11 Effective Ecommerce Content Marketing Strategies to Boost Traffic

July 27, 2022

62deccde1927d480d982c42e 11 Awesome Ecommerce Content Marketing Strategies For 2022 ecommerce content marketing

Your customers expect top-quality products from your business but often get swamped with salesy promotional content.

This can negatively impact their shopping experience and lead them straight to your competitors.

Instead of salesy pitches and clickbait titles, customers want to receive content that has real value. They want personalized experiences, honest reviews, and relevant offers.

This is where content marketing plays an important role.

It helps your ecommerce business reach the target audience and build relationships with them.

In this article, we will cover:

Without further ado, let’s dive in!

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What is content marketing?

Both small businesses and large corporations spend a lot of money creating quality content. In fact, average businesses invest around 25-30% of their budget into content marketing.

Why is this?

Because in today’s digital world, content is the key to providing value to the audience.

It increases conversions, boosts revenue, improves brand awareness, and enhances customer satisfaction.

So what exactly does the term content marketing mean?

Generally speaking, it is the process of attracting and engaging with your target audience through content creation.

Content marketing covers creating and sharing online content that doesn’t explicitly promote a brand.

content marketing methods illustration

Some of the most common content marketing strategies include:

  • Social media content
  • Blog posts
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Gated PDFs
  • Print publications

And many more.

The goal is to get through to the audience to increase brand awareness, engagement, and customer loyalty.

This eventually leads to your goal when you started developing a marketing strategy—increased sales.

With content marketing, you will spark interest in products and services in a more natural way.

Whether it’s a lengthy piece of quality content, a killer video, or something else, your audience won’t feel like you’re trying to sell something.

Instead, if you did everything right, they will feel that they are getting value from you. And what you offer will come as an additional benefit.

Why is content marketing important for ecommerce

Ecommerce is very competitive today, and businesses rely heavily on digital marketing to succeed. Ecommerce marketers use it to attract visitors to their online stores and encourage people to shop.

Investing in quality content is the most effective move to get you one step ahead of the competition.

An informed potential customer is the one that is close to becoming a paying, loyal customer—simply because you took the time to create content of interest to them!

That alone is enough reason for you to start using content marketing.

But more than that, it helps you tell an honest story about your brand. Getting yourself out there day after day, year after year, will attract an audience that shares common values with your company.

Once you’ve got the audience, you’ll be able to authentically share your brand’s story to a wide audience and cover all customer journey phases.

That’s how you build trust with customers.

Besides that, your audience will appreciate the value you create for them by providing the answers to the fundamental questions they have when they are at crucial moments in their buyer journey.

#cta-paragraph-pb#Content marketing is so important to DTC brands who focus their strategies on owned channels like their blog. Learn how DTC marketing helps brands scale while maintaining control of their branding.

Questions to answer before you start

Are you a newbie in the ecommerce business, or do you already have some years under your belt?

In both cases, you should have the answers to the following:

  • Sales expectations. How much revenue do you expect in a month, quarter, or year? What is the number of clients you expect to serve in that period?
  • Market size. By knowing the total number of potential buyers of a product or service within a market, you’ll be able to estimate the total revenue that these sales may generate and set expectations based on them.
  • Target group.  Who are you creating content for? What questions do they need answered? What tone is best to take with them? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you connect with your audience.
  • Competition analysis. Who are your biggest competitors? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What should you offer the customers to take a part of the market from them? This is how you’ll set the action steps in taking the part of the market you’re after. Spontaneity won’t do.

When you cover this, start working on your content marketing strategy for ecommerce success.

The above four points are essential because you’ll know more about your current situation and goals.

Once you’re clear about the audience you are trying to reach, potential dangers coming from competitors, and the market characteristics, it will become easier for you to adjust your overall marketing strategy.

Once you have a plan, set out how you intend to execute the marketing strategy and evaluate its success.

With this in mind, you can shape your content marketing strategy to help you reach the business targets you want to achieve.

11 content marketing strategies for ecommerce brands

Even though an excellent customer experience is a prerequisite for success in the ecommerce world, that alone is not enough to make your online store successful.

