic. They have also been very helpful with keyword research, helping us to find gaps in our coverage.

The quality of writing is very good — but the best thing is it’s written for the reader in mind. They use tables, lists, graphics, comparisons, etc. knowing that every reader consumes content differently. I highly recommend using CopySmiths, or at least testing them with a small batch of articles!” — Alan Marek, PartCatalog

Social media posts, on the other hand, are added to a channel on a social media platform like Facebook. The posts form is determined by the platform, for example, Twitter only allows posts up to 280 characters, while Facebook has no limitations.

So which platform best fits eCommerce marketing? Let’s find out from the comparison table below.

Blogging	Social Media Posts
Blogs are constantly updated, helping websites and eCommerce businesses to rank better in SERPs	Social media posts are entirely reliant on social platforms for distribution
Blog posts are generally longer, allowing businesses to write more information explaining a product	Social media platforms are highly restricted
Blog posts offer longer-lasting content for websites	Social media posts are often times event-driven and seasonal

As much as it’s an excellent idea for an eCommerce store to utilize both blog posts and social media, blogging holds more weight and helps your business stay relevant for longer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the eCommerce marketing strategies?

There are several eCommerce strategies available on the internet today, including:

Content marketing
Email marketing
Search engine optimization for eCommerce
Producing original content
Social media marketing

Are there any challenges in using blogging as an eCommerce marketing strategy?

While blogging is an excellent way to market your eCommerce stores, it comes with some challenges. This could be

Competition from other stores
Battling quality over quantity
Experiencing burnout
Lack of enough resources

Fortunately, you can overcome these challenges by relying on an experienced content shop like CopySmiths with 25-years experience writing quality blogs.

What if I can’t create engaging content to market my eCommerce store on my own?

CopySmiths can help. We’ve already helped multiple eCommerce stores streamline their content marketing needs. With this, you can focus on other pressing matters like growing your business.

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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.