You’ve chosen the best products for your customers, you’re spending top dollar for advertising and your customer service works great. Yet something seems to be missing. Your online store does not yet stand out. Let see how you can use content marketing for ecommerce to leverage your audience and earn sales.
Content marketing for ecommerce is a really vast area and means a lot of things for many people. For me, content marketing is educating your potential buyers on topics you are passionate about. For example – I am passionate about ecommerce. I love how it helps small businesses connect with their potential customers and how it’s made the world better. What are YOU passionate about?
Content marketing is about your shop’s personality. It’s about standing out and standing up for something. It’s your story to the world. It’s how you guide your community toward a better future by selling the products you care about.
So let’s have a look at five ways to build great content for your online store:
1. Your story is a great content marketing for ecommerce strategy
What do you do when you meet someone? You try to look as interesting, smart and great looking as possible. You wouldn’t just go ahead and show them your ID card and recite a bunch of boring facts about you.
You tell a story. Your content marketing starts with your story.
Ecommerce sites all have a story. At some point someone thought – hey, I can do better than my competitors or hey – I can make some money selling the products I like. They decided to stand for something. Yet most of the times they miss the opportunity to show this. They get lost in boring and useless “About us” statements that fail to transmit anything else then the fact that someone bothered to fill in some words on that page.
Other companies make it personal, no matter their size. They tell everyone what they stand for and why should you choose them. Meet Warby Parker:
Warby Parker decided they would have none of that boring “About us” corporate double talk. No sir. They went on and shared everything the company stands for. The history, their social responsibility program, even why they’re named Warby Parker (Turns out they’ve named the company from two characters in a Jack Kerouac book).
The point: tell a story, not just a few facts about the company. After all, your customers are people, not robots. The best content marketing for people starts with stories.
2. Help your customers connect and share “How To” do it
You’re selling lots and lots of products. That means you should be some kind of expert on how they could be used. Some of your customers might be as well. Here’s another content marketing strategy for ecommerce:
Tell people how to use your products. or ask them how they use it.
Take Sephora for example: As their online sales grew intensively, they’ve built a special community gallery page. They engage their community and allow them to show case how they use their products.
Even the products have their own how to’s and user submitted gallery
The point: make your customers understand how to use the product and engage them through content. Otherwise – ask them how they use it.
3. Earn your media. Own your media. Have a voice.
You know who’s the best at saying great things about you? That’s right. You.
Don’t rely on others to say great things about your products. You know they’re great. Otherwise – why would you sell them?
Build a magazine for your niche and stick to it. Explain what your customer should do to look better, feel better, spend better. After all, you have already picked those “whats”. The times where media was owned by large corporations and they alone could make or break your business – those times are gone.
Go ahead and build a blog that is interesting and informative for your community. It doesn’t have to be just about your products. Great content marketing for ecommerce enriches your customers’ lives with great ideas.
Here’s an example on how to be a better you by BetterSelf, an ecommerce business that sells physical tools for productivity:
The point: start writing and earn media instead of paying for it. It’s a great way to share insights with your customers and build relationships.
4. Enage your audience with (live) video
One of the fastest trends in video, in the past year, is live shopping. This trend combines entertainment and shopping to create a shopping experience that is previously unheard of.
In this scenario a live shopping assistant can engage and sell to their audience in real time. It creates a feeling of fun and generates loads of sales.
But it doesn’t have to be live video. BirchBox uses YouTube to generate awareness and keep its community together with its makeup and beauty channel.
Here’s how they use video in their content marketing for ecommerce practice:
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