How to Win the Ecommerce War
Millions of products wage war with one another online, all vying for attention with thousands dying every day.
Don’t sacrifice your products to the gods of war. Use our step-by-step approach to building an ecommerce growth strategy through content marketing.
How to Start Content Marketing
Spotify Wrapped is an iconic example of great, viral content marketing.
Content marketing isn’t just about sharing your products to get readers to become customers.
It’s important to offer value that empowers your customers to execute tasks more efficiently, such as making their businesses more profitable or shortening their morning routine.
There are many types of content marketing such as social media, blog posts, newsletters, infographics, paid advertising, podcasts and videos.
Picasso said ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’ Studying your competitors is the best way to understand the existing landscape, learn from their mistakes and identify untapped topics.
Be careful: while Picasso was a genius, his advice shouldn’t be followed to the letter. You need to improve upon your competitors’ content, not copy. Strive to beat the leaders, not catch up.
Craft a Compelling Brand Story
Patagonia’s Worn Wear initiative is a great story about sustainability.
Why did you start your business? What problems do you solve? Answering these questions is key to starting your brand’s story.
Just like your favourite fictional characters, a great brand story will help your audience remember you, empathise with you and care deeply for your future success.
Conflict
Highlight adversities that you have faced and talk about how you overcame them. Customers understand that business is fraught with failures and mistakes. They want to see that you can admit mistakes and overcome them. This builds trust.
Resolution
Resolve any conflicts that you discuss. This resolution is a chance to display your creativity, dynamism and core competencies. Take Patagonia as an example:
Clothing waste is rampant in the fashion industry. This conflicted with Patagonia’s messaging as an eco-brand. Their resolution: a scheme to refurbish second-hand clothing and resell it at a discount.
Elevate Content with AI
Could you have guessed this art was AI-generated?
Starting your content planning with AI is a great way to play to AI’s strengths and reduce the amount of time and money you spend on content creation.
AI as a Brainstorming Partner
AI is a great brainstorming partner. It is phenomenal at analysing great swathes of data and providing actionable next steps. Take this prompt as an example of how to leverage ChatGPT:
I want you to do some research for me. Act as an expert Instagram Social Media Marketer. Tell me 10 frustrations, 10 desires & 10 fears that [my audience] experience with their [area of focus]. Put it in a table format. Label X axis 1-10 & Y-Axis frustrations, desires & fears.
AI Video Creation
AI video creators such as OpusClip are groundbreaking technologies.
Long-form videos such as podcasts can be analysed, broken up into multiple smaller clips and subtitled in seconds. Text-to-video features also allow you to describe the video you want the AI to create such as ‘Instagram Reel on the benefits of cycling over walking’.
Generative AI is simply magic and a must-have for digital marketing.
AI as an Editor
Using generative AI models such as ChatGPT to edit your work is a game changer.
ChatGPT can fix grammatical errors, rewrite wording in a friendlier voice and write an analysis of your copy with detailed recommendations of how to improve it. It can even write entire passages for you.
Be careful about overusing AI. Social media algorithms are trained to recognise and reduce the reach of AI content. Consumers are becoming skilled at recognising AI content and tend to distrust it.
Drive Traffic to Your Ecommerce Website
Canva’s design school is a great way of providing edutainment that drives traffic.
Social Media
Social media is a great way to engage with your audience. Responding to customer posts increases consumer trust, increases the interest in conversations surrounding your brand and humanises your business.
Facebook released an automated lead generation feature on Messenger, allowing businesses to create an automated chatbot experience within Messenger to link to content offers on your site. This is a great feature for sending traffic to your website.
A/B Testing
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a marketing experiment wherein you split your audience to test variations on a campaign and determine which performs better. In other words, you can show version A of a piece of marketing content to one half of your audience and version B to another.
A/B testing should be used for all forms of content marketing from blog posts to social media posts. Its important to only pick one variable to test otherwise it will be unclear why one approach was more or less successful.
A/B testing can be used to improve ecommerce websites. E-commerce businesses see an average of 70% of customers leave their website with items in their shopping cart. This is known as “shopping cart abandonment” and is detrimental to any online store.
Using A/B testing to improve product images, product descriptions and website UI/UX can greatly improve your bottom line.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves partnering with individuals on social media who have a large audience cohort that aligns with your target market.
Using influencers is a great way to reach previously untapped markets and to give customers trustworthy reviews of your products.
Start a Blog
A blog is a great way to engage with your audience through edutainment. It also helps your website rank higher on Google.
Be careful with blogging. It can be incredibly time consuming. Try to reuse the content by cutting it up into social media posts and maybe start an email newsletter that contains each blog post.
Email is the most personal content marketing platform and has the highest ROI, generating €36 for every €1 spent.
How to Run Paid Ads for Content
Link your paid ads to your existing marketing campaigns to maximise return.
Paid ads offer benefits to small and large businesses, including:
- Instant traffic: Traffic can roll in as soon as your ads go live
- Advanced targeting: Brands can target specific demographics, interests, and behaviours
- Performance measurement: Ad platforms offer detailed analytics that advertisers can mine for insights
- Affordability: Even brands with small budgets can launch ads to reach their target audience.
Paid ads enable even small businesses with no brand recognition to reach new audiences. And there are a variety of ads to pick from.
While content marketing allows you to boost the credibility of your brand and retain visitors, paid advertising allows you to get more traffic and increase brand awareness. Pay-per-click advertising offers double the traffic compared to an equal spend on SEO. Ads may increase your brand awareness by up to 80% through targeting untapped markets.
If you run ads directly to sales or product pages, traffic will typically dry up as soon as you stop paying for those ads. However, content advertising allows for sustained returns. Such as an article encouraging your audience to sign-up to an email newsletter.
Conclusion
Practise makes perfect. Create a piece of content marketing and post it in the comments below. We will offer a free content marketing brainstorming session to the first three people who post.
Our team can help you identify missing links in your ecommerce strategy. Give us a call and we’ll talk over a virtual coffee (or a real one).