The eCommerce industry is in the middle of a huge boom in 2021. Unfortunately, this also comes with a lot of competition in any niche that you pick. Hence, the traditional marketing strategies might be of little help in 2021.
Content marketing can be one of the most potent tools for driving traffic to your eCommerce site, converting visitors, and triggering repeat purchases. However, if content marketing is not exactly yielding you the best results at the moment, then you may be getting certain things wrong.
In this article, you’ll learn about some of the most common eCommerce content marketing mistakes that businesses tend to make and how you can avoid them. Let’s dive right in!
1. Lack of Research on Target Audience
This is one of the most common mistakes committed by new businesses. Simply creating content without audience research and the right strategy can be a huge waste of everybody’s time. This way, you are either attracting the wrong people to your site, or you are not getting the attention of anyone at all.
Hence, just like any other business, for eCommerce, too, it is super important to start with an in-depth understanding of the target audience. The best way to go about it is to create ideal buyer personas that list down all the likes, dislikes, interests, pain points, demographics, etc., details about your different buyer personas.
How does this help? By creating buyer personas, you’ll be able to create content that is laser-targeted towards who are likely to buy from your online store. This way, you’ll have a perfect content marketing strategy in place that brings customers into your funnel.
2. Creating Only Promotional Content
While starting as a niche eCommerce business, many make the mistake of creating promotional posts for their products and promoting them on social media. It is crucial to understand that initially when people are not familiar with your brand and offering, it might be difficult for you to convert them.
With eCommerce content marketing, it is always better to have a mix of both informational and promotional content. Value-packed content aimed to educate or entertain your audiences can be a great way to attract attention to your brand in the initial stages.
3. Lack of Creativity and Uniqueness
There are probably dozens of different eCommerce websites that are selling products similar to you. So, how do you stand out from the crowd and grab the attention of potential customers? Content marketing can play a major role here. But, it is important to be unique, creative, and original with your content.
You can start by crafting a unique brand identity for your store that resonates with your products. Try experimenting with your content based on this unique brand identity. These can be your color palette, designs, brand voice, or anything that grabs the attention of your target audience.
It is also essential to be unique with your content. For example, if you are creating blog content, it is okay to get inspiration from your competitors but do not blindly follow their strategy. Instead, pave the way for your unique content and explore different directions.
To make the website planning and management process easier, consider using a website planning and management tool like Slickplan. These tools can help you coordinate your efforts by providing features such as sitemaps, wireframes, and content planning modules. Slickplan, for example, allows you to visualize your website structure, plan your content strategy, and collaborate with team members, streamlining the website development process.
4. Not Experimenting With Content Marketing Platforms
Lack of experimentation is another common blunder that we observe in new eCommerce businesses. Common mistakes such as creating only Instagram content can rob you of many big opportunities. Yes, Instagram may be the primary place where your target audience hangs out. But sticking to only one platform may not yield you the best results.
So, diversify your content marketing platforms based on the audience research that you do. There can be numerous content marketing platforms for your eCommerce store, such as blogs, different social media platforms, and email marketing. Experimenting with many such platforms can help you improve your KPIs.
5. Not Focusing on Every Customer Journey Stage
Every eCommerce customer follows a journey, usually starting with awareness, consideration, and decision. The kind of content that the users will consume across different stages will be entirely different. When it comes to content, each of these stages is equally valuable, and hence you should focus on creating content for each of these stages.
For example, content for the awareness stage is the most commonly observed one. This can be informational content directly targeted towards your ideal buyer persona. In consideration, the stage may be the one where the users are contemplating buying your products. At this stage, users may need content related to product alternatives, comparisons, etc.
At the decision stage, users are ready to make the final purchase decision, and you need to offer the final nudge. Content at the decision stage can be in the form of product descriptions, product demo videos, FAQs on your efficient courier service, etc.
By creating content for each of the customer journey stages, your users will find it easier to transition from one stage to the next. And this will be highly beneficial in driving sales and revenue for your eCommerce business.
6. Not Tracking Content Marketing KPIs
Putting in efforts into content marketing without setting KPIs in place may as well be pointless. It is essential to set and track important content marketing metrics that are relevant to your business. These metrics are completely up to you to decide and can be lead generation rate, content engagement rate, website traffic, content shares, etc.
Set benchmarks for these content marketing metrics and work together towards meeting these KPIs and goals. This way, you and your team will have a definite direction and goals to work towards. And, this will lead you towards your goals quicker than otherwise.
7. Lack of a Distribution Strategy
Creating content is only half the battle won for content marketing. The rest lies in how you distribute the content that you created. Not getting organic traction or organic search engine traffic is a common complaint amongst eCommerce businesses. But are you really focusing on your distribution strategy?
The way you distribute your content can do wonders for your sales and revenue. For example, you can repurpose your blog posts into social media creatives, promote them on your email newsletter, or use them as a lead generation channel by offering content upgrades.
8. Not Trying Out Different Content Formats
Just like it is important to experiment with different content platforms, it is also vital that you experiment with different content formats. Only creating text-based content or carousel posts may not be the best idea.
Instead, try different formats such as infographics, videos, social media lives, social media stories, etc. Blog engagement can also be driven by also converting them into audio and a text to speech generator can help in this regard. Through experimentation, you’ll be able to maximize your engagement and drive more traffic to your eCommerce store.
9. Not Focusing on Content Engagement
Nurturing and engagement is another major part of content marketing. Your site visitors and followers have to feel engaged and connected with your brand. Only then will it be easier for you to convert them into loyal customers.
Not just your leads, engagement and nurturing is also crucial for your existing customers. Engagement can nudge them to make repeat purchases. Hence, ensure that you actively engage with your audience on different content marketing channels.
10. Focusing on Quantity More Than Quality
No, it's not always about how many social media stories you put out each day or how many blog posts you produce in a month. Yes, consistency and content frequency is important. But, these are not more important than the quality of content.
For example, creating eight 500-word blog posts may not fetch results as good as producing two 2000-word blog posts in a month. Hence, do not try to give up on the quality of your content just for the sake of quantity.
11. Ignoring the Search Engines
Your content will only be visible to your target audience when they are able to access and crawl content on a page. So, if your website has crawlability issues, it can significantly affect its visibility and your online ranking. So, it’s critical to pay attention to factors like site structure, internal link structure, server errors, looped redirects, web crawler access, and others.
Make sure you submit your sitemap to Google. For this, you can count on XML sitemap generator tools like Slickplan and Dynomapper. Secondly, avoid duplicating and speed up your load time.
Finally, use a full-service SEO crawler and auditor like JetOctopus that can offer you a big picture of the issues in your website and allow you to prioritize your on-page SEO right away.
Conclusion
To conclude, we can say that content marketing can be a powerful tool for an eCommerce business, provided you have a strategic approach towards it instead of an unfocused approach.
The tips offered in this guide will help you identify the content marketing mistakes that you may be currently facing in your eCommerce business and ways to avoid them in the future.