October 15, 2019

#17 - Create a content marketing strategy that will grow your business

35 minutes

Welcome my fellow eCommerce Entrepreneurs! My name is Matt Edmundson and this show is for those of us Kurious About eCommerce and who want to know how to get better at digital business.

Creating and sharing valuable and relevant content is one of the foundational elements of having effective websites that drive traffic and generate leads. It is a medium to long term strategy that needs to be carefully considered and implemented because of its direct link to the sales funnel.

The reason being engagement.

The better your content can resonate with your customers, the better the engagement and the higher the conversions.

Not all engagement is the same.

Outbound content management is short, snappy and easily digestible. It disrupts the reader and offers value that they are probably not even looking for.

Inbound content marketing, on the other hand is where you try to make yourself more discover-able by people who are searching for specific content. This is where we you create content gold and get people to keep coming back for help on other related topics.

Here are four steps you can take to create valuable, relevant and consistent content:

1. Define your content strategy

Before you do anything else, you need to have very clear and measurable content goals in place. Knowing where you are and where you want to be will give you a clear sense of direction from which you can create a content schedule.

2. Create only good content

The competition for good content is tough out there! To stand apart from the masses you have to understand what consumers in your niche want to know. Every bit of content you produce needs to hinge on being: valuable and relevant.

For example if you have an online store, a product landing page can serve as an excellent content marketing tool that will quickly translate into conversions. The content here needs to be entirely customer focused - what they would like to know and see. Keep it relevant and give them content around what the product is, what problem it will solve for them, how it will transform then and (with a clear call to action) what they can do next.

Another example is a product page, complete with videos, reviews and FAQs. A product page with images and solid descriptions for each product is content that is both valuable and relevant to the consumer - they want to know everything they possibly can before they make the decision.

How-to-videos that show how the particular product can be used or worn are highly valuable and relevant content. Your customers will watch the videos to better understand the product and learn how it can transform them. How is it valuable and relevant to them? Use subtitles if you are narrating because a lot of people watch videos with the audio off.

Product reviews have a lot of mileage. Before we buy anything we want to know if it works and actually does what it claims to and one way to do that is to read the reviews. Amazon claims that over 90% of people read reviews before making a purchase.

FAQs are a great way to engage your customers with valuable and relevant questions. You can build this content by preempting what you think your customers will want to know as well as include what questions your customers have already about that product. Take careful note of the questions your customers are asking and what they care about. Creating content around their questions will increase engagement.

3. Be committed to your content schedule

With strategic content marketing you are playing the long game and in time your content schedule will add to the success of your organic searches and lead generation. Commitment and consistency are key.

4. Be deliberate about distributing content

Don't create content for the sake of it and definitely don’t create content with fingers crossed hoping it will get noticed by someone.

You have to be deliberate and intentional about distributing content in the right forms and onto the right platforms so that it can be noticed by the right people. For your eCommerce business to sky rocket, it is critical that the right people engage with it.

It may seem daunting to think how on earth you're supposed to find the time to create content in so many forms and distribute on just as many channels. But I bring good news! You don't have to create lots of different content to distribute. You can use one piece of content and splice and dice it in different ways to distribute.

Getting the content right is vital for driving traffic to your site and generating leads because it builds trust in your brand.

If you have any questions or thoughts, we'd love to hear them!

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By Matt Edmundson

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