It’s tough running your own e-commerce business. Not only do you have to see to the running of your company on a day-to-day basis but you’ve also got to market your online business to foster its successful growth. Yet as important as marketing is, you’ve also got to create products, chip orders, and manage customer concerns — so how are you supposed to do everything?
Believe it or not, you don’t have to sacrifice marketing your business in an effort to keep everything else running. In fact, there are a bunch of ways to form an e-commerce development plan that won’t act as a distraction from the other aspects of your daily operations. Even better, these methods won’t even break the bank. The best of these, content marketing, ticks all the boxes. Here’s what you need to know — and how content marketing will help you succeed.
What Content Marketing Is in a Nutshell
If you haven’t heard of it, content marketing is simply a subset of digital marketing that pinpoints its focus on providing value to consumers. This is different than older or more traditional marketing techniques, which usually rely on older advertising methods. Instead of pushing direct sales by touting the benefits of your products and services, content marketing takes a much softer selling approach that, many times, doesn’t even seem that concerned with converting prospects into customers at all.
The approach is effective, and here’s why: the typical consumer that uses the internet isn’t actively looking for advertising material. In fact, because of how the internet is awash in traditional digital marketing, most internet users tune traditional ads out or even use browser plugins to hide them! Marketing your company, therefore, needs to come across in the form of something valuable. With so many of us using social media today, entertaining content shared to social media can be leveraged to market a company and its wares to targeted audiences without being dismissed as advertising. Companies that provide engaging, entertaining content with things like shoppable video through social media channels can promote themselves and engage the target audience without relying on traditional advertising tactics.
How Content Marketing Works
It is completely unsurprising that content marketing is so successful, and doubly so when used in social media. Entertaining and engaging content shared by company-run social media accounts have a positive impact on that company’s online reputation, and positive reputations help spread your company message through avenues that aren’t denigrated like traditional advertising channels.
This is, of course, the goal of any content marketing campaign. Spreading your company’s brand awareness as far as possible, hopefully due to as many viral posts as you can manage, offers you opportunities to grab the attention of as many prospective customers as possible. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, as long as you’re not trying to sell to your audience. This demonstrates to that audience that all you want to do is share this content with them.
Choose Your Content with Care
That being said, the content that you share with your audience needs to be chosen carefully. This content needs to reinforce your company culture and beliefs, portraying them as virtues that your audience can identify with. Consumers are often passionate about their own beliefs and often prefer to buy from companies that have philosophies that align with their own. It’s for this reason that the content you create and/or share should reinforce your core values and message.
Additionally, consumers value transparency and honesty quite high in social media content. You need to meet your customer expectations and open up your business practices, making them open to scrutiny to showcase your brand’s honest approach. Social media moderation services can also play a crucial role in ensuring that the interactions on your platforms reflect these values, by managing comments, addressing inappropriate content, and fostering positive community engagement. Likewise, interactions you have with consumers on social media channels are there for all to see, so make it a point to treat these interactions as the public relations opportunities they are.
Content Marketing: More Than Social Media
While posting to your company social media account is a powerful content marketing tool, you need to go further. There are a number of ways to produce content that are ideal for different platforms; YouTube is ideal for video, for example, while Instagram is a popular choice for images. Yet don’t forget that you can share content hosted elsewhere to any social media platform — and one of the most effective types of shared content are regular blog posts, hosted from your e-commerce site directly.
A regularly-updated blog is an effective method for more than just hosting valuable content, according to website design specialists. The truth is that search-optimized blogs help market your e-commerce site whether or not they’re shared to social media. This is because search engines will catalog your content and provide it to users looking for subjects related to your blog posts. Organic search engine traffic is still a powerful tool in this regard, especially when the amount of effort needed to invest in a good blog has such a potentially high ROI.
Focusing on the Content Itself
Of course, there are those of us who haven’t the foggiest idea of how to craft content for an e-commerce site marketing campaign. Most business owners, especially if you own a startup or other small business owners, don’t have enough time to spend running their company while also working on the creation of marketing content.
Thankfully there’s help you can find in that regard. You can outsource content creation to specialist companies that can provide blog management for an affordable price. This can be blog posts, articles, or even a full social media marketing campaign from soup to nuts. Again the ROI for outsourcing this to a content creation service means that the amount of new business you’re likely to generate will far outweigh the modest cost of these services.
Content Marketing: the Wrap-Up
E-commerce businesses thrive based on their online visibility. This means it’s crucial you maintain a strong social media presence. Yet e-commerce business owners have enough on their plate as it is. That’s why you should find ways to cut your workload while still getting ahead.
You can accomplish this by using content marketing as a marketing approach. Even better, choosing to partner with a content creation company with experience in social media management means you’ve got even less to do — and that leaves you more time and energy to focus on the other important parts of your business.
Don’t miss an opportunity when you see it. Invest in content marketing and you’ll have the chance to grow your business like never before.
