Content Strategy and Marketing: Why You Need Them for Your Ecommerce Brand

A world without content is a world that does not exist because a world without content is null. Content drives the world. Beauty need content, fashion need content, tech need content, everyone needs content, but most importantly, ecommerce needs content.

Why You Need a Content Strategy for Your Ecommerce Business

“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” — Doug Kessler, Creative Director and Co-Founder at Velocity Partners

One of the first things you learn when selling is the importance of knowing your audience. You can’t sell to someone if you don’t know what they want, much less need. 

Content Marketing

The cornerstone of content marketing is a good content strategy. Throughout the whole sales funnel, from awareness and the multiple touch points that lead to sale, content has its place. 

With blog posts, video creation, and everything in between, a content strategy aids in the development, creation and delivery of your brand’s message to your audience. Above all, especially if you’re an ecommerce business, content marketing increases your ROI. Here’s how:

1: Improve Branding

Content creation allows you to use every persuasive technique at your disposal to present your brand and services to your audience. It’s an opportunity to introduce yourself, showcase your strengths, create demands for your services, and foster new leads. Some things you can do to accomplish this are:

● Start a blog in your niche that describes your services

● Guest post on similar websites to increase your reach

● Embark on content syndication to further expand your reach

● Stream a behind-the-scenes live video that presents and humanizes  your company

2: Expand Your Audience and Reach

We briefly touched on expanding your reach in the previous point. Well, your reach and your audience are positively correlated, so when one expands, the other does as well. Focusing on content syndication, you do this by repurposing content on a website with higher authority than yours, thereby presenting yourself to a whole new audience and expanding your reach beyond anything you could have done otherwise.

Without going into specifics of how search engine’s function, let’s leave it at:

1. A user searches for, “why you need a content strategy for ecommerce business”

2. Search engine matches query to posts that match said query

3. User goes through the pages and finds the one that’s best for them

Make the most out search engines and their search function. Sprinkle keywords in your content that will make you more discoverable to your audience (don’t overdo it — that’s called keyword stuffing and it’s frowned upon in the SEO community), pick relevant titles, headings and subheadings, and link to your other posts to further boost your discoverability. 

3: Bring in More Leads

Imagine a digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO services, let’s call it Agency X. Instead of paying for customers to find them, Agency X produces content that focuses on the benefits of healthy SEO, how-to guides that improve SERP rankings, and the like.

Now picture Matt, a business owner who desperately wants to be found on Google’s first page. Matt does what most would do in his shoes, he does a Google search for tips on improving SEO. Lo and behold, one of Agency X’ SEO posts shows up, Matt reads it, finds a backlink to their website, and now Agency X has a new lead that is well on its way to becoming a customer.

From a different perspective, think of having someone working for you 24/7, always on your beck and call, ready to deliver your message to your audience. That’s essentially what your content does for you — it’s always online. Content doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t eat, it sits in the world wide web and waits for someone to open it.

4: Boost Your Conversion Rates

You might’ve noticed a pattern in the points leading up to this one, namely that when you do one, you arrive at the next one. When you improve your branding, you expand your audience and reach. When you expand your audience and reach, you bring in more leads. And finally, when you bring in more leads, you boost your conversion rates.

5: Pay Less for More

Traditional marketing involves expensive campaigns, advertising fees, and costs that range as much as the colors of the rainbow. Content marketing does not. In the most basic sense, instead of paying for your ad to be seen by your target audience, as you would with traditional marketing, your audience comes to you instead.

For example, think of the scenario with Matt and Agency X. In that scenario, instead of paying for Matt to find them, Agency X created content that directly resulted in bringing Matt to them. They (Agency X) incurred no extra marketing expenses and neither cold called nor spent hours writing emails with the hope of getting more leads. 

Increase Your ROI with Content

If you’re still on the fence, think about this: conversion rates for brands engaging in content marketing are nearly 6x higher than those who are not. Let’s take a second look at some of the benefits content bring in:

1. Improve Branding

2. Expand Your Audience and Reach 

3. Bring in More Leads

4. Boost Your Conversion Rates

5. Pay Less for More 

Good luck creating content and improving your ecommerce business!