For brands that are 100% online, a well-developed ecommerce content strategy is the key factor that will set you apart from the crowd and drive traffic toward your ecommerce website.

Some of the top brands serve as great content marketing examples—they have managed to reach and keep their customers satisfied and coming back by implementing the right ecommerce content strategy.

Whether you sell clothes, handmade products, electronics, or anything in between, you’ll hardly find a more effective method for lead generation than content marketing.

Unlike ads that ruin the user experience (UX) and a bunch of spam emails, content marketing focuses on providing consumers with valuable content that eventually turns them into customers.

We’ll guide you through real-life content marketing strategy examples, highlight best practices and provide actionable tips you can apply to your brand.

1. Produce content that’s original and useful

Around 5.6 billion internet searches occur on Google daily.

So imagine how hard you have to try to reach the top of the search engine results page (SERP) when someone searches for a term related to your business.

Luckily Google loves original content. 

Just look at their mission statement:

“Our corporate mission is to organize information in the world and make it universally accessible and useful.”

That’s why, to make Google rank your content well, you have to write easily accessible and useful content for your target audience.

Search engines still have to sort all sorts of content that appears on the internet, and giving them cues that the content you create is user-friendly will help them.

It will help you as well.

When you produce original content, you show search engines that you’re doing something valuable. As a reward, you get a better position on the SERP.

This means more people will see your website when searching for terms related to your products.

However, it takes much more than talent to create valuable content for your customers. It also takes patience, research, and a good understanding of what they really want.

Take time to get to know your target audience. Only then you’ll be able to deliver the content that addresses their interests.

The smaller your niche, the harder it is to know how to conduct ecommerce content writing that is both useful and original.

For example, you’ll need to research the platforms where they spend time to get content ideas that are both original and cover the topics that interest your target audience.

Here’s a great example of original content that provides value for the readers.

scuttle mug how to use one content marketing naked armor
Image: Naked Armor

Based on it, they can learn about the topic they have clicked on without pressure to make a purchase.

Of course, the text will include a call to action (CTA) by providing a list of products that are related to the content.

This blog post provides the why and how of using a scuttle mug, a popular tool among men who shave the old-fashioned way.

2. Personalize your content

When brands provide their customers with personalized experiences, 80% are more likely to complete a purchase.

At least that’s what the research shows.

Besides that, customers who are satisfied with the levels of personalization that companies offer tend to shop more frequently.

Luckily, with the development of technology, it is easy to offer personalized experiences to every customer that visits your store.

With a little extra effort, your ecommerce store could bloom.

Personalize the content you show your customers based on their behaviors, and you’ll increase your conversion rates quickly.

The logic behind this is simple—they will see exactly what they’re looking for.

When you deliver a personalized experience to your customers, you show them that you understand their needs.

Their total customer journey becomes much easier, and a cold buying process becomes a relationship. This is what will teach customers to trust your recommendations and, in turn, increase conversion.

If the content is too wide-ranging, you’ll be reaching people who are not interested in your product. 

Customize your ecommerce store, and make landing pages that cater to a specific segment of your target audience.

plant subscription mockup landing page

Dedicated landing pages can be used for specific audiences from email and paid ads to drive adoption

Build upon customer data such as location, past behavior, etc, and create dynamic and personalized content.

You’ll bring each of them a couple of steps closer to the purchase than if you went with generic content.

Besides custom landing pages, you can create personalized guides for your visitors based on their surfing habits.

For example, runners in Norway can get content about running in cold weather with CTAs that lead to winter sneakers that they’ll likely need.

Simply put, get to know them well enough to make their shopping experience easier.

3. Optimize the look of the ecommerce website

We dress and groom ourselves daily to create a unique look that showcases our identity and affects how others perceive us.

When you have a brick-and-mortar store, you try hard to make it stand out from the competitors.

From your name and logo to the approach your staff has towards customers, you’ll create a complete identity. If you did your research and created a quality image, customers will find you.

The same concept works for your ecommerce website. 

