How To Succeed at E-Commerce Content Marketing – 11 Helpful Tips

E-Commerce Content Marketing for Online Stores

Unless you are entirely off the grid, you know the importance of e-commerce content marketing for improving online sales. The problem is that some marketers believe that if they provide enough content, people will find it. But, unfortunately, this is not how it works. This is not a movie, after all.

Without a plan, e-commerce content is merely words, pictures, and videos broadcast into cyberspace. This content adds fluff without providing any value for your target consumer.

Effective content strategies have clear objectives and actions to get there, such as boosting your bottom line, increasing conversions in your sales funnel, and increasing engagement with target audiences. Among marketers’ top content marketing challenges is producing quality content with leads.

Online retailers and product brands publish content to generate likes, shares, and sales. However, an e-commerce content strategy is necessary for material that influences consumer behavior.

Why Does My E-Commerce Website Need a Content Marketing Strategy?

Creating unique, high-quality material with a specific audience in mind while appealing to their interests and addressing their problems is known as content marketing. By giving helpful information that cultivates goodwill and involvement, it often gently sells a brand, service, or product instead of making a hard pitch.

The ultimate objective of this customer engagement is to turn consumers into paying clients by guiding them through the sales funnel process of meeting their needs, establishing your credibility as an authoritative source of information, positioning yourself as the authority best suited to assist them, and then turning that interest into a paid business and a valuable ongoing relationship.

Advantages of E-Commerce Content Marketing

• It brings in fresh visitors to your business website. 
• It promotes confidence in your brand.
• It can assist with crucial conversions.
• It could generate a different source of income.
• Its evergreen substance may offer a lasting benefit.

Without a solid e-commerce content marketing strategy, you risk confusing and alienating potential consumers with content that lacks focus and purpose. Additionally, you run the risk of falling behind rivals that have a strong content strategy in place.

11 Tips for E-Commerce Content Marketing

1. Know Your Audience

If you sell products online, you should have an e-commerce content marketing strategy and be aware of the buying habits of your target market. If you sell goods on external marketplaces like Amazon, you should be mindful of the type of material they require and match it to what you already provide for your website.

Additionally, you ought to comprehend how customers locate your goods. Perhaps they use a search engine if they are older. Your products might appear in the social media feeds of your target market, which is likely to be younger. Understanding current trends will help you follow and reach your audience where they are because social media platform audiences vary.

Knowing your audience allows you to map out their purchasing patterns. For example, while you may use most of your material on various social media platforms, some of them might profit from more distinctive media.

2. Identify Content Specific to Each Channel

You can choose the kinds of material you should produce after you are aware of the channels your audience consumes. For example, you can create entertaining and educational videos if you use TikTok. You can design an impactful graphic if your target demographic uses Facebook. An aesthetically pleasing GIF would also work well on Twitter.

Numerous materials can be successful on multiple platforms, regardless of the channel. For instance, you can post videos, descriptions, captions, and hashtags on your website and several social media sites.

You should weigh the expected results against the specific e-commerce content marketing investment required for each channel. Avoid investing excessively in specialist content at the expense of your essential e-commerce content needs. If clients can’t locate the information they require to decide, even a solid social media hook won’t be of much use.

3. Create a Content Model

You can make a content model after mapping out the content. This approach establishes precise standards for content creators to follow when structuring their work to complement your plan.

First, list all the entities you intend to map, such as your offerings’ goods, product categories, campaigns, and channels, and any editors, product managers, or other relevant entities.

After mapping the entities and their connections, you must decide what information to record for each item. Start with the product’s name, description, price, and photo.

New marketing channels continuously evolve. Make sure your approach is adaptable enough to deal with new knowledge base platforms, fads, and the associated content without needing to start from scratch.

Once you have your model, you must decide how to add content. Even if your production crew is imaginative, they can forget to record the correct information. Implement the content model in a structured CMS to manage the material for your company to assist them.

4. Prioritize Visually Appealing Content

In e-commerce, there is a greater emphasis on visual content than in other sectors because, in nearly every case, buyers want to see what they are buying—and in as much detail as possible.

