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A viral social campaign or a high-budget paid ads strategy can quickly bring new eyes to your website. However, making sure that your site has consistent, and continuous content will be what ensures that your business' success is maintained long term.
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This year, Semrush’ state of content marketing report found that 96% of eCommerce businesses had success when they met their content marketing goals, so cracking the content marketing code should be one of your top priorities if it’s not already.
Considering that a large portion of an eCommerce business’ success hinges on initially getting people to its site, keeping content as a top priority is a necessity. Similarly, this is not something you can just ease off the gas on, as customer needs and perceptions can change, not only over many years, but over individual months and weeks too.
So let’s unpack the major considerations when it comes to making content for your eCommerce business.
The most effective content strategies will focus, not on what products you have, but on the needs of your target audience. And this is true regardless of whether those within your target audience are prior customers or will never buy from you. This is to say that, your downloadable guide, blog post, or podcast, should all be in service of educating, entertaining, or engaging with your audience. The resulting increases in brand awareness or profits should be the natural result, rather than the original intention.
Furthermore, owned content, that is housed within your website, gives you the opportunity to expand the horizons of your brand’s voice, in a way that your marketing channels may not allow for. For example, longer blogs and videos open the floor to discuss the ethical or environmental considerations you have made in your design or manufacturing processes. This can go a long way to improving customer retention too, as a brand’s most dedicated customers want more from a brand than just new products.
Staying aligned with your target audience’s wants and needs, will keep your overarching content strategy focused and up to date. In fact, not having that alignment can mean that your messaging becomes ineffective, unengaging and, at worst, contradictory.
Content serves two main purposes, improving your organic search results, and equally importantly, getting a customer to convert once they’re actually on your website. Blog, video, and photo content can be what piques the interest of a customer as they’re browsing through Google. But product copy, buying guides, and product FAQ pages are what turns this potential customer into a fully fledged one.
Similarly, if this supporting content is optimised and, most importantly, correct, it will lessen the chances of a customer making a poorly informed purchase.
Let’s say that your website states, “our boots aren’t just stylish, they’re great for hiking and outdoors too, “ but they actually don’t hold up against the elements very well. Customers who purchase them to wear outside are going to be more than a bit peeved by the poor experience, and likely won’t buy from you again. This is an extreme example, but illustrates how having non-optimised content can worsen the customer experience. On the other hand, a competitor's product copy may state “our hiking boots feature a shock absorbing EVA midsole, so are perfect for use outdoors,” which is a much more accurate representation of their product. This, in turn, reduces the number of returns they receive, and lightens the load placed on their customer service team.
There are many considerations to be made when conducting a content audit, and these can vary from brand to brand, but we’ll summarise some of the main things to consider.
As your business grows and changes, your priorities from both the product and marketing perspectives will change too. As this transformation occurs, you need to be realigning your content strategy to ensure that it isn’t lagging behind. After all, if you spend a lot of time on your content, you’ll want to ensure that it’s actually helping your brand, and not hindering it.
Similarly, as producing content is an effort that can span across multiple people and departments, your intended best practice may get watered down. In order to improve your organic traffic, improve your conversion rate, and improve the customer’s experience, you want to ensure that your content is being refreshed.
By regularly examining what content on your website needs improving, updating, creating, or even retiring, you are thinking in line with what the current customer needs.; not the customers that you had when your brand started or when each piece of content was initially created, but the customer shopping today. So, whilst a fully fledged content audit can be a lengthy process, it is one that will see massive returns if done so properly.
It’s extremely obvious to customers when a website’s content is stale, out of date, or, in certain cases, flat out wrong. Whilst your products and marketing can pick up the slack if both are of exceptional quality, providing inadequate content to support them both can be damaging to a customer’s perspective of your brand. On the other hand, if your content is actively solving customer’s problems, educating or entertaining them, then your product offering instantaneously becomes more appealing.
To level up your content and organic search rankings, speak to one of our team today.
