Sell, sell, sell. It’s the goal of every business. And with a globally connected audience, you can sell to billions of people worldwide.
The struggle? Showing them you exist.
And once they know who you are, they need to trust your product and brand and be incentivized to buy.
It’s not enough to love your products and consistently provide quality. You also need to master marketing so you can sell.
For online marketplaces, this means marketing digitally. And marketing digitally means making content.
Content marketing e-commerce takes resources and time but pays off in spades.
In this guide, we’ll delve into why content marketing ecommerce matters and 6 strategies for driving sales.
Content marketing in eCommerce
Unlike B2B (business to business) sales, the customer journey for B2C (business to consumer) is much shorter.
In B2B sales, purchases are generally much more expensive, and many stakeholders are involved in the buying decision. This majorly slows down the process, as every facet of the product is evaluated, budgets are assessed, and demos are tried.
A B2B sale can take anywhere from a few weeks to more than 5 months.
Contrast this with a B2C buying decision. Typically, only one stakeholder (an individual) buys on their own behalf, not an entire company.
There is not as much at stake. An individual can click “buy now” without running it by anyone else or trying to stay within a company budget.
This is important for your content marketing ecommerce strategies. Why? It affects the types of content you produce.
For instance, lean into user-generated content like ratings. Or product reviews. Or even short-form content on social media channels. Why? It is more likely to matter to a B2C buying decision than in-depth user guides or comparison charts.
That is not to say that B2B content marketing strategies don’t translate to B2C marketing. For instance, couples usually talk and decide together on big purchases like vehicles and appliances. Plus, many work within a personal budget, and they don’t want to over-extend.
But the important takeaway here is to know your audience. Understand who needs (or wants) your product the most. Now, focus your content marketing ecommerce efforts on them.
Next, understand that the buying decision is likely to be quick. So, you want to earn and keep their attention long enough for them to buy and (hopefully) keep coming back.
6 ways to drive sales: A content marketing ecommerce guide
Let’s look at several strategies to optimize your content marketing ecommerce efforts and beef up your conversion rates.
1. Keep your website running clean
Your website is your content marketing e-commerce calling card. Is it slow? Clunky? Difficult to navigate? A crisp, clean, well-running website is the difference between making a sale and having users bounce immediately upon landing.
Don’t go through all of the trouble of building organic traffic with compelling content just to frustrate your potential customers before they can buy.
Before you create one more piece of content, do a website audit.
Here’s where to start:
Page load speed:
A fast-loading website is a critical ranking factor for Google and essential for delivering a great user experience. If your website has trouble loading, it’s time to identify what’s slowing it down. Optimizing your site speed not only improves your rankings but also keeps users engaged, reducing bounce rates and driving conversions.
Mobile responsiveness:
According to Statista, mobile devices were responsible for half of all web traffic worldwide in the last quarter of 2023. If your website is not well-optimized for mobile, you are losing a massive amount of potential sales. Plus, a poorly performing mobile site can make your whole brand seem janky and out of touch.
A healthy backlink profile:
Backlinks are an extremely beneficial indicator to Google that your website is valuable and trustworthy to users. When healthy links are included in your blog posts and web pages, you build a solid profile with valuable ranking input for Google and add value to your readers.
Pro tip: Don’t just focus on adding fresh links (though that’s a very important step!). You must also check existing links and ensure they are not broken or outdated. Broken links are as bad for your backlink profile as healthy ones are good.
Have an intuitive path to buy:
Have you ever tried to make a purchase only to be given the run-around by a poorly designed site? After fruitlessly navigating the site to figure out how to buy, you eventually abandon the page and find an equivalent product elsewhere.
Don’t shoot yourself in the foot with bad UX design. With every website design update you make, have someone who has no hand in the design process navigate the website.
Are they able to find the path to conversion easily? What frustrations did they run up against? What was confusing to them? Take this feedback onboard and clean up your UX design accordingly.
2. Encourage user-generated content
Globe Newswire reports that 95% of consumers read reviews before they shop, 72% use Google reviews to find where to shop, and 58% report a willingness to pay more for products with good reviews.
The data tells you that potential buyers trust reviews from consumers who already have experience with your products.
Having good reviews is not just about looking good on a web page. They translate to conversion rates and overall trust in your brand.
If promoting user-generated content isn’t already a part of your content strategy, here are some ideas to encourage it:
Branded hashtags:
Offer gift cards or discounts to buyers who take pictures of themselves with your product and publish social media posts with branded hashtags.
Make leaving a review easy:
Follow up on purchases with a text or email asking for a review. You can sweeten the deal by offering money off their next purchase or points for a loyalty program.
Engage customers:
Spotlight a customer of the week in email newsletters and on social media platforms and let them share their experience with your product in their own words.
