E-commerce Trends/Stats
Over the past decade, e-commerce has experienced consistent growth. Recent research shows that more than 2 billion people actively shop online and e-commerce sales revenue in the United States exceeded 1 trillion dollars in 2023 alone. This amount is expected to increase by 52.4% in 2024. The total revenue from e-commerce sales in the United States is projected to reach over 2 trillion dollars by 2029.
Your e-commerce business must adjust to these changes and trends to be successful. The best way to achieve this objective is to develop and implement a comprehensive content marketing strategy, focused on building brand awareness for your e-commerce business and increasing customers engagement.
Content Marketing Definition
Content marketing is a strategic marketing process of creating and sharing content to attract, engage and educate customers. Content marketing is a useful component of your marketing mix because it does not contain direct sales pitches. Instead, content marketing provides your customers with valuable information that answers their questions and solves their problems.
Types of E-Commerce Content Marketing
You can use various types of content marketing approaches for your e-commerce business. The specific method you choose depends on many factors, including the niche of your e-commerce business and the target audience.
Blogs
You can make your blogging an effective component of your digital marketing efforts by practicing simple tips. For example, create blog posts that your audience would love to read. Understanding your buyer persona prior to creating blog content will enable your content team to craft engaging content targeted to your customers.
A highly-engaging blog post answers the key questions that your customers have at any time. You can create compelling blogs by trying to understand the needs of your customers. Here are some common questions you can ask yourself before writing blog posts.
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What are the most pressing problems that my customers have right now?
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Do I have the answers to the problems that my customers grapple with right now?
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In what form do my customers expect to find content that addresses their needs?
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Should I include graphics and images in my blogs as long-form content?
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How long should my blog posts be?
Good blogging practice benefits your e-commerce business in numerous ways. The most common being maximizing conversion rate optimization, increasing engagement and growing lifetime value.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still a consistent way to increase customer lifetime value. Your e-commerce brand can benefit from email marketing in various ways related to growth marketing, retention marketing, and conversion rate optimization.
Email marketing is an effective content marketing technique because of the nature of the audience. People on your email marketing list take time to sign up for the newsletters, which primes them to receive quality, brand-focused content. It should be no surprise that email marketing can deliver the highest engagement scores in your entire digital marketing repertoire.
Email marketing is ideal for announcing new products with discounts, addressing concerns about your brand that some customers may have, and generally keeping the audience engaged.
Ensure you include your clients’ names in the emails to make them sound authentic and personalized. People are likely to open and read emails directly addressed to them.
Landing Pages
E-commerce businesses use landing pages to maximize the number of visitors who turn into customers. Conversion rate optimization scores help you rate how well you convert visitors to your website into clients. Landing pages typically contain Calls-to-action or CTAs. These are brief statements within the content that ask clients to take specific actions like placing an order for a product. The goal of using CTAs is to take the visitors from the top-of-the-funnel to the bottom-of-the-funnel in the conversion process.
Benefits of Content Marketing in E-Commerce
Content marketing is more than simply creating and sharing content online. It is important because it helps your ecommerce business connect with clients online. You can use content marketing to build trust among your audience by sharing valuable and relevant content with them. Here are some of the greatest ways an effective content marketing strategy can benefit your e-commerce business.
Increasing Brand Awareness
The best way to measure brand awareness is to consider how easily people interacting with your content remember your brand. Consumers are experiencing an information glut in the current digital age. People get so much information daily. However, consumers interact with content they find memorable and tailored to their needs.
Therefore, you need to create content that addresses the pain points of your target audience to make your brand stick. Curating content and placing it before the right audience using the appropriate channel can help create impressions in the minds of the people who consume the content. Increasing brand awareness is good for your e-commerce business because it helps you achieve your growth marketing goals.
Increase brand loyalty
Naturally, you would like to keep your customers as long as possible. A solid retention marketing strategy can help you keep your customers for a long time and maximize sales revenue. Retention marketing techniques help your e-commerce brand to minimize customer churn.
Your customers will stay for a long time with your brand if they are happy with the experience they get when shopping from you. Customers tend to stay with brands they understand and trust. Therefore, you must make your brand trustworthy and relatable to your customers to ensure their loyalty.
Effective content marketing can help you achieve this objective. Create content that addresses all customers’ concerns about your brand. The audience will then engage with your content online and follow your brand on various social media platforms. Increased loyalty will foster word-of-mouth marketing efforts for your business.
Focus on creating and sharing high-quality content to build brand loyalty. Your customers will consume your content regularly when they are convinced that you are an authority in the industry.
Reduces marketing costs
It is expensive to run digital marketing campaigns. The costs of paid search, PPC, and email marketing campaigns depend on the size of the target audience and the period you run them. Besides, traditional advertising on conventional media channels is no longer effective for e-commerce businesses, yet it remains costly.
Content marketing is an effective and affordable method of communicating with the target audience of your e-commerce brand. A content marketing strategy lets you identify the needs of your target audience, curate the appropriate content for them and get it right before the eyes and ears of the target segment.
A good content marketing strategy supports your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts to ensure your message reaches the right audience. Providing useful and engaging content to your customers can help increase traffic to your business’ website. Increased traffic may convert into warm leads and eventually sales, thus increasing your business’ revenue.
How to Get That Content in Front of an Audience
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps to get your content in front of the right audience. The basis of SEO as a digital marketing technique is that people search for information online using specific queries. These questions form the keywords you can use to create and optimize content for search. So, when people look for information online using specific queries, your content, which contains the matching keywords, appears at the top of the Search Engine Results Page or SERP. People tend to click content that appears at the top or on the first pages of their search results. Therefore, it is important to ensure your brand appears at the top or on the first pages of search results.
Here are some ways to put the content in front of your audience.
Paid search
Under paid search, you give money to a specific search engine then your content appears at the top. Search engines like Google and Bing sell advertising spots to businesses. These spaces are optimized for specific audiences and keywords.
PPC
Pay-per-click is an old method of getting your content before the audience. You will pay certain rates every time a person clicks from your audience. Advertisers usually bid on the value of a click. The amounts the advertisers pay for this type of advertising depend on the platforms, keywords, and type of audience they target.
Organic social posts
These are social media posts that organically attract audiences. People find such content interesting or informative and start engaging with it by sharing it with their friends or liking it. They may also click on the links and visit your website to get more information about products.
Paid social media posts
Here, you pay social media platforms to place your content before a specific audience. You define the audience using demographics and other parameters like their location.
Conclusion
A good content marketing strategy will help you get the right content for your business in front of your target audience. Your e-commerce brand can benefit from this in numerous ways as successful content marketing efforts help to establish brand awareness, build loyalty and improve conversion.
You can achieve these objectives by using content marketing to tell real stories about your business. Audiences engage with brands that sound authentic online. Here at Penmo, we deliver premium content for your business. Talk to us today to get some of the best SEO writers to deliver hand-written content that tells your brand’s story to your target audience.