The more appealing it looks, the more likely they are to stay. Here are some elements you can pay attention to and improve your visual identity:

1. Typography. The fonts you use in your designs can send a strong message about your brand. Make sure that the fonts you choose for your ecommerce brand match the message you’re trying to send.

If you use it properly, typography will make your customers feel a certain way. This is one of the factors that will help them understand the message you are trying to send them.

An appropriate font will set the tone of your communication even before visitors of your website dive into the content.

For example, if you have a kid’s clothes store, using a wacky, round font such as Kids Crayon would work better than Times New Roman.

2. Brand voice. The voice you use with your customers depends on the theme of your particular ecommerce brand.

Setting a consistent tone throughout your website content and other communication forms you use with your customers is important.

The right tone will help them identify your brand easily and relate to your brand messaging.

For example, if you want to create a cheerful and happy atmosphere, use an upbeat, positive tone in your content. Be consistent, from your web copy to your email marketing and social media posts.

3. Color palette. People have strong associations with colors, which makes the color palette you use a powerful tool for inducing specific emotions and behaviors from your audience.

Pastel, bright colors are associated with natural cosmetics, while black and gray are a great choice for electronics stores.

4. Form/shape. A sharp, angular logo versus a softer-shaped logo conveys a different message to your audience.

Different shapes can help create an emotional and psychological connection between your store and your consumers.

You should get familiar with the message that each shape could speak about your brand and how you can effectively use them on your website.

The ecommerce shop that sells electronics we mentioned would go for an angular, sleek design. On the other hand, softer and rounder shapes go better for an essential oil store.

You can guess why—rounded features and curved lines look soft and welcoming. They are usually linked to happiness and pleasantness.

On the other hand,  harshly-angled shapes, such as triangles and squares, are associated with efficiency, professionalism, and practicality.

Take ECO as an example. Their branding is soft, soothing, and rounded—perfect for essential oils.

eco essential oils branding
Image: ECO

Whatever you do, avoid a generic look. 

Don’t take a cheap route and build a website that looks like any other. Invest your time and effort in making a website that reflects the essence of your store.

Figure out what is most important for your store and optimize the look of your website around those goals.

A good idea for catching visitors’ attention is to use dedicated landing pages. Use visual cues and combine them with good content.

Make sure it has the following elements:

  • Strong headlines. They will catch your customers’ attention as soon as they arrive on your landing page.
  • Eye-catching imagery and media. Liven the page up with images and media to give your customers a visual representation of your store’s offer.
  • Engaging copy. This is the part that sells—make it clear what you are offering and how your product can help your potential customers solve any kind of problem they have. 

That’s how you’ll create UX that makes spending time in your store pleasant. As you might guess, that’s what will make them shop more.

4. Make your blog section look stunning

Blogging is one of the fastest ways to scale your ecommerce revenue. It will help you drive more sales and boost your brand awareness.

A blog is a great way to share insights into your business and keep your audience updated on industry trends.

You could use the blog section to give helpful advice and share your thoughts on topics your customers might be interested in.

A blog can do wonders for your business, but only if it’s good. What does a “good blog” mean?

A good blog is one that:

  • Provides value to your audience. This means that they learn something from what you write about, and it helps them solve problems they might face.
  • Drives traffic to your website. With good SEO and quality content, your blog will keep bringing customers to your store. This is the ultimate point of a blog on an ecommerce website.

A blog should be at the heart of every great ecommerce website. And there are two sides to this: content and looks.

Of course, having good content on your website is important, but how you present it matters a lot as well.

Apart from the content itself, make sure your blog posts check the following:

  • Are they easy to read?
  • Are they visually engaging?
  • Do they help your readers?
  • Will they attract more visitors to your store?

You’ll need to consistently find out the topics your customers want to know and read about and write about them. This is the tried-and-true way to attract traffic to your website.

There are a lot of ecommerce blog examples out there that you can use for inspiration.

alchemy fine home style alchemist blog page
Alchemy Fine Home uses on-brand design for their main blog page

An attractive design will keep people coming back. When your audience reads (and enjoys) the content you create, they are more likely to become loyal to your brand. 

You should see blogs as a two-way communication between your store and the audience. Encourage them to interact with you by creating informative and call-to-action texts.

