How to Use Content Marketing to Help Drive Business to Your E-commerce Company

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At Boston Publishing, we have been sculpting engaging content for over three decades, first in print and since 1999 in the digital space. Content marketing is a relatively newly coined term but the concepts behind content marketing have been around for centuries. Here in this article we look at the three different tenants of content for content marketing used in not just outbound marketing, but also our onsite communications.

 

1.       Foundation content

Foundation content is like the foundations of your house, it is the content that the rest of the building is constructed off. This includes content that communications the core business you are transacting, and then any sub categories of business underneath. It is critical that this foundation content doesn’t just sell the what, but also the why. Many customers that come to your site are in the very early stage of the buying process so may need further education in the product, or how to use the product. We see this being overlooked by many of our competitors to their detriment. Having good foundation content will lead to better time on site, and better engagement is once of the signals used by search engines to validate key word accuracy. It is also critical to the user experience on site which is important for conversion and retention. Tone can be emotional in areas if you are trying to make a connection with the brand and authoritative in others when educating customers to engage a level of trust.  Content on landing pages is always critical. Here you can see an example of work we have done for a wedding invitation e-comm Paperlust - you can note the way we have focused on the tone for such an emotionally driven product.

 

2.       Snippet content

Many SEOs would be well aware of using rich snippets as a way to enable search engines to understand what content is contained on each web page. However, many miss the content marketing opportunity of these snippets. They need to be a clear, concise description of a product or services, not a keyword laden signal to the search engines. Of course keywords need to be included, but they need to be naturally included. Improving the communication on snippets leads to higher conversion rates growing revenue and less intervention from our customer service teams, reducing costs.

 

3.       Blog, Outreach & Social

Finally, we have Blog, Outreach and Social, which I have combined into one because of the content similarities. Both pieces of content are about creating an emotional connection with their audience. To contrast with my earlier point, a blog needs to create an emotional connection to the brand, whereas snippet needs to convey critical information clearly and concisely. Whilst the type of content is similar for all three, at paperlust.co we use them for different purposes.

 

  • Blogs: we have produced a large number of blog and content articles which are aimed at the early stage researcher who is planning for their wedding or event. EG: https://paperlust.co/blog/21st-birthday-ideas-themes-invites-gifts/ These customers are pre-awareness and so firstly it is great to get our brand in front of them however we don’t stop there. These readers are then tracked using several remarketing cookies for social or google ad networks and we then serve up specific content and messages to these customers as they browse the web and social over the following weeks. The blog content is relatively cheap to produce and to get ranking and it gives us a very cheap pool of qualified leads for different product categories. Remarketing to them is much cheaper than buying the acquisition (cents versus dollars) and gives us ROAS of 8-15 times.

  • Outreach: Outreach using content marketing for us is about creating brand awareness. We regularly contact all the major wedding blogs and magazines with fresh content. Often sending unsolicited content works, but at other times you need to go further and so for magazine titles such as Vogue we have organised products and product shots based on their creative direction.
  • Social: The content we create for social differs for paid advertising and for our own organic feed. Customers use our feed more like a brochure, going through our wide range of options before enquiring or going to our site. The content for this purpose is very much traditionally styled shoots and flat lays. However, for paid acquisition campaigns the content is much more emotive. Videos showing our most luxurious designs are filmed using soft lighting effects to create an emotive connection. Re-marketing content, including video and stills are much more about the conversion messages regarding our unique selling propositions (USPs).

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