By today’s standards, even fledgling eCommerce entrepreneurs and executives know that content marketing is a solid and effective way to spread brand awareness and to get customers engaged with your brand.
All too often, though, even experienced eCommerce store owners and managers make the mistake of creating content just for the sake of creating it. That is, they work under the assumption that creating just any content is enough to generate this sought-after brand awareness and customer engagement.
Of course, that simply isn’t true. The reality is, you need to approach your content marketing initiatives strategically if you want to have any hope of using content to accomplish your business-related goals.
Table of contents:
- Why you need an eCommerce content strategy
- eCommerce content strategy overview
- eCommerce strategy chapter list
Why do you need an eCommerce content marketing strategy?
To further nail down exactly why you need to have a content strategy, let’s take a look at this data collected by SnapApp in December of 2017:
Do you have a content strategy?
(42% of companies surveyed don’t have a content strategy. Do you? Source)
[Reason #1] Your competitors have a content strategy
Of the companies surveyed, an overwhelming 72% of them reported having a content strategy in place. So, simply from a competitive standpoint, if you don’t have a strategy for your content marketing initiatives, you’re likely at a disadvantage.
To add to this, data collected by Neil Patel shows that nearly half of small businesses have a documented content strategy (with 41% of larger companies reporting the same), and that 60% of the most effective B2C marketers in the world actively use a content strategy.
[Reason #2] Without a content strategy, your content will lack value
Aside from “keeping up with the Joneses,” there are a number of other benefits to having a solid content strategy in place. Perhaps the best way to illustrate these benefits, though, is to understand what happens when a company doesn’t have a content strategy in place.
As we touched on a bit earlier, creating content without a strategy behind it will often lead you to create content just for the sake of creating it. For example, you might start churning out blog post after blog post simply because you noticed your main competitor has a blog, and you figured you probably should as well.
However, there are several problems here.
For one, since your goal here is to simply keep up with your competitor in terms of content quantity, you’re almost certainly sacrificing quality in the process. Rather than providing unique value to your audience via a smaller number of in-depth blog posts, you’ve simply looked at what your competitor has written, and churned out your own “version” of the very same content.
At best, you’re providing information that can be found elsewhere on the web (and thus won’t allow your brand to stand out); at worst, you’re creating generic content that doesn’t tell your audience anything they don’t already know.
[Reason #3] Your content will lack focus and purpose
Along with this, by merely copying what your competitors are doing (or otherwise approaching your content creation efforts in a non-strategic manner), you’ll ultimately fail to create a cohesive “library” of content that revolves around a specific theme, concept, or purpose.
As we’ll get into as we get deeper into this guide, one of the main goals of a content strategy is to ensure that every piece of content you create ties into the other content you’ve created in one way or another. This just won’t happen if you fly by the seat of your pants when deciding what content to create next.
[Reason #4] You’ll eventually mislead or confuse your audience
Finally, by creating content without a strategy behind it, you’re liable to pull your audience in way too many directions - causing their experience with your brand to suffer. As we said in the previous paragraph, all of your content should interconnect in some way, shape, or form. And, as we talked about earlier, your various pieces of content should aim to provide value to your customers as they make their way through their buyer’s journey. That said, if you don’t have content to provide this value at certain points along their journey, they’ll likely leak out of the sales funnel before they end up converting.
To quickly review, a solid content strategy enables you to:
- Develop unique, in-depth, and valuable content that will stand out from your competitors’ efforts
- Create a cohesive content library that interconnects in multiple ways
- Stay laser-focused on creating content that nurtures your customers through each stage of the sales funnel - and keeps them engaged well beyond their first purchase
eCommerce content strategy overview
We’re going to dive deep into all that goes into creating an effective eCommerce content strategy throughout this guide. Our hope is that, as you read through our guide, you’ll come away with a better understanding of how to create content with a true purpose - not simply because you “want to get into content marketing.”
We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s get started.
How Content Can Enhance The Shopping Experience
If you’re still on the fence regarding whether or not a focus on content marketing can benefit your company, let’s be perfectly clear: It absolutely can. Here are the 4 reasons why content can boost your users’ shopping
Content Strategy vs Content Marketing: What’s The Difference?
Content strategy vs content marketing: What’s the difference? Throughout this guide so far, we’ve mentioned the terms “content strategy” and “content marketing” a number of times without going into what they actually mean, exactly. While we’ll explain each in detail momentarily, let’s first explain how they relate to one another.
eCommerce Content Plan: What's Included in The Content Strategy?
There are 4 main facets of a content strategy: Substance, Workflow, Governance, and Structure. Let’s take a deeper look at each.
The Stakeholders of eCommerce Content Strategy: Who's Involved In The Creation?
An overview of the main responsibilities for each member of your content marketing team.
eCommerce Team Structure: How To Structure Your Marketing Team Department
Depending on your company’s current bandwidth and capacity to hire new talent, you may need to have multiple individuals take on more than one role. Here's our recommended structure for your content team.
How to Develop an eCommerce Content Strategy
Now that we’ve gone over what a content strategy is, and discussed the foundational basics of what goes into a content strategy, let’s now go into the actual process of creating one.
eCommerce Strategies: 10 Advanced eCommerce Tips You Need To Steal
Before we wrap things up, though, we’re going to take a look at some of the more innovative and engaging approaches to content marketing we’ve seen over the past couple of years.