Create a Content Strategy for your Ecommerce Website

The e-commerce industry is a competitive market that is continuously growing. It’s also a very rich market to take advantage of, with the UK being the 4th largest market for ecommerce websites/online retailers.

As an online retailer, ecommerce business, or online shop, it’s crucial that you to do everything possible to get exposure for your online business. Digital exposure is your first thought, and you would be right.

Content is a fantastic way to make sure your online business doesn’t go unnoticed in search engines.

You’ve probably heard the term ‘content is king’, it’s an old phrase now. But it’s still true.

This is why a content marketing strategy is needed for your ecommerce business.

Get the recipe right to your content and SEO plans, and you’ll cook up a delicious financial pie that will keep growing with increased exposure for your online business.

For any business owner or marketing manager responsible for the ecommerce’s success, this guide is for you.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of content online. From blog posts to video and social media posts, it’s all intended to showcase products or services that the business sells.

For ecommerce businesses, content brings your products to life. while also providing advice and insight to shoppers who need guidance to solve an issue or answer their questions related to your product.

Basically, content is what shoppers will read to help them make a decision on whether your product is what they need.

Content marketing turns window-shoppers into paying customers!

Why content is important to every ecommerce business

In a growing market, it’s easy enough for your ecommerce business to get drowned out by the noise that other ecommerce sites are making with their own marketing.

Creating engaging and high-quality content is beneficial to your ecommerce business in many ways, whether you’re the owner or marketer for the website.

Here are just some of the benefits that come with content marketing for an ecommerce site:

• It’s your full time sales person – quality content that connects with your users will sell for you!
• Gets people to find your website on search engines, or engage with your social media posts
• Helps with brand visibility and awareness
• Builds loyalty and trust with customers
• Allows the business to answer questions and provide valuable information
• Creates value in your products and/or services
• Pushes your customers through the sales funnel

Yeah, content is a big deal.

Let’s dive into creating your own content marketing strategy for your ecommerce business.

Getting started with your ecommerce content strategy

How do you create an ecommerce content strategy that:

1. Is tailored to your ecommerce business

2. Will actually help you to get more people finding and buying on your website?

No need to panic, you’ll find everything you need below.

The ingredients to create an effective content strategy

Audience

Before doing anything, you need to know who it is you’re trying to connect with through your content.

The more data and insight you can gather on your audience, the better.

Identify your target audience demographic, their preferences, and pain points. A lot of businesses will make buyer personas because chances are, your ecommerce website might attract a wide range of customers.

Some target buyers might be after certain content that encourages them further through the sales funnel. Others could be new to the ecommerce website and need introductory content that establishes that relationship.

All the information you garner from your audience will guide you through the content decisions you make and ultimately what your content strategy should look like.

You can create a buyer/customer persona with this template.

Search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation – or SEO for short – is a key practice to add to your content creation. It should be an objective you lead with when it comes to all of the content within your content strategy.

There are many ways in which SEO can be integrated into your content strategy:

Keyword research

Conducting keyword research is what gets your web pages on the search engine result pages of Google. Identifying high-value keywords related to the products you’re selling is key to driving traffic to your website.

It’s why keyword research is so useful to understand or at least outsource if you’ve not got the knowledge in-house.

On-page optimisation

To help with SEO, it’s useful to ensure all product pages are being optimised to their fullest.

From meta titles, descriptions, and alt tags for images, these tasks all help satisfy the search engine’s requirements for high-quality and valuable content.

You might also want to consider compressing images to help with page speed, which can also help to reduce bounce rate. After all, one study found that one in four visitors will abandon a website if it takes more than four seconds to load.

Content quality

Content quality is important to get right, especially as it can result in higher volumes of traffic if the search engines deem it to be useful content.

When creating content for SEO, your content strategy should be to prioritise high-quality and unique content over quality. In the case of SEO, make sure you’ve created high-quality product descriptions, referencing specifications, benefits, and any USPs.

