Once you’ve established an online store, the real work begins. Now you’ve got to drive awareness, encourage potential customers to check out your business, and keep existing customers active and engaged with your brand. Fortunately, you’re not alone, and well established types of content marketing practices work, as long as they’re executed well.
Let’s reveal eight common types of content marketing, why they can benefit your business, and things to think about when employing them.
1. Your Own Blog
For starters, it’s worthwhile for your Ecommerce business to have a blog. This blog can search multiple purposes, each with their own value:
- Business announcements: At a minimum, a blog offers a space to post about new product announcements and launches, so you can drive awareness of some of the changes happening on your store.
- Thought leadership: If you’ve been running your business in a certain arena for awhile, you’ve developed knowledge, and established best practices, that others can learn from. Such posts can also help your buyers understand why you’re a good choice to buy from.
- Deeper topic dives: A blog offers space a product page or other area can’t get into in depth, so it can let you expand on business practices or product design decisions, for instance, at a deeper level than you can cover elsewhere. This can provide more insight as to why your products have certain features, materials or other key information.
- Buyer case studies: If you’re seeing success and getting great feedback from your buyers, showcasing it on your blog can help elevate those testimonials or case studies, helping others feel confident in purchasing with you as well.
Blogs have the additional benefit of providing more long-form content for search engines to hook into and make your business discoverable. Calculating a blog’s firm return on investment is not easy to do, but it’s still considered a standard feature of content marketing for many businesses.
One thing that’s important about a blog is consistency. You should establish a schedule, and publish on that schedule as closely as possible. Anywhere from one to three posts a week is a reasonable pace; the trick is to find the right pace for your business, and your ability to maintain it steadily.
2. Guest Blog Posts
As a next step, as you’re establishing yourself as a thought leader in your space, you have the opportunity to generate guest blog posts for other publications or blogs. Sometimes this can take the form of a swap, where you write a blog post for someone else, and they in turn write one for you.
There’s a couple of key benefits for this approach:
- New audience reach: You’ll have the opportunity to reach people who aren’t directly familiar with your business, and be able to introduce yourself
- Links from other sites: One key strategy for search engine optimization is getting links from other sites. Having a guest blog post that you’ve written also allows you to link to your site, whether other blog posts or product pages, and doing that enough over time can help raise your profile in search engines.
3. Social Media Content
Social media marketing is becoming a standard content marketing practice of its own. Similar to the blog, you’ll want to establish a content calendar and a steady publishing schedule. Daily is pretty common, but don’t go crazy – it can seem easy to post a bunch of pictures and posts throughout a day, but once a day is considered the optimal approach – too many posts and some will just outright get missed or ignored.
Your social media content should be adapted to the platforms you’re leveraging – Facebook may deserve a different take than Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn.
Social media marketing can have a good mix of different types of content, including:
- Blog posts: That work you’re doing on the blog can get additional mileage from being featured on your social media profiles.
- Image and video posts: Most social media solutions are visual mediums, so you can pair imagery with marketing copy to drive awareness of what you sell.
- Product features: You can highlight specific product lines easily and effectively, even having carousels of products appear, as best benefitting the way the business sells.
- Testimonials/buyer quotes: The vast majority of buyers read reviews before making a purchase. You can put your best foot forward by curating examples of your happiest buyers.
- New arrivals/sales/clearances: You can of course promote what’s happening with the business in terms of your initiatives by driving awareness to what’s new, or pushing what’s being cleared out.
4. User-Generated Content
Now, those first three items alone may sound daunting when it comes to content marketing. And depending on the industry and your publishing schedule, it can be quite a bit of work. Here at Zoey, as of the time this is published, we update or social media accounts each business day, and our blog three times a week.
For some businesses, you can bridge some of the gap by leveraging user-generated content. This could be pictures, written word or other valuable content options that your own buyers share and submit, or have posted on their own social media.
Your most excited buyers will often be evangelists of what you’re doing; being able to leverage their user-generated content is not unlike testimonials or case studies as it reinforces your value, through the eyes and minds of your own buyers, which can be more relatable than direct marketing copy or images.
5. Email Marketing
Building an email list is an important tool for staying connected to potential and existing buyers. Email marketing can work similarly to social media in driving awareness of new products and sales, sharing customer testimonials, and promoting various blog content you’ve been generating.
Most importantly, it’s another way to keep in touch with your buyers, so you can also automate more transactional type emails, including check-ins when it’s been awhile since you’ve heard from your buyer (perhaps with a promotion to entice them in), and to segment your list with more targeted messaging based on how often they purchase, and what they purchase.
The bigger your list, and the more you know about them, the more specific you can get with your messaging, but even at a high level, using email as a medium to stay connected is quite effective.
6. Answering Questions
A number of sites have proliferated online allowing users to provide answers and expertise, such as Reddit and Quora. You can create an account as an expert, and answer industry-specific questions to help others learn from what you know.
In the process, you have the ability to reference your business as a way of backing up your expertise, which in turn drives awareness for your business.
Not all industries can benefit from this particular approach, but more can than you’d realize – people ask questions on all sorts of topics, and your knowledge could unlock the answer they’re seeking.
7. Media Appearances
When someone hears about media appearances, traditional media tends to come to mind, such as TV and radio. But nowadays there’s more niche options that can reach a more targeted audience as well, such as podcasts or YouTube channels.
Media appearances work similarly to answering questions, in that you can share some of your expertise and drive awareness of the business, but it may help you reach specific audiences given the more targeted approach of new media programming.
8. Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is often seen as a separate initiative from content marketing, but content can be used for PPC marketing in increasingly broad ways. You can use content-focused solutions like Taboola to raise awareness of content generated in places like your blog, for instance, and repurpose content for more direct marketing initiatives.
PPC marketing allows for targeting based on certain types of audiences and sites, making it easy to hone in on buyer personas that are relevant to your business, and your content may resonate in a different way than a more direct marketing message. It can be particularly effective for remarketing to people you’ve previously been in contact with, and are trying to bring back.
This Webinar Has Even More Ideas
Companies like Zoey partner Hawke Media navigate this space daily on behalf of merchants, and as such they’ve developed successful strategies for a variety of companies working online. In this webinar, they share data around what content marketing strategies businesses are favoring, what is proving most successful, and things a business should think about.
Marry Types of Content Marketing with Strong B2B Ecommerce
Of course, it helps to have a good Ecommerce solution to back your various initiatives with types of content marketing you may pursue. It’s also worth providing your customers with Ecommerce-specific content types such as eBooks and whitepapers, that may better target your audience.
Zoey offers support across the board, including offering a blog module to make it easy to post content on your Zoey site. To learn more about our B2B Ecommerce offerings, click the button below to request a demo:
