How to Use Content Marketing for eCommerce
All online businesses have the same goal – to drive revenue, sales, or clicks through website traffic, preferably meaningful traffic that keeps users on pages and returning to pages frequently. Content marketing is one of the best ways to do this, and is emerging as the foremost tactic for promoting your site and generating long-lasting traffic.
The meaning of content marketing may not immediately be clear, but it’s exactly what it sounds like – the combination of content and marketing that content. The key to successful content marketing involves those two parts of the equation, each of which have their own difficulties as well as their own ways to use them effectively. The first step to content marketing is to create your content.
The important thing about content creation is the quality of your content. Many websites such as blogs and even stores have articles, pictures, and videos available, and to drive traffic you need to make yours stand out among the crowd. If your content blends in with everything else, you won’t get the attention or the clicks you need.
To make good content, you should make it exceptional in some way. This may mean that it’s longer, more in depth, contains more informative media, contains higher quality media, or has a “hook” or a unique angle to draw people’s attention. You want to make your content different in some way from the millions of articles or pieces of media on the internet. Including links, embedded videos and images (ideally created by and creditable to you), and other multimedia will go a long way to making potential customers want to not only go to but stay on your site.
The next step in the content marketing process is, just like sounds, to market that content. The primary way to do this is through social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or other sites that cater specifically to your target audience. Just like with the content itself, you want to make your marketing stand out by including high quality images and good taglines to intrigue people. Consistent marketing is also important – by posting regularly or even on a schedule, you encourage people to follow, like, share, or otherwise interact with your social media profiles.
The most important part of this process is to complete both steps repeatedly and consistently. If you are frequently putting out high quality content and marketing that content to the right people, your traffic will begin to grow exponentially as more and more people are exposed to your content. This will lead these increasing numbers of people to your site, where you can then convert their traffic to sales and revenue through high quality products, advertisements, and sponsored clickthroughs to other websites.
The effectiveness of content marketing for ecommerce is proven not only by experts but by example, which is why it’s growing in popularity as an online marketing tactic. While it requires some work on the front end to generate content, once that work is completed it will continue to pay off for the lifetime of your website.
