A digital marketing plan for eCommerce entails much more than just repurposing the content for various channels. An effective content marketing campaign will help you grow your audience, maximize loyalty, generate more high-quality leads, and boost your content marketing ROI while lowering your current costs.

Customer acquisition and retention costs will rise due to the eCommerce boom and eventual return to in-store shopping, making it a difficult decision for online retailers.

By addressing these questions, a content management approach will help to clear the issue:

  • Why is it essential to engage in content marketing?
  • What kind of material do your ideal consumers prefer to consume at different levels of the sales funnel?
  • In terms of KPIs, including increased traffic, SEO, profits, and lead generation, how can content help you achieve your desired goal?

If you own an eCommerce shop and want to create a content marketing campaign, I’ll show you how to do it in an hour or less. It won’t take much less time if you have a basic understanding of digital marketing platforms like SEMrush and BuzzSumo. Get ready to hear a lot more about the subject in this comprehensive guide.

Steps Before We Start Working on Ecommerce Content Marketing Strategy

Before we begin, you should have a few points clear in your head.

Make a business case for yourself

Simply put, your business case is a description of how you can add value to your stakeholders. By resolving a challenge or upgrading a current product/process, involves consumers.

Define the target market and buyer personas

Everyone who may be interested in viewing and engaging with your content is your audience. Buyers are members of the community who can buy from you. You should be familiar with their profiles, psychographics, personality characteristics, and requirements. Their interests, desire to invest, and what motivates them to spend money should all be included.

Make a brand like a story

A brand story is why your company stands; it includes your beliefs, ethos, history, and how you wish to be seen. Your brand narrative fills the difference between your company’s vision and mission.

Now is the time to do a content audit

You could have written blogs, social media articles, infographics, and even gated content as part of your eCommerce content marketing campaign. Examining these content pieces will indicate which of the current content pieces the audience enjoys the most.

To conduct a full website content audit, you can use an SEO platform like SEMrush or Ahrefs. The report would provide information on the best landing pages, page-by-page efficiency, dwell time, bounce rate, click-through rate, and other social media options. It would also point out some technical problems with your website, such as 307, 403, and 404 redirects.

You can also do an email audit and a chatbot application analysis to see if all of these platforms are compatible with your business strategy. For example, CRM integration, email design instructions, email marketing analytics, and chatbot automation workflow tests would be best.

On the creative side, double-check the brand components are correctly arranged and that your email copy and chatbot personalities are consistent with your brand image.

Analyze the data

On the other hand, paying marketing campaigns can be evaluated in terms of ROI, participation levels, branded vs unbranded traffic, and other metrics provided by the platforms. You can even get a compiled report from your marketing tools (such as HubSpot) to work easily.

The next move is to do a competitor review after downloading all of these papers. It would be best if you searched for eCommerce stores close to yours and are doing well. It gives you a rough understanding of where your competitors are spending money on content and how well it is doing for them.

You don’t have to compare apples to apples or clone anything, so it will give you hints of where you need to change. Collecting all of these files could take up to 15 minutes, minus the email investigation, which is time-consuming to do from scratch. However, if the communications department is well-organized, you can produce reports easily. Alternatively, if you’ve outsourced it to an organization, you should send an email to request it when you settle down for the other papers.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy with a Timeline

Naturally, the next step in creating a content management strategy is to set goals. It would be best to determine which places will support your overall business cause without putting your investments at risk. Time-sensitive topics, platforms you need to protect, repackaging the material for better dissemination, and recycling older items should all be included.

A set timetable should support your targets, and you should have KPIs in place for each of them. Where do you begin, though? Here’s a tried-and-true method for setting objectives.

Make a SWOT analysis of the situation

A SWOT review of your content management plan will reveal that you need to do so and the possible rewards of doing it correctly. You’ll also learn about the needs of your perfect consumer identity. Platforms, content type, delivery, frequency, consumption time, and interaction rates are all factors to consider.

  • Strength: It can change the content areas with little effort and in a short amount of time. Screaming Frog and other similar tools assist you in identifying content gaps that you can quickly fill.
  • Weakness: Keep an eye out for new channels and information types, such as infographics, where you can improve. Typically, marketers overlook this aspect in favor of content delivery.
  • Opportunities: This group includes areas that involve long-term efforts, such as connection construction. If they play a greater role in the content strategy or promote other tasks, you can focus on them.
  • Threats: This group includes initiatives such as large-scale paid ads.

Make a list of goals that are backwards in time

You are using the ‘Backward Goals’ approach to determine a practical timetable for each task after you’ve set the baseline. List where you need to be after 75, 60, 45, 30, and 15 days if you want to boost your online store’s monthly organic traffic by 30,000 visits in the next 90 days.

It is a tremendously effective strategy. If you’ve been in the entertainment business for a while, you’ve already found that all of the best creative marketers are using it.

Determine how the content will assist you in meeting the needs of your customers

“Integrated brand communications are a way of looking at the whole marketing process from the receiver’s perspective.” Philip Kotler is a writer from New York.

Ask the Appropriate Questions

Ask yourself the following questions to figure out how your marketing will serve your target customers:

  • What kind of information do your clients like to hear about your product category?
  • When and where do they look for this information? What is the platform? What is the format? What is the frequency?
  • Can they purchase after consuming knowledge from how many different sources?
  • How many experiences do you need to have with a buyer before they purchase from an online seller?

Examine the Responses

After you’ve got answers to all of these questions, you can use the following structure to create content:

  • It (pain point) is interfering with the customer’s ability to perform well and earn money.
  • That’s what turns the tables for your customers (situation after purchasing our offering, i.e., solution).
  • Here’s how to do it correctly – CTA (purchase)

BuzzSumo will help you generate content ideas and discover the most common channels for sharing them. Often have a master resource for each of the content pieces and make it available in several formats.

Long-form stories, mini-blogs, infographics, tweets, social media pages, podcasts, and even videos fall under this category. This way, you will reach the widest possible audience without paying several times to say the same story. Often eCommerce stores fail at content marketing because they produce content for one or two sites, struggle to keep up with the competition, blow out their budgets, and then give up.

Remember that content marketing is all about creating faith, which takes time. Small, steady efforts, rather than brief, expensive bursts of exposure, will propel you to the top while costing relatively little.

Expert marketers can spend 30-40 minutes conducting this exercise for SMBs. Still, you may take as long as you need because the progress is solely dependent on learning from past outcomes and determining the best action strategy.

Make a schedule for your publishing activities on your editorial calendar

The secret to good content marketing is to include an editorial schedule. In reality, staying on course lets you get little wins and reviews daily.

The secret ingredients for a good content management campaign are winning regularly and being open to making progress. To plan and monitor your editorial tasks, you can use Buffer, Asana, HubSpot, Trello, or any other app you want.

If you interact with your customers, your content marketing campaign would be a long-term success. After setting large deliverables in the remaining period, distribute the workload to your tools and prepare to celebrate your expected performance.

Final Thoughts

A few key takeaways:

  • Your eCommerce content marketing plan should be able to connect your customers with your merchandise.
  • It should be well-documented and focused on research-based, data-driven objectives.
  • When it comes to content development, modular is the way to go.
  • Keep your content management plan agile and improvise regularly.