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Why Do Ecommerce Brands Need Content Marketing?

For the most part, content marketing is a free method to engage, entertain and/or educate potential customers about your brand and the products that you offer. You may choose to invest your marketing and advertising budget towards this activity, but there’s absolutely loads of things you can do without spending money at all.

If you’ve had your brand for some time and have had to rely on low-cost ways to get people to notice you, you’ll know just how difficult this can be. Effective content marketing is a game of really tapping into the needs and desires of your target consumers before, during and/or after they make a purchase with you (if they ever do).

What Kinds of Content Can You Create?

Content marketing is constantly evolving, and shouldn’t just be restricted to the obvious. There was a time where every SEO in the world was saying that you needed a blog, just because. There’s a lot of dead content out there because it serves no purpose. It’s there because someone said they needed it. The best way to break out of that trap of making unhelpful, purposeless content is awareness about all the potential options.

Here are a few examples for you to consider:

  • Blog post
  • Social post
  • Poll
  • Infographic
  • Quiz
  • Interview
  • Video
  • Gif
  • Petition
  • Case Study
  • Checklist
  • Survey
  • Animation
  • eBook
  • Podcast

Some sectors are flooded with the same formats of content – often blog posts, videos and social posts. If you were to throw some interviews with relevant people out there, it’s going to send people in your direction.

What’s the Most Suitable for Your Brand?

Really and truly, you have to work this out for yourself. I would usually say that it’s best to follow what your closest competitor is doing, but that doesn’t quite work in this space. For the most part, low-level DIY ecommerce brands don’t tend to do much other than push out relevant posts on social media. This being the case, the simple act of trying something else will make you stand out.

A number of high street and online fashion brands have created podcasts this year, and they’ve found success with them. It really pays off to try something new, and to make content that fits in with the way your target audience finds it convenient to consume content.

Think about the topics you’re interested in and the way you consume content related to it. In my case, music is my thing. It’s a constant in my home. I like reading about music, so I might read a blog post analysing an album. What I wouldn’t both doing is listen to a podcast about music, when I could spend that time listening to it myself. I’m into pro wrestling too (as a bit of a guilty pleasure). I watch a couple of videos about it every few days, but I would feel like I’m wasting my time if I was to read an article about it.

How Do You Manage a Store and Create All the Content?

A very common problem I see with DIY ecommerce store owners and content marketing is that it’s beyond their comfort zone. They may not mind whipping together some social graphics, quotes and all that on Canva for their Instagram, but they’re a bit lost if they need to go any further than that.

In my case, I used to work as the Content Manager at a digital marketing agency. All that meant was that I was good at getting the right people to create effective content. I can up with the concepts, and got the right people to make a promote it. I don’t have the skills to channel that creativity into making anything substantial (apart from a little copy). It’s meant that for my ecommerce brands, I do all of the easy stuff myself and I would much rather someone else creates the rest.

I turn to People Per Hour and Fiverr for a lot of my content, because I know that it’s not my strength. There was even a case where I was so stuck for ideas that I turned to an old colleague (the former Social Manager at a department store) to create a 12-month social media plan for me.

For those that have mastered the art of converting engaged people into customers, but know they don’t have it in them to create the content themselves, hire experts to do it for you. So long as you know that more traffic = more sales, you’ll find the budget to be able to invest in a little assistance.

People Per Hour is always my go-to for this kind of thing, and you’ll see why once you take a browse around the site.

If you use this link, you’ll get £30 to spend towards you first purchase there.

Chiino
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