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Content marketing is an essential part of every e-commerce business’s marketing plan. It’s an amazing way to help engage with target audiences and help boost a business forwards. However, it’s vital to know that e-commerce content marketing can be both positive and negative. If done incorrectly, it can have an adverse effect on your business and be a waste of both time and money.

In this article, we’ll focus on how to properly apply a positive e-commerce content marketing campaign. More to the point, how can online companies use it to their advantage? If you continue reading, you’ll find five points that show the right ways to use content marketing for your e-commerce business:

Photography

The whole nature of an e-commerce business means you’re selling products to people on the internet. If you have something to sell, it makes sense to try and advertise and promote it as much as possible. You want to show people your products and let them be amazed by how great they look. What’s the best way to do this? With a photo-heavy content of course!

Photos do everything you want them to and serve an exceptional purpose. They’re there to show consumers your products and highlight special features and details. You see so many brands using photos as their primary source of content production in a marketing strategy. For instance, when our digital agency, Avex Designs, created a website for KITH, the NYC-based fashion label, we put a strong focus on high-resolution product and lifestyle photography. Our case-study touches on the fact that you need high-resolution images. You can’t get away with pixelated and blurry photos of your products, as it makes your product seem sub-par.

The way you promote this visual content is also extremely important. The best idea is to take to social media, particularly Instagram, and post photos there. This helps you reach wider audiences and can also increase web traffic to your e-commerce site. People on social media see these awesome pictures, love what they’re looking at, and click a link to take them to the product page on your site. Speaking of your site, this is also another place you should post photos. A lot of popular e-commerce companies will have plenty of product photos on their home/landing pages to entice audiences and keep them on the site.

Create A Dedicated Content Site

A dedicated content site may sound like some fancy and impressive thing, but in reality, it’s a blog. Many e-commerce sites choose to create a blog that’s integrated into their original site. If you have a look on the biggest brand sites out there, you’ll usually find a link to the blog at the bottom of the homepage. However, this is not necessarily the best way to do things, as it can be difficult for people to find your blog if they don’t know it exists. Plus, integrated blogs usually get pushed down to the bottom of your content priority list. Posts rarely get updated as, quite honestly, you forget the blog exists.

So, what an e-commerce business can do is create a separate site that’s dedicated to creating content. It’s a standalone blog or media outlet that provides people with information on numerous issues relating to your business. For example, if you own a fashion brand, then a special fashion blog should be started to go alongside your website. The purpose of this is to create a whole hub where you provide internet users with as much content as possible. In fact, if you’re ever on a blog that’s dedicated to a particular industry – especially fashion – a little bit of research may show you that it’s owned by an e-commerce brand.

The key is ensuring this site is always updated with regular content and blog posts. This can include long informative posts where you provide information that users will find helpful. It can also include visual content too to keep everyone engaged. Also, ensure you link back to your e-commerce site to keep that traffic flowing.

Customer Generated Content

For an e-commerce site, generating your own content can sometimes be difficult and hard to sustain. Thankfully, you have loads of customers that are willing to help with your content mission! You can showcase content that’s generated by your customers, and it will have a brilliant effect. As an example, many companies will share images of real customers using or wearing their products. They showcase this on social media, their website, their blog – everywhere.

The benefit of this is that it shows other consumers that real people are enjoying your products. It’s a great way to break the mold from the usual scripted photoshoots with models, etc. You’ve got real people taking photos of themselves and sharing it with your business. It helps build a higher degree of consumer trust as people often rely on the opinions of others to influence their buying decisions. So, your company can benefit from an increase in customers and sales figures!

Additionally, you get content generated for free without having to do any work. Just ask for customers to send in photos on social media and then share them or put them on your site. Very simple, and highly cost-effective.

Create Video Content

In general, visual content is always seen as the most effective form of e-commerce content marketing. We already touched upon photos, but there is more to consider. A lot of businesses make a mistake by only focussing on still images when producing visual content. If you do this, then you’re missing out on a major player; video.

Video content is all the rage and is proven to be extremely effective. There are a plethora of ways a company can use video content to market their advantage. One popular form of e-commerce content marketing includes filming instructional videos. This is highly encouraged if your business sells things that people need help with. For example, let’s say your e-commerce company sells something that has to be put together. Sure, you can include instructions on the packaging, but most people prefer to watch a video. So, upload a video to YouTube instructing people on how to put everything together. The benefit of instructional videos is that you’re highly likely to get a lot of views as your company is the main authority on the matter. Why watch a video from a random person when you can find an instructional video from the company that made the product? The more views you get, the more you increase brand identity and build awareness of your company.

Instructional videos aren’t the only thing you can create either. One of my favorite ideas is using video to show people around your business. If people go to the ‘About Us’ section on your e-commerce site, they’re usually faced with lots of text. Spice things up a bit and include a video that gives people a tour of your office headquarters and provides a background on your business. Video keeps people more engaged and helps form a bond between you and the consumer.

Make Good Use Of FAQs

Frequently asked questions are a very good example of e-commerce content marketing done right. Every company should have some FAQs on their site; it’s a must. It’s almost guaranteed that someone out there will have a question that needs answering. So, stop them from searching the web and finding the answer themselves and provide it for them on your website. That’s the key with FAQs; you should include questions that aren’t always directly related to your company. Obviously, there are few questions like ‘How fast is delivery’ that need to be related to your business. But, there might be some questions that are more broadly related to the products you sell and the industry you’re in.

With FAQs, you have the chance to create informative content that people are eager to view. Again, it pays to be creative when answering your frequently asked questions. This is another place where you can include some video content for a few of your answers. Otherwise, text content will be effective, as long as its creative and doesn’t bore people. Make sure every question is answered as simply as possible, assume that everyone reading the answer has no knowledge of the topic in question. This helps you create responses everyone can understand.

The great thing with FAQs is that they can also be a valuable SEO tool too. It’s another area where you can include keywords to help rank your site higher. In essence, it’s content marketing that’s very practical.

All five of the above points are great for e-commerce content marketing. They show you the right way to do things and ensure that your company uses content in the most effective fashion. It’s all about creating content in different ways using a combination of both images, videos, and text. If you can get your customers involved with content creation, then you’re always going to reap a lot of benefits too. E-commerce content marketing isn’t as difficult as it might sound, particularly if you take onboard all of the info in this article.