E-commerce content marketing: A complete guide 

What is content marketing for e-commerce? 

Content marketing for e-commerce involves creating, distributing, and promoting valuable and relevant content to potential and existing customers. Whether you’re building awareness or driving conversions, content marketing can help you reach customers across the full buying journey. 

Any landing page, product page, video, or blog you produce is content marketing, but you need to be able to use it effectively to grow your business. 

Types of content and their benefits for e-commerce

When creating a content marketing strategy for your e-commerce business, it’s important to know which types of content are available and how they could benefit you. 

Blog posts 

Blogs are incredibly versatile and can cover a wide range of topics, including how-to guides, industry insights, product comparisons, and customer stories. They are also great for SEO, helping you drive more traffic to your website and build your brand's visibility in the search engine results pages. 

Blogs are a highly effective way to drive growth for your business and is something you will need to add to your strategy if you want to keep up with or get ahead of your competitors, with 71% of marketers reporting that content marketing has become more important to them over the last year. 

Product descriptions and pages 

Beyond basic specifications, expanding the content on your product descriptions and pages to tell a story about the product, its benefits, and how it fits into your customers' lifestyles can help boost conversions. Plus, if you optimise your product descriptions for relevant keywords, it can help to boost your visibility in the search engine results pages too. 

Videos 

Videos are a great way to provide product demos, share behind-the-scenes stories, or simply entertain your audience. Videos are particularly effective on social media if you want to build brand awareness. Research shows that consumers who view a product video are up to 144% more likely to add that product to their cart than a consumer who does not watch a video. In addition, 73% of consumers say they are more likely to buy a product after watching a video. 

User-generated content 

Encouraging your customers to share reviews, unboxing videos or photos of your products in use is a great way to generate a bank of user-generated content that you can use on your website or on social media channels. 

User-generated content not only provides authentic testimonials but also boosts engagement and trust among prospective buyers. In fact, 79% of consumers say that user-generated content has an impact on their buying decisions, and 70% said they read reviews or ratings to decide whether or not to buy a product. 

Email marketing 

Email is another powerful tool for e-commerce businesses. Whether you’re sending regular newsletters with helpful tips and advice, the latest product drops, or abandoned cart emails to existing customers or those who have visited your site but haven’t converted yet, email can really help boost sales.

59% of consumers say that emails influence their buying decisions, and abandoned cart emails have an average 53.57% open rate. With so many consumers still utilising email on a daily basis and responding to emails from the brands they’ve interacted with, email should be top of your list when it comes to content marketing. 

Developing a content marketing strategy for e-commerce 

A successful e-commerce content marketing strategy involves several key steps: 

1. Define your objectives 

Before creating any content, you need to know what you want to achieve. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, boost sales, improve customer retention, or a mixture of all of these? 

Setting clear objectives for your content strategy that align with both your overall marketing and business objectives will guide your strategy and help you to measure its success. 

If you don’t know what you’re working towards when it comes to your content marketing strategy, it’s going to be impossible to know whether it’s working or not. 

2. Understand your audience 

As with any marketing strategy, to get the most from your investment, you need to know exactly who you’re targeting. Get to know who your customers are, what they need or want and where they spend their time. 

You can then use this information to create detailed customer personas that provide your customers’ demographics, interests, and behaviours. This will allow you to create content that’s tailored to their needs and that will resonate with them. 

3. Audit your existing content 

Evaluate your current content assets and see what’s working well and what isn’t. An audit can reveal gaps in your content strategy and opportunities for improvement. You might find that a particular piece of content performs well for your brand, so it would be worth investing time and resources to create more of this type of content. 

4. Create a content calendar 

Planning is key in content marketing. A content calendar helps you organise topics, schedule posts, and maintain a consistent publishing cadence, which is vital for keeping your audience engaged. 

Knowing what you need to create and when can keep your team on track and ensure that everything is created when you need it. 

5. Choose the right content types 

Different content types serve different purposes and appeal to different audience segments. Consider a mix of blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, and social media posts to diversify your approach and provide your audience with the content they want and need at each stage of their journey.

In addition, different types of content will resonate with different people, so it’s important to have a mixture to ensure that you’re reaching the broadest audience possible. 

6. Optimise content for SEO 

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is essential for ensuring that potential customers find your content. Use relevant keywords and optimise meta titles, descriptions, headings and tags to provide search engines with the information they need to ensure your site appears in the search engine results pages. 

7. Measure and adjust 

Regularly track your content’s performance using analytics tools. Look at metrics such as page views, time on page, social shares, and conversion rates. Use these insights to refine your strategy and content over time to ensure you’re getting the most from it. 

Key takeaways

Content marketing is an invaluable tool for e-commerce businesses. By understanding your audience, creating compelling and diverse content, and continually optimising based on performance, you can build a content marketing strategy that attracts and retains customers. This approach drives sales and builds a lasting relationship with the audience, turning casual visitors into loyal customers. 

If you’d like to know more about how to use content marketing to drive results for your e-commerce business, book a 30-minute consultation call with one of our experts. 

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