No need to be uptight here—present your content in a personal and more casual way to make yourself more approachable.

Readers who enjoy reading your content will be more likely to come back and purchase from your brand.

And this means more sales overall.

Creating a good-looking blog doesn’t have to be a complicated task—sometimes, all it takes are a few tweaks to make a difference.

Start by designing your blog to match the style of your store.

If you’ve taken the time to define your brand—colors, fonts, graphics, and the message you’re trying to pass on—bringing it over to your blog should be easy.

Keep it consistent with your branding, and then infuse its key elements into this part of your website.

Use custom themes to showcase your brand’s personality and improve the user experience.

Most importantly, don’t overcomplicate your blog section. Readers love simplicity.

5. Leverage the power of email marketing

Did you know that emails are among the most powerful tools for ecommerce marketing? In fact, email marketing generates $38 for every $1 spent.

That’s an excellent ROI!

You can use emails to send newsletters and notify your customers about new products, deals, discounts, and promotions that might interest them.

Email marketing is effective at every phase of the customer sales cycle. It is a fast, flexible, and cheap way to communicate with existing customers and convert new ones.

For example, you can influence hesitant customers to choose your product, nurture the relationship with the ones that made a purchase and encourage them to buy in the future.

Through regular newsletters, you can also educate your audience.

This can help position your store as a source of information and a reliable source your customers will turn to when they want to learn something.

What you need to do to achieve that is excellent research. Figure out what your customers want to hear about, and find the right timing to share the advice.

Let’s say that the real estate market has been growing in recent months.

This means that more people will be redecorating the flats they buy. Why not share some decoration tips with the customers of your online furniture store? They’ll love it and like your brand even more.

You can make even more out of your email campaigns by personalizing them. 

Some basic email personalization tactics include using customer names in the subject lines of your emails.

More advanced ones would be changing the email content based on your information about recipients. This could include their location, gender, age, or anything else you know about them.

Start from your email subject lines. Then, keep your customers reading with concise and valuable content. End with a relevant, compelling landing page to convert.

email marketing stats cognique
Image: Cognique

A good CRM is your friend here.

Use it to send highly targeted emails to website visitors based on the items they saw, put into the cart, or terms they searched. 

A CRM can help you store your customer data. It is an excellent way to keep track of user behavior, purchase records, shopping preferences, etc.

You can use it to optimize your email marketing processes and push your customers further in the sales funnel.

The point is to follow up on any actions they take to nudge them to shop in your store.

Additional tip: Add elements of urgency and scarcity to create the best outreach sequences and watch your cold leads convert again. 

For example: Last Sale, Special Discount, Only X Pieces of The Dress Left tick both boxes.

You get the idea.

6. Use social media

social media share icons

Presence on social media is an excellent way to reach your potential audience and cement your relationship with your existing audience.

Social media can help your ecommerce business attract customers and create customer loyalty. 

It will make it easier to increase your market reach, especially when you’re targeting international markets.

You can engage with your audience in a more informal way and still convert the leads into potential clients.

More than half of the world is using social media nowadays. This makes social networks a natural place to reach potential customers.

An advantage of social media is that you can share almost any media format. 

For example, you can share new products that you’re about to add to your ecommerce store or show your audience what the manufacturing process looks like.

Some other examples you could use would be partnering up with influences, creating flash sales exclusive to your followers, making live videos, polling your audience, etc.

The goal is to attract customers and increase their engagement.

Embrace every platform you can, from Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter to Instagram and Linkedin.

It is important not to spread your efforts on random social networks—do the research to find out where your target audience spends the most time and increase your activities there.

Ecommerce businesses share images and videos of the products they’re offering with engaging text in the caption and subtly placed CTA buttons.

This is a fool-proof way to attract good-fit customers.

Of course, the content of the post is important, but targeting plays a huge role here. A good rule of thumb is to target people who live in a location you can ship to.

The age range is another criterion you can use based on the stats you have about your store visitors. It is an easy way to get more relevant eyes on your post.

Below is an example of a sponsored Facebook post from Ethical Bedding.