Include social proof on your website:
When you have reviews and customer testimonials, ensure they’re visible. Don’t lose the persuasive power of good reviews or customer stories because they’re buried in your website or impossible to find.
3. Write effective product descriptions
B2C has an advantage over B2B in the product description department. While it’s true that B2B sales use product pages and narrative storytelling, B2B e-commerce marketing has more opportunities to use copywriting to its advantage.
For instance, if you have a web page full of sneakers or boxes of chocolates, you can use copywriting to showcase the brilliance of every single product.
Your target audience may not be interested in a few, but you have many more chances to win conversions with dozens of unique products per page.
There are whole schools of thought about what makes good copywriting. But your focus should be twofold: optimization and representation.
Optimization is writing your product descriptions with technical SEO in mind. When you optimize descriptions, use target keywords aimed at discovery through organic traffic.
For instance, if you notice “snow boots with heavy tread” has a higher search volume than “heavy snow boots” in your keyword research tools, optimize for the highest-performing keyword.
Representation means representing your product well and accurately through narrative descriptions.
As an example, if we stick with our previous long-tail keywords, we could write a product description like:
Image created by the author via Canva
Here, we’ve used our most effective keyword with narrative descriptions to form an effective description for a new pair of snow boots.
4. Play ball with Amazon
Love it or hate it, Amazon makes over $1 billion a day in ecommerce sales. That’s 18.3 million dollars a second.
These staggering statistics demonstrate that more often than not, when there’s a product to be bought, Amazon will be the first place your target audience looks.
Amazon has embraced independent sellers on its platform. In fact, according to the Amazon Sellers website, 60% of sales in the Amazon store are from independent sellers.
A partnership as an Amazon seller comes with tools and services to help optimize and elevate your brand on the Amazon platform.
If you embrace an Amazon partnership, make sure your brand messaging stays consistent so your target audience doesn’t get confused or misled by a competitor’s product.
5. Go all-in on what’s working for you
Regardless of what industry trends say, the best marketing channels are the ones that work for you.
If all the research shows that short-form video and email marketing are the best marketing channels, but they just don’t work for you, don’t feel like you have to keep pouring resources into them.
Give them a fair shake if you can, but your focus should be on what’s already working.
Do a content audit and analyze key metrics. What digital marketing strategies are already performing well? Go all-in. Once you’ve reached the ceiling of return on investment for those marketing channels, expand to new ones.
Spreading yourself too thin isn’t the answer. Doing one thing well and maximizing the impact of every piece of content you produce will get you much more mileage.
6. Use visual content
43% of marketers use social media as their #1 content marketing channel. This makes sense, considering social media is the preferred method of product discovery across generations, with Gen Z and Millennials leading the charge.
Social media runs on stunning and evocative visuals. Thankfully, with tools like Canva, it’s easier than ever to create custom visuals in-house. Lean into brand-specific content, especially.
That could be the color scheme of your branding (think Crumbl Cookies and their easily identifiable pink boxes) or data-driven visuals from your own customer surveys.
An extra bonus is that good visuals (especially data content) can lead to backlinks from other publications that use your visuals and link back to you. It’s a win-win all the way around.
Pro Tip: Never underestimate the power of your internal data. What your customers care about is written all over it. Scour every department for customer feedback and let it guide your marketing and visuals.
As always, create long-form content with distribution in mind. How many soundbites from a longer blog post can be repurposed with a visual on X, Instagram, or LinkedIn? Get the most out of every piece you create.
If you build it, sales will come
Marketing is a long-term strategy. While going viral is a possibility with digital content, it is not a strategy that should be expected or relied upon. Slow and steady growth is the ticket to long-term success.
Start by understanding your target audience. Consumers are usually quick to buy (compared to B2B sales) but still require brand trust and information to make an informed decision.
Capture B2C conversions by running a clean, easy-to-navigate website with a clear purchase path. Next, focus on writing clear, valuable content (especially in product descriptions) that helps your readers understand what they are buying.
Build social proof by incentivizing user-generated content like ratings and reviews. Be strategic about what partnerships and channels you invest in and grow your efficacy on social media platforms with visual content.
Remember crucial optimization factors like a strong backlink profile. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the more technical aspects of link building, we’d love to help you with the heavy lifting.
We specialize in high-authority link building that has helped hundreds of brands reach their content marketing ecommerce goals.
We want to help you, too. Just like we’ve done for a men’s fashion brand. Since December 2022, we’ve helped a fashion brand rank for 53.9K+ new keywords, earn 52.9K+ backlinks, and increase DR by +14 in 13 months.
Are you ready to achieve this kind of online success? Reach out today to book an intro call and tell us all about your business!
