Are you focusing more on your content marketing strategy this year? You aren’t alone. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 73 percent of B2C marketers expect to produce more original content in 2017.
With eCommerce businesses pumping out content at an all-time high, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make your own content stand out. If you want to rise above the rest, your content strategy needs to be airtight.
To get you headed in the right direction, here are some actionable content marketing tips for ecommerce that will help you crush your competition this year:
1. Choose Quality over Quantity
Some online businesses are churning out content left and right, but that doesn’t mean that you should be doing the same. Not only is this difficult to do if you’re a small eCommerce marketer, but it’s also worthless if the content is mediocre.
To capture the attention of consumers, your content needs to be unique and high-quality. Focus on creating a few pieces that are exceptional, rather than something that simply fills the void. These pieces will have a greater chance of emphasizing authority in your niche and being shared on social media.
Learn more about creating quality content in Kathryn’s new book and course—due out this summer. Learn how you can save on both.
2. Keep a Close Watch on the Competition
At the very least, you have probably poked around your competition’s eCommerce sites to see how they approach their brand, but a cursory glance isn’t going to do much for your content marketing strategy. Instead, you should take advantage of competitive analysis tools that can help uncover your competitor’s secrets.
For example, keyword tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush can be used to discover what keywords your competitors are bidding on and which ones they’re ranking for. You may be surprised to learn of some new keywords that you missed during your own keyword research.
Monitor Backlinks is a great tool for looking at your competitor’s backlink profiles. If you don’t have the time or budget to go looking for quality backlinks, you can let your competitors do the work and simply follow in their footsteps.
There are also tools that will compare your most important key metrics to other eCommerce stores in your industry, allowing you to spot gaps in your competitor’s strategy. With this knowledge, you can create content that fills these gaps and capture a greater market share.
3. Amplify Your Content with Influencers
Who says that you need to be the one doing all the content creation? Influencer marketing has become a key tactic for eCommerce brands to distribute their content and reach a wider audience.
In fact, influencer marketing has become so popular that 83 percent of brand marketers say that building relationships with influencers is a “top priority” this year.
There are various ways to define influencer marketing. Generally, it involves teaming up with an influencer, or someone who is active on social media and can promote your brand with your target consumers. When influencers mention your brand in their social media posts or on their blog, consumers tend to listen.
Of course, this is assuming that you choose the right influencer to share your content. A large following on social media means little if the message falls on the wrong audience.
4. Find the Right Influencers
To find influencers to work with, start by building an influencer profile. This is similar to a buyer persona, except you are creating a representation of your ideal influencer instead. Consider which channels will be most effective and target influencers who have a good command over those channels.
Next, use the content marketing tool Buzzsumo to identify popular content and the people who are sharing it, or the authors of popular content. Make a list of influencers who have higher domain authority and higher retweet rates. This will ensure that your content has a bigger impact.
Once you have your list of influencers, all that is left is to reach out and begin building relationships with them.
5. Anticipate Your Customer’s Needs
To be considered a leader in your industry, you need to anticipate your customer’s needs and be the first to solve their most pressing problems. This can be accomplished by collecting customer data and analyzing it to spot trends and patterns.
If you don’t have marketing automation software to do this for you, now is a good time to get on board. It’s quickly becoming the only way for eCommerce businesses to compete in today’s market, and it can help your eCommerce store yield a better ROI from your marketing campaigns.
It’s much easier to spot consumer trends with nicely generated reports and manage your social media campaigns on a single dashboard than it is to do everything manually. Your customers will appreciate it most of all when you are better able to meet their changing needs.
6. Always Listen to Your Customers
Content marketing doesn’t work unless you are providing something of value to your audience. For some marketers, the difficult part of this is figuring out what customers find valuable and doing it better than the competition.
The key to creating valuable content is to simply take the guesswork out of it. Browse blogs and forums in your niche to discover what your target audience is buzzing about, and you’ll also discover some long-tail keywords there to help with content creation as a bonus. Then, create killer content that addresses their interests.
Although Steve Jobs famously said that you can’t simply ask customers what they want, plenty of eCommerce brands do it today to enhance their content marketing strategies. If you don’t want to flat out ask them via social media, you could also get their opinions through a survey.
Offer them a discount in exchange for their feedback and make sure to ask what types of content they want to see and which channels they use the most. This allows you to not only create content that is more valuable to your audience but also helps you reach them where they want to be reached.
About the Author: Erika Brookes is the Chief Marketing Officer at Springbot where she leads all brand, product, marketing campaigns and communications. Before joining Springbot, Erika held executive-level marketing positions at Oracle, Vitrue, MindSpring, Earthlink and Rackspace. In her limited free time, you’ll find Erika running through Atlanta with her yellow labrador Sunny or sharing marketing insights on Twitter @ebrookes.