It gives valuable information to the buyers. It also mentions a 100-day sleep trial and a lifetime warranty, which is a clever incentive.

You’ll notice that the colors, fonts, and content used for a post reflect the style of their website.

ethical bedding facebook ad on brand
Image: Facebook

By being consistent through all the communication channels, you will achieve the same—brand recognition and access to your target audience.

Ethical Bedding’s ad is attractive for their target group that values both sustainability and comfort.

#cta-paragraph-pb#Are you posting when your audience is online? Learn the best times to post on Instagram for better engagement.

7. Do your SEO homework

Stellar content without an equally good SEO content marketing strategy won’t do much in the sea of ecommerce stores available.

Your products must rank higher than your competitors’ to reach your potential customers. 

By putting effort into quality SEO, your store is more likely to rank higher in SERPs, and more people will see and click on it.

When you understand that almost half of ecommerce website visits come from search engines, you’ll get why ranking well in SERPs is so important.

pie chart ecommerce site visits source
Image: Bigcommerce

When you continuously create high-quality content and optimize it around relevant keywords, organic traffic will come. This means more customers if you’ve done everything well.

The best way to reach an expanded potential audience is by optimizing your product descriptions for SEO.

Good product descriptions should provide all the necessary information about your product to the consumers.

Include colors, product sizes, features, usage instructions, etc.

Besides that, you should consider the benefits it provides for the customers and include that.

Ask yourself: In what situations would your customers use your product? What is the problem it helps them solve?

Once you cover the above, you’ll be able to write a product description with all the critical information.

And to ensure you’ll cover your target audience’s searching habits,don’t skip the keyword research part. It will help you understand your customers’ searching habits and create product descriptions that match them.

Final result? Higher rankings in the SERP.

8. Pay attention to mobile

Over 90% of smartphone owners use their devices for researching and buying the products they are interested in.

Why is that?

Mostly because of the ease of access. People can now browse through the stores from anywhere—the couch, while waiting in line, in bed before going to sleep, etc.

When you look at it like this, the increase in ecommerce mobile shoppers comes as no surprise.

In recent years ecommerce on mobile has been taking over the whole online shopping industry, and it will evolve even faster in the coming years.

Shopping on mobile has quickly revolutionized the ecommerce market. 

Nowadays, if you have a store and are not investing in adjusting it for mobile shopping, you’re likely to fall behind the curve.

Ecommerce brands are well aware of this.

mobile commerce share growing chart
Image: Statista

What does this mean?

Just like segmentation and personalization, mobile optimization of content is becoming a must in ​​ecommerce content marketing.

Mobile content marketing is easy, technically speaking—you just need to make content readable via mobile devices.

More specifically, you should adjust your mobile content to provide a good user experience.

Ideally, your website will intuitively adapt to whatever device your users are using. 

Mobile devices should display a different version of your online store than the one that appears when someone is browsing on desktop.

To achieve this, you have 2 options:

  • Responsive design
  •  Different domain

Create mobile-friendly landing pages with lighter content to make them load faster. This is how your customers won’t get annoyed by waiting.

Here’s an example of a landing page optimized for mobile devices. Check how the important content is presented to make it easy for visitors to find their way around the store.

feed projects desktop vs mobile
Image: Feedprojects

You can customize your content for mobile through apps—large ecommerce retailers such as Asos have increased mobile conversions by creating an app with responsive content.

Their app includes features that make shopping easier, such as cross-device log-ins and shopping cart editing.

Like many other ecommerce brands that followed and created an app, their goal is to provide an engaging experience for the customers and a seamless switch between desktop and mobile.

And it’s worked well—most of their online sales are made through mobile apps.

9. Put retargeting to the best use

For most of the websites, only as much as 2% of the first-time visitors convert.

Retargeting ads allow you to reach users who previously interacted with your ecommerce store.

It is an effective form of marketing because in its focus, it has people who have shown interest in your brand in the past.

Even if it does cost you more than a regular campaign (which is unlikely), it is worth the money—it has a higher likelihood of bringing you new customers.

