by Axadra
If you are running an ecommerce business, then you’re already using content to let potential customers know what your brand is all about. Content is the fuel that powers any marketing initiative, and an effective content marketing strategy is crucial in mapping out the way to success.
However, 63 percent of businesses are recorded to have no documented content marketing strategy. This shouldn’t be the case. Getting your content marketing strategy in order will help your business avoid future struggles that can be brought forth by missed opportunities or even miscommunication. Here are seven tips on how retailers can improve their content marketing to strengthen their business:
1. Re-align Your Content Marketing Goals & Objectives
It’s important to frequently check your goals and objectives as these factors determine whether your company is achieving the success for which it’s aiming. To start, review the data or the report on how your business performed in the previous months. This should give you an insight into what your current activities are and what kind of content you’re producing, which will then give you an idea of your direction.
Reassess your content marketing needs. What is content marketing going to do for your business? Do you need it for awareness? Or is it for lead generation and customer retention?
2. Determine What Your Key Performance Indicators Are
Numbers don’t lie. It is important to know what you are measuring right from the beginning in order to know what your supposed targets are. KPIs are key to a successful content marketing strategy. It will help stir the campaign in the right direction.
Is your goal to spread awareness, guide decision making, close a sale, or enhance customer retention? These are all important goals and they are all measurable. Make sure that your content marketing KPIs align with your goals. This is important because it is not just about setting numbers, but determining the right numbers to track what is more helpful for the team to succeed.
3. Get to Know Your Target Audience
The previous months have been filled with life-altering events and everyone has been affected. Your target audience may have changed or their buying behaviors might have shifted. Use buyer personas to represent your audience. There will be different buyer personas since your buyers won’t just have one personality.
Here are some tips on how you can define your buyer personas:
- Put yourself in their shoes. In updating your buyer persona you have to walk in their shoes and think why a buyer would look for your brand or your website.
- Review their psychographics. Knowing the age, gender, ethnicity, and employment status is one thing, but you have to dive deeper and aim to reach a broader audience. Now is the time to look at the psychological angle and see how your audience behaves.
4. Map Out The Customer’s Journey
In the process of updating the buyer’s persona, you have most likely gone through the buyer’s journey. This is the process that your target audience goes through before they perform the action that you’re aiming for, whether it’s a sign-up or purchase.
You will have three levels in the buyer’s journey which are awareness, consideration and decision.
Awareness is how they became aware of the need for your product and how they come to be aware that your product exists. The next stage will be consideration. Consideration is the stage where you persuade them to choose your product and this can come from different types and styles of content. You can have reviews from other customers, or case studies and lead magnets containing more information about your research and your brand.
The last part of the journey is the ‘decision,’ where the client or buyer has already chosen the solution that suits them. This is also the stage where they are learning how to use your product or purchase from your store. The way your customer thinks, feels and behaves will most likely have changed by now. It is important to track their habits and behavior again and redesign your strategy to guide them from point A to point B.
5. Optimize Your Website
Your website will house your content and it will be a big part of your content marketing strategy. It is best to groom and prepare it to be an effective vehicle for your content. Change your titles, meta tags, and CTA’s so that it aligns with your brand voice and identity.
Adapt Search Engine Optimization. SEO is now a must in your content marketing efforts. Having these two work together will be the best addition to your digital marketing strategy. The main goal of SEO is to keep your website visible on search engines through organic traffic. SEO primes content and content needs to be optimized with SEO.
Today, informative and well-researched pieces of content will not mean much if nobody ends up reading it. Integrating SEO services in your ecommerce website will ensure that your content and your website will be easily visible to users.
6. Identify The Marketing Channels
Determine which distribution channel you are going to use as this will help mold the content you will be producing. At this stage, you are aware of how your customers are behaving. Depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey, your potential customers will need a variety of content.
Once you determine your best content, it is important to decide your best distribution methods. Think about what action you want users to take after seeing the content and what will make them view the content. Find the channel that works best for you by analyzing your current data, studying buyer’s behavior and performing a series of A/B tests.
7. Track and Analyze Results
The ability to collect and analyze data will allow you insight into what works and what is not working at the moment. With gathered results, you can also set achievable expectations and goals.
With the availability of advanced tools today, there is no excuse not to keep up and collect the necessary data from your content marketing efforts. After collecting data, you have to organize and analyze all of them to know what is working and not working in your content marketing campaign.
Contact Axadra.com for further information regarding content marketing strategy.