It’s worth knowing that content doesn’t just help your website to rank when it comes to SEO, it’s also the difference between a customer staying on your website or leaving.

Want to have a crack at creating your own content? Then check out this cheatsheet/template to guide you through writing content for your website pages.

Blog writing

If you’ve not got a blog on your ecommerce site yet, then you’re missing out on further traffic potential. Make sure you read how to start a blog.

A blog is a great way to get people landing on your website.

If you write high quality, helpful content on your blog, you will no only get shopper landing on your website, but keep them on your website for longer periods. In doing so, encourage them to read your content and realise that your product as their solution they need to buy.

Blogs are a great place to provide educational resources to provide valuable information for your audience, relating to your products and your ecommerce site in general.

Consider content categories when creating a blog section for your website. Develop content categories that align with the products you sell, while also catering to your audience interests. Remember, use that audience data to tailor your content.

Make sure the content is educational and entertaining. You want your audience to be enticed by the content you put out on your blog but for them to learn something from it.

Types of blogs that you could write for your ecom business:

• How-to guides
• Tutorials on specific products
• Informative, long-form blog posts on a complicated topic – where your product is the solution
• Q&As – write answers to highly searched questions from your customers
• Ideas posts – typically highly searched content
• Product comparisons
• Seasonal blogs
• Evergreen content – the type of content that it doesn’t matter what time of year it is, the content is relevant

See more blog types you can write here.

The more variation there is in your content, the better. When planning blog content, you might want to create blog posts in relation to the time of year it is.

Seasonal and trend-based content is a great way to capitalise on relevant search traffic and keywords being inputted into search engines.

An extra tip for blog content strategies is to incorporate your own customers’ experiences of your products. Sharing customer testimonials and success stories helps to build that all-important credibility and trust in existing customers and those perhaps close to converting to paying customers.

Want to give blog writing a go yourself? Then make sure you grab this blog writing template to help you do it yourself!

Visual content

As humans, we adore visuals, which is why you want to make your content is not only enjoyable to read, but it visually catches people’s eyes.

When creating product pages, make sure you’re using nice-looking images and product videos to showcase them from a variety of angles. Many ecommerce sites now use video content to show the product in action, like ASOS for example, that have models show off the garment in a quick 10-second video clip.

These types of interactive visuals are great for your customers to get a somewhat realistic viewpoint of the product in action. Other useful visuals that are interactive are 360-degree product views, enabling the user to zoom in and out.

Don’t forget about user-generated content either! Encouraging customers to share photos and reviews of their purchases is certainly something to make use of.

You can then add these to the product pages as well as showcase them via your social media feeds.

Content distribution

The distribution of the content is an important part of your content strategy. Nowadays, simply existing as a website alone is often not enough to get the attention of your target audience.

There are a number of ways in which you can effectively distribute the content you create and hopefully drive more traffic to your ecommerce site.

You may have written your content for your website, but that doesn’t mean you can’t adapt it to share it on other channels too; social media, email, and paid ads.

You’ve invested in that content, so get the most out of that investment by repurposing your content.

Social media

Connecting your social media profiles to your site is a great use of cross-channel marketing. If you don’t have social media feeds for your business, then now is the time to start using them.

From TikTok to Instagram, Facebook to X, there are plenty of social media apps to utilise.

Sounds like too much effort? Well, just know that the use of social media as a tool for ecommerce is continuing to grow in popularity. In fact, the worldwide revenue of social commerce alone is forecast to surpass six trillion U.S. dollars by 2030.

Email marketing

Within content marketing, one of the most prominent and highly-used methods is via email. Most people nowadays have an email, whether that’s a personal one, a work email, or both.

Email marketing proves useful when you want that personable connection with your customers. You’re able to send regular newsletters once a user subscribes to it and this can be helpful for nurturing them through your sales funnel.

It’s worthwhile segmenting your users too because not all of them will be at the same point within the funnel. Email marketing is beneficial to share your blog posts, exclusive offers, and discounts, as well as new product launches.

