According to HubSpot, 69.6% of companies actively invest in content marketing.

The figure is a dead giveaway of how vital content marketing is — whether you’re an established business or just starting in the ecommerce scene. 

However, running effective content marketing campaigns is time-consuming and labor-intensive, especially if you’re moving your brick-and-mortar store online.

There is the need to upload your product photos, set your pricing, gather marketing materials, update inventory details, and more. 

The good news is, there are tried and tested ways to help kick start your efforts.

In this guide, we’ll dive into how you can implement content marketing for your startup ecommerce business. 

1. Establish your brand identity

Essentially, your brand identity is the overall representation of how your brand feels, speaks, and looks to your target audiences.

This helps you determine your voice, tone, and build content that provides value to your audience, and create a brand experience that encourages engagement. 

For instance, using language that matches your brand’s personality ensures content consistency throughout your social media channels, website, and other platforms. 

A serious brand identity calls for more professional messaging, while a playful personality would require a conversational tone. 

A strong brand identity can help fuel your content marketing efforts — allowing you to communicate with your audiences better and form relationships for long-term ecommerce success. 

2. Blogging and Social Media

Publishing relevant content helps you drive traffic to your website from various sources including, social media. 

For instance, you can publish blogs that let you put storytelling at the heart of your content or other posts that are relatable and valuable to your target audiences. 

One way of making the most out of your blogs is to share them on your social media channels to engage your audience further. 

Social media management platforms such as Buffer, for example, lets you schedule your posts across networks. 

Use the platform to schedule a social media update of when your blog post will go live on your website — helping you streamline your content creation and posting process.

By integrating your website and social media content marketing efforts, you can improve your engagement, grow your following, and increase website traffic and sales.

3. Learn from your top competitors

It’s crucial to build your own content marketing strategies, but it also doesn’t hurt to check out the popular blogs and traffic-generating tactics that your competitors use. 

Emulate the strategies they utilize, but make your posts more engaging than your competitors.

Investigate the length and type of content they publish. Do your competitors publish lists, tutorial videos, photos, GIFs, or original memes? 

Check how often and at what time in the day they publish their content and look for patterns of engagement related to this.

Using Buzzsumo will help you check your competitors’ most shared content — including their engagement insights such as the number of likes, shares, comments on social platforms. 

Uncover your competitors’ best content strategies — including their value propositions, visual content, calls-to-action (CTA), and more and develop your own approach from there. 

4. Leverage interactive content

Publishing interactive content like polls, surveys, and giveaways is a great way to entertain, attract, and engage your customers. 

Interactive content helps improve message retention, allowing you to solidify your marketing campaign’s core message into the minds of your audience.

Including this in your marketing strategies makes your posts more digestible and memorable for audiences. 

For instance, add call-to-action buttons to your quizzes, surveys, and newsletters.

5. Use videos

Another type of interactive content that is easily digestible and shareable for your target audiences are videos. 

The formula for a viral video is straightforward: create a video with a compelling hook and great valuable content that showcases your brand. 

Fortunately, it’s also easy to find free video editing software online.

Users have different expectations and reactions toward videos posted on various media platforms, so make your content more engaging by varying the length, tone, etc. per platform.

Ensure that your thumbnail images are also as relevant as possible to your title.

6. Nail your email marketing content

Email marketing helps you reach out to your leads and nurture relationships with them to establish brand loyalty and increase your sales.

Studies even show that 81% of sales take place after seven or more email contacts. 

Your email marketing content needs to be on point to drive conversions and sales successfully. 

Write killer subject lines, catchy preview texts, be conversational in your copy, personalize your message, use stunning visuals, and more.

Marketing automation platforms such as Mailchimp lets you create and design your email content easily.

Choose a template then customize and design according to your preferences and brand.     

With this, you can spend more time crafting engaging email marketing content and run your campaigns in minutes to nurture leads, entice them to purchase, and advocate for your brand.

7. Keep SEO in mind

Optimizing your content can help your website rank higher on search engine results pages and drive traffic to your site.

Although this is an intricate marketing strategy, here are some crucial factors to consider when building your SEO content strategy. 

• Keyword research. Performing keyword research helps you find the keywords that searchers use to include in your content — which aids you in generating traffic. 

• Keyword optimization. Learn how and where to use keywords in your content for optimum searchability. 

• Content promotion. Build links to your content internally and from external websites to help increase the visibility of your new content. 

• Organizing content. Arranging your content logically not only aids your SEO strategies, but also helps your website visitors find and consume your content easily. 

Ready to build your content marketing strategy?

Using the right strategies and tools in creating and implementing your content marketing efforts can streamline the process. 

There is no perfect formula, but these tips can be your starting point in building a solid content marketing strategy to help achieve your goals and grow your ecommerce business. 

What other ways do you know that will help startup businesses with content marketing? Let us know in the comment section below. Cheers!

The post How to Tackle Content Marketing as a Startup Ecommerce Business appeared first on Guild of Bloggers.