A video or still image of a product in use gives the buyer a good indication of quality and suitability, which is why many of the best e-commerce marketers focus their content marketing efforts exclusively on producing high-quality videos.

5. Use Video to Build Your Brand

E-commerce is about products. For online retailers, marketing is about raising awareness, increasing understanding, and helping people buy products.

According to research, video is the most effective content format for retail and e-commerce businesses. 

Popular categories of videos include:

• Product explainer and description videos
• Customer testimonial videos
• Live shopping videos

Long-form videos are usually posted on YouTube, while shorter videos prevail on TikTok or Instagram.

6. Utilize Lookbooks and Live Shopping

Lookbooks are digital recreations of printed promotional catalogs that retailers used to create for in-store browsing before e-commerce even existed. However, in fashion e-commerce, creating lookbooks is increasingly replacing traditional blogs.

A digital lookbook allows your customers to view your designs online and from any device or browser – without wasting paper or spending tons of money on distribution costs. Furthermore, digital lookbooks can incorporate much more than traditional paper lookbooks.

Lookbooks offer stylized photography and branded graphic design that can supplement regular product images, drumming up renewed interest in your store and deepening consumer loyalty.

Digital retailers now create online lookbooks to showcase their products in an eye-catching way. For example, fashion brands often release a lookbook for a new season or line.

You can produce lookbooks in different formats, including:

• Scrollable carousels of images of models wearing essential items from featured collections
• Short-form videos of models wearing outfits from specific collections
• Live videos of people shopping and creating outfits

Live shopping videos are also becoming increasingly popular, especially in China and now the U.S., and feature heavily in content marketing campaigns from fashion and beauty brands.

Live shopping is a marketing strategy that allows brands to promote or sell their products in real-time through an online Livestream. With live shopping, brands and potential customers not only get to connect and interact with each other but also streamline the purchasing process.

Allowing the viewers to buy directly from the Livestream is a brilliant idea, as the brand capitalizes on the excitement generated by the influencer.

7. Optimize Your Presence on Amazon

Many people looking to buy specific products begin by searching on Amazon—not search engines like Google, as they would if their query was more informational.

As a result, companies must pay close attention to each piece of content accompanying their products on Amazon and ensure it aligns closely with their website and brand. Failure to do this means shoppers may buy a competitor’s product instead.

Amazon has expanded the content options available to brands beyond just the title, description, and images of their product to include:

• A+ content
• Amazon Posts

A+ is a premium content feature that allows sellers to improve the description and merchandise of their products by adding richer text and high-definition videos and images.

As Amazon’s search function ranks products based on sales, retailers need to optimize their conversion rates—even if Amazon is not their primary sales channel—to ensure their competitors’ products don’t feature more prominently.

8. Consider Influencer Marketing

Personalities (i.e., people) play an important role in e-commerce content marketing. For some brands, the founders or owners fulfill this role. However, working with sector experts can be an excellent option for other retailers, not least because it shows Google that your content has authority.

Examples include fashion brands collaborating with social media influencers or bloggers and health and wellness brands partnering with doctors or nutritionists. 

The cool branding and influencer alliance enhances their credibility and connects to their target audience. This personal; connection has become a unique selling point for them, helping them stand out from the crowd in a busy marketplace.

Partnering with third-party experts to conduct research is another valuable investment that incurs no loss of credibility or authority.

9. Prioritize the Customer Experience

Your customer experience or how customers feel about their contacts with your company includes your e-commerce services.

So, businesses must promptly provide customers with the information that satisfies their demands when they use self-service portals with a problem, sometimes one that is urgent.

When the e-commerce customer experience rate grows, it will improve the customer retention rate, thus resulting in more sales over time.

10. Don’t Overlook the Benefits of SEO

Due to an above-average focus on visual content, many e-commerce websites have overlooked the opportunities afforded by more traditional text-based content marketing.

However, creating educational blog content and optimizing your website for search should be an essential part of your strategy. 

Therefore, e-commerce marketers should engage technical SEO experts and implement their suggestions.

For example, if you are a website offering skin care, you can type “skin care” and explore a broad range of related subtopics. You can also choose a relevant geographical area up to the city level.

