Content Marketing Tips for E-commerce Sites

Several tactics had evolved in the past few years that enhance every phase in a content marketing process. They make every task much easier and quicker but still yielding the same or even better results. And the most effective content marketing tactics for e-commerce sites are the overlooked techniques which, if properly utilized, can greatly affect the conversion goals targeted by the campaign.

In this post, I’d like to share with you a few tips on how you can assure that your content marketing efforts are of high quality and will certainly help your brand achieve its business-related goals.

Conduct reverse engineering regularly

Reverse engineering is the process of analyzing a competitor’s content portfolio as well as its backlink profile to have better insights of the needs and behavior of a market sector.

For B2C businesses, analyzing other brand’s strategy in promoting their products is a superb way of improving the content assets of a website. Thought it will require some testing to see the results, reverse engineering will help you set benchmarks and expectations for a good start of the campaign.

Use Amazon to find well-written descriptions of your competitor’s product and/or similar assets of other brands. This will give you insights on which industry terms are most commonly used and are possible to be included in your content assets (you can target these terms on your own blog posts).

Get inspirations from product reviews/commentaries. You will find queries from your potential customers that you can take advantage of for your own content pieces.

Use Mentions.net and Fresh Web Explorer to scale brand mentioning of your competitors (Great tip from Jason Acidre). To see how your competitors got those mentions, ask yourself the following questions:

• How frequent do they get their branded mentions?
• What are the page(s) that they mention most? Is it the homepage or a blog post?
• What is the content format of the link? Is it a video, an image or a text-based content?
• What are their intentions of sharing the link? Did they find it useful? Interesting?

Backlink analysis helps you find the top pages of your top competitors. Using some link tracking tools, you can get some inspiration for your content given that you’re able to see what your audience wants to read/learn/consume in your industry.

Identify the evolving needs of your target users

Start with your own company/website. If you have a support team who answers queries from your customers, take a look at your customers’ questions and find some loopholes. Answer those questions through your blog posts and let them know about it.

On Twitter and other social sites, type in your keyword followed by a question mark to find the latest questions of your potential customers. Adding these queries to your list of blog topics will add value to your content pieces.

Utilize content templates for your blog

In content marketing, there are so-called “content templates” which refers to content formats/styles that are repeatedly used for one’s blog but are still adding value to its target audience.

Here are a few content templates that you can consistently apply for your E-commerce’s blog:

• Buyer Guides

When you create tools to support your sales team, turn them into buyer guides (they can range from 10-15 pages). These pdf-style content assets are your brand’s call to actions. Use them to get more email subscribers and social sharers for your blog.

• Crowdsourced Content

Crowdsourced content or group interviews are easy to create since you would only need a list of contributors/interviewees and an interesting topic to capture the interest of your readers.

Here is a good post by Content Marketing Institute about creating and promoting a crowdsourced content that you might want to check out for future references.

• History

Everyone wants to learn about the origin of a thing (especially if it is something not mostly talked about in schools). Posts that talk about the industry’s history can potentially interest readers to learn also about the brand (which can increase the chance of getting more customers for the company).

• Case Studies

Category and/or product-based case studies are best to perform when they prove success in performing one situation that uses the tool of the brand or similar tools. It increases brand awareness given that the audience are able to see the value/benefits the brand can provide.

If you want to learn more actionable content marketing tips, you can check out the extensive 11-step guide by SEO Hacker on Breaking down Content Marketing or my post on how to promote your content.

What works in a B2B blog might also work for a B2C blog. You only need to test and see which works effectively for yours.

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