Sometimes, users will casually browse your store and not buy anything. Or, they will buy certain items and regularly come back to your store to check out what you have to offer.

You can help those customers by showing them the items that might spark their interest.A strong call-to-action will remind them to reconsider buying at your store.

copper cow facebook ad retargeting
Copper Cow Coffee sends a special offer after visiting their site without buying

Use your data on returning visitors to personalize your on-site messages as much as possible. See this as an opportunity for promotions that match their interests.

Whatever you do, don’t retarget your customers with the same message.

There are many ways to segment your store visitors—recent visitors, recent buyers, recent bouncers, cart abandoners, etc—and making the same ads for them doesn’t make much sense.

Incentivize different types of audiences with same-day deliveries, offering related products, giving discounts—try and see what works best for each of them.

The idea is to capture visitors’ attention and convince them to take action by communicating with them about the great deals that could be theirs.

Don’t forget about these

Aside from tips for improving your content marketing strategies, there are some core steps you have to take if you want to see the results of your efforts.

To create a good content marketing strategy, you need to:

10. Do your research

Close to 50% of businesses don’t have a marketing strategy, which makes working on a digital marketing part of it very difficult.

A marketing strategy should guide how you talk about your business, who you target, and what sets you apart from the other ecommerce businesses in your industry.

Without it, you won’t have a compass for developing a sound content marketing strategy for your store.

For example, the best way to address your target customers or find out what resonates with them is to do thorough market research, which is a big part of any marketing strategy.

This way, you can make sure you’re not wasting your efforts on things that are not relevant anymore.

11. Conduct an SEO competitor analysis

The importance of SEO is pretty clear to many ecommerce store owners, yet, they neglect SEO competitor analysis.

Your SEO competitors are stores that rank for the organic search queries that you are competing for. 

By analyzing the behavior of stores in your niche, you can fine-tune your SEO efforts and climb up the SERP rankings faster.

Think about it as learning about the wins and fails of your SEO competitors without having to try it yourself.

Follow these steps to conduct an SEO competitor analysis that will keep you covered:

  1. Identify your top SEO competitors. You can easily do this by Googling the main keywords for your business and the products you’re offering.
  2. Analyze your competitors’ websites to see what keywords they are ranking for. You can use tools like Ahrefs to help you do organic traffic research, backlink checking, and paid traffic research.
  3. Use the information you got in creating your SEO strategy.

You’ll see results in an increase in traffic volume to your site.

ahrefs seo tool competitor research
Image: Ahrefs

#cta-paragraph-pb#Want to get some more tips? We’ve put together 13 powerful marketing strategies for Shopify to help you start scaling.

Increase your traffic with ecommerce content marketing

With the ecommerce business industry developing fast, it’s essential to stay on the top of your game.

Sales in the industry will reach $5 trillion in 2022, and the growth is projected to continue until 2025 (at least). This means there is a lot of untapped market potential for ecommerce businesses.

To grow your business, you must offer value, personalization, and strong customer service to establish trusted relationships with your customers.

In the end, they are the ones who will help you grow.

A well-developed content marketing strategy will be your best ally on this quest. 

Identify these most pressing questions, challenges, and obstacles your target customers face, and help them solve them with high-quality content.

Once you have all the critical parts of your content marketing strategy in place, you need people who will implement it properly. But that’s a lesson for another article.

When done well, content marketing will help build brand image, develop a large customer base, and create loyalty.

This means that you need to reach your audience in a way that feels natural and organic without being disruptive.

And, of course, make helpful content that will satisfy your customers.

Satisfied customers are:

  • The key elements for increasing sales
  • The driving force behind revenue growth
  • What will help you achieve ecommerce success

Good luck!

#cta-visual-pb#<cta-title>Build a stunning content marketing machine<cta-title>Create and customize landing pages and blogs with all the vital elements for conversions—all with a drag and drop visual page builder.Start designing today

Stefan Smulders

Stefan Smulders is a SaaS entrepreneur and a founder of the world's safest software for LinkedIn automation—Expandi.io. He’s enjoying his life in the Netherlands, the proud father of a lovely 4-year-old son, Steef.

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