Finally, focus on understanding the motivation behind your customers’ search behavior. Try to dig deeper, find out what made them type specific phrases, and look for products.

11. Request Consumer Feedback

Paying attention to what your consumers have to say can help you make improvements to the material you offer and increase sales. Understanding what your customers think of your sales process is essential for future improvement, regardless of how you go about it.

You could send a follow-up email, have live chat support scripts, interview customers, examine recorded sales calls, check social media channels, or use other methods.

What Kinds of E-Commerce Content Are Effective?

Common Content Publishing Platforms

• Blogs: Sharing lists, guides, thought leadership, and more for your audiences, no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey.
• By establishing a presence on YouTube, you “humanize” your brand and lay out your area of expertise.
• Instagram: Whether creating bite-size stories or longer form Reels, Instagram is an excellent way to connect with a larger audience via social media.
• LinkedIn: Generally thought of as a more business-focused platform, this is a great social channel to find and connect with the professionals you want to reach.
• TikTok: It feels like the whole world is on TikTok now, and a younger audience is increasingly using it instead of regular search engines.

Types of E-Commerce Content

You can use various content types when creating an e-commerce content strategy. These consist of the following:

1. Blogging

These articles are the backbone of most content marketing plans because they foster client relationships, generate leads, and lend themselves to SEO tactics.

2. Original photography

Product and lifestyle photography compensates for the fact that customers cannot touch the goods you are selling before they make a purchase.

3. Video content

Studies have shown that watching videos increases sales volume and value.

4. Product guides

As customers seek additional details about the products they are interested in, they may increase traffic to your e-commerce site.

5. Customer testimonials 

These come in the form of endorsements, critiques, and case studies.

6. Email marketing

You have numerous opportunities to interact with customers and develop relationships by simply confirming purchases, informing them of shipping and product delivery, and conducting follow-ups.

Creating E-Commerce Content

Top product brands, online stores, and niche retailers spend money on e-commerce content marketing because it’s essential for retaining customers and bringing in new ones.

Content strategies for e-commerce help retailers build relationships with their audience and win customers. 

Brands should focus on addressing the specific needs of their target market by answering their questions and concerns. Ultimately, this helps buyers complete their purchase journey.

Whether you want to increase traffic through organic and paid search or develop original content that serves marketing and sales objectives, creating an e-commerce content strategy will help you improve your online selling presence.

You can attract, engage, and convert your target consumers better if you have the right resources to study your market, conduct competitive audits, produce excellent content, and analyze the results to improve future performance.

The Purpose of E-Commerce Content Marketing

The purpose of e-commerce content marketing is to support the customer throughout their purchase journey and increases a brand’s online sales.

It is different from other forms of content marketing in the following ways:

• It emphasizes visual content more than traditional text formats.
• Its audience sometimes starts their acquisition journey on Amazon rather than on search engines such as Google; however, Google still plays an essential role.
• The most successful brands leverage personalities, primarily via video, and establish authority through partnerships with experts.
• Traditional SEO and text-based formats (such as educational blog posts) sometimes remain overlooked, which presents opportunities for brands that want to rank highly.

Therefore, creating content for e-commerce websites requires a multi-pronged approach that balances both the visual and the text-based. We are here to help!

Are You Creating E-Commerce Content?

Are you interested in attracting and engaging your target consumers and increasing conversions? Our professional eCommerce designers will be happy to help you with this. But first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.

Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your eCommerce web design needs, reach out to us! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.

And if you are unsure how to optimize your eCommerce homepage, let’s talk! We will listen to you, answer your questions, and help you provide the consumer experience online shoppers expect!

How is Your E-Commerce Content Marketing?

Do you have anything to add to our tips for succeeding at e-commerce content marketing? Perhaps you have additional ideas regarding e-commerce content creation? Feel free to add your comments below so our audience can benefit and grab our feed so you don’t miss our next post! And feel free to share our post with your audience!

For more content relevant to your business or product brand – check out the range of articles on our web design blog. (This one, on writing compelling product descriptions that sell, is an excellent place to start!)

Thank you! We appreciate your help ending bad business websites, one pixel at a time!

By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita