Content is a huge part of a successful search engine optimization program. Content includes any kind of writing you are doing to promote your business or educate. The purpose of these pieces is to increase your rankings, increase visibility, educate people about your brand, get information out, and attract more customers. If it isn’t already, content marketing for your e-commerce business needs to be made a priority. The first step in doing this is creating a strategy.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy
So now that we understand the purpose that content serves, let’s dive into how we can most effectively put together a content marketing strategy. Having a plan in place is crucial to your success in executing your content marketing strategy. It helps you better understand where you want to be and what you are going to do to drive the business forward.
But where is the right place to start and what should your focus be in putting together your plan for moving forward? To start, you need to understand what your goals are for the business such as driving down the cost to acquire a customer, improving ROI (return on investment) on marketing, increasing repeat purchases, etc. Different KPI (key performance indicator) initiatives to consider when writing a plan include:
- Hitting an average order value (AOV) target
- Reducing shopping cart abandon rate by X%
- Working toward a customer acquisition cost
- Targeting a gross profit margin
- Improving your site’s conversion rate
Like any marketing initiative, you need to have a defined goal you are working toward in order to measure how effective you are with your marketing initiatives. Businesses often struggle to know what goals they should put into place so they measure things like overall revenue and site traffic growth.
Key Takeaway: You have to be very clear about how you plan to use marketing initiatives to make money for the business. Before you think about hiring an agency, you need to have a solid KPI in place so that the agency is very clear on what they are trying to accomplish from the marketing efforts. DO NOT rely on an agency to set your goals for you. They do not know your margins or what ROI is needed for marketing campaigns to be profitable.
What Are Your Goals?
Before you do anything, sit down and determine what your goals are and what you would like to accomplish in your content marketing efforts. Whether you’re flying solo or wanting to brainstorm with your team, set aside a portion of your time to consider what you’d like to accomplish. Here is a list of questions you could use as a starting point while you work to define your content marketing goals:
- What would determine success for us?
- Where are the content gaps on our current site? (FAQ, product pages, category pages, etc.)
- Are we looking for more subscribers, or perhaps an increased amount of backlinks?
- Is our content marketing designed to increase brand awareness?
- Is creating content going to help our audience understand who we are?
- Is it going to establish trust? Things like reviews, testimonials, and social proof?
- Do we need to focus on educating our customers about our products and the positive influence the brand can have on them?
- How can we use various content pieces across our marketing channels?
- Do we want our content to drive more customer engagement- asking for opinions, experiences, and general engagement to help customers to feel like they’re interacting with a person instead of a brand?
- How can we measure the ROI with our top-of-funnel content marketing?
Asking good questions is just the start and should help as you consider if content marketing is right for the business in generating revenue. Like any initiative, you should set goals centered on various aspects of content marketing. Record your goals. You might even consider displaying your goals in a place where you’ll commonly see them to help you stay focused. If content marketing is a good fit, you need to understand who your audience is and their content needs and makes sure the brand lives at the center of it all!
Define your Target Audience
Determining who your target audience is will work wonders in helping you to maintain a laser focus on achieving your goals with content marketing, and will make it much easier for you to brainstorm and create content to best serve your customers.
Before you move forward with a content marketing campaign, it is imperative that you understand who your audience is and what best speaks to them. If you don’t have a clear picture of who you’re targeting, you won’t see the success that you’re looking for with your content marketing efforts.
To start, consider these aspects of your target audience:
- Age
- Location
- Gender
- Habits
- Likes and dislikes
- Spending habits
Identifying these details will help you to really hone in on who you best serve and will do wonders in helping you to create an effective content marketing strategy. However, don’t fall into the trap of defining your target audience too broadly.
Key Takeaway: By focusing on generic content, you will be attracting the wrong traffic to your site. You may be thinking to yourself, isn’t all traffic good? Truth is, that’s not always the case. What starts to happen is you get a broad range of traffic to your site but these individuals are not taking action on your site leading to a higher bounce rate. The end result is your traffic looks great, but every other metric suffers!
Some business owners or marketers, when asked who their target audience is, use overarching phrases such as “everyone is our target audience” or “all parents” or “people who like to exercise.” The way you target a mother is different from the way you would target a father, and the way you would target a 65-year-old female swimmer is different from how you would target an 18-year-old male football player.
This is why defining your target audience is so crucial to your strategy. Understanding who you’re targeting will determine what content you decide to use, your phrasing, your content placement, etc….this will truly determine the overall direction of your content marketing plan.
Something that many find helpful is creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents what you’ve defined as your target audience. Keep in mind that this is not a real customer- this is a fictitious individual who personifies your ideal customer. For help creating a buyer persona, feel free to check out some of these great resources:
- Buyer Persona Profile from Epic Content Marketing
- This quick one-page worksheet from Epic Content Marketing allows you to create a snapshot of a buyer persona, their job description, priorities, and challenges.
- 5 Rings of Buying Insights Template from the Book Epic Content Marketing
- When used in conjunction with the worksheet above, the 5 Rings of Buying Insights template will help you glean additional insights around the journey of each buyer persona.
- How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business from Hubspot
- Hubspot provides a great step-by-step post and downloadable template to support your buyer persona creation initiatives.
As you build out your buyer personas you will want to start mapping some basic keywords to the persona in order to understand how they would search for information related to your products. No need to go in-depth right now (we’ll cover how to do keyword research later in this guide) but you should start to get a sense of how a consumer would start to search for products related to the business. Use this keyword research for additional information about the different personas you create.
Here is a quick chart as an example of how to create personas based on consumers looking for health-related products:
Some find it helpful to give their buyer persona a name or even find a stock photo that they can associate with the person. The goal is to personalize the experience between your marketing team and this persona – it provides the ability to cultivate a more substantial and targeted marketing experience for your target audience.
Once you define your goals, establish a content strategy, and create your buyer personas, your next step in the process is to do a content audit. A content audit will help you understand what content you have to work with. This process is designed to make sure your site content is aligned with your buyer persona’s needs.
Having a content marketing strategy for your e-commerce business is an absolute must. Hopefully, this post has given you a few more insights into how to create a strategy with your goals and target audiences in mind. However, if you’d like more help with content and a content marketing strategy, contact our team to set up a consultation. We’d love to see if we’re the right fit for you and your e-commerce business.
Looking for more content marketing tips to help you grow your e-commerce business? Check out these posts:
- What is Content Marketing & Why Is It Important For Your Ecommerce Business?
- Why & How To Perform a Content Audit For Your Ecommerce Business
- How to Document Your Content Marketing Strategy For Your Ecommerce Business
- How To Build a Content Calendar For Your Ecommerce Business
- Where Will You Share & Distribute The Content For Your Ecommerce Business?
- How To Understand The Buyer’s Journey For Your Ecommerce Customers
- How to Optimize Your Ecommerce Content For The Best SEO Rankings
- How To Perform a Content Analysis & Reporting For Your Ecommerce Business
- How To Scale Your Ecommerce Content Marketing
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