Paid advertising

Investment is needed in your ecommerce site in more ways than one. One such way is through paid advertising. Paid ads comes in the form of PPC marketing on the major search engines, like Google, or paid social media advertising.

It’s useful for a mix of organic content and content influenced through paid advertising to help attract more traffic.

Using platforms such as Google Ads and social media ads can be helpful in bringing more eyes to your ecommerce site.

Content calendar

Creating content is hard work and for many marketers or business owners operating their ecommerce site alone, keeping up with this content is challenging.

That’s where a content calendar is useful to create. Whether you have just yourself on your marketing team or half a dozen staff, creating a content calendar keeps everything organised and planned in advance.

Plan your content strategy in advance by brainstorming your blog post topics, and scheduling in timelines for product launches and other promotions throughout the calendar year. That way, you’re creating consistency in your content, which is likely to perform better online.

User-generated content

User-generated content is something that has been mentioned already in this post but is an important variation in content to include actively within your strategy.

Nowadays, in the world of influencers, many people are making use of creating content that documents their own experiences with brands and products in particular. As an ecommerce site, the more people you have posting about your products, the better.

It’s worth encouraging your customers to leave reviews and ratings for products they’ve purchased which you chase up once they’ve made it through to checkout. Perhaps send out a follow-up email one or two weeks after they’ve received their product to ask them what they think of it.

Social proof is also used actively by many businesses online nowadays, whereby they showcase user-generated content on product pages and via their social media feeds. There’s nothing more exciting for customers to see their own socials being used by a business or brand they love.

Product comparisons and buying guides

For some customers, a thorough understanding of how to use a product might be needed before they go ahead and purchase the product. It’s also something they may benefit from reading once they’ve purchased the product.

Helpful resources that you supply through your social media feeds, your blog, and product pages are very much appreciated by your customers.

Think about creating buyer guides, comparison charts, and any product recommendations that might encourage new or existing customers to make a purchase.

Mobile optimisation

Nowadays, most people will own a smartphone and it’s these devices that are fast becoming one of the most used devices for browsing and shopping online. Whether it’s on a morning commute to work or shopping while watching the kids at their swimming lessons, mobile-friendly content is paramount in content strategy.

Ensure that all of your content, including that of product description and visuals has been optimised for mobile devices too. That way, your customers are getting the same, high-quality experience they would get when browsing on their desktops.

Measuring content’s performance

As part of your content strategy, you should be actively tracking and analysing the performance of your content.

Without performance management in place, how do you know whether the content you’re providing is having an impact on customers and for your business?

Make sure that you read our content analysis blog to find out more about what stats count in measuring your content’s impact.

Feedback and iteration

Finally, be attentive when it comes to feedback from your customers. Whether it’s good or bad, it’s all useful when critiquing your products.

No business owner wants to hear there’s something wrong with their products but they’d rather hear about it than it go unnoticed.

Listen to your customer feedback and use it to refine your content strategy every so often. Staying up to date with the latest industry trends is also helpful in adapting your strategy accordingly.

Real life results achieved for online home furnishing store

We’ve worked with many ecommerce brands over the years. One of our most recent wins is with a small business based locally to us in Hampshire.

They went from being a market stall selling their handmade home upholstery and furnishings on the odd weekend to an online shop!

In a year’s work of SEO, we achieved exciting results, thanks to content and SEO:

• A 10050% increase in sales generated from their website
• From a handful of rankings to over 200 keywords ranking worldwide on Google
• Started ranking for keywords with a monthly search volume of between 350 – 1,200 (highly competitive keywords)

Check out the full Cross-Stitch case study here.

Implement a well-thought-out content strategy for your ecommerce site

A well-executed content strategy is a winning formula for your ecommerce site. Not only does it significantly enhance your online presence but it also helps attract more traffic, which will hopefully lead to more conversions. That’s an increase in sales for your business, which in turn helps you grow further as a business online.

Regularly analyse and adapt your content strategy based on the data you receive and customer feedback. That way, you’re ensuring continued success for your business this year and beyond!