An eCommerce website should be designed to attract potential customers and convert them into paying ones. While design, imagery, and the overall appearance of your website is critical, they don’t necessarily drive traffic. Interestingly, businesses that have a blog have 55% more traffic, and more traffic usually equals more sales. So, if you haven’t considered eCommerce blogging yet, perhaps it’s time to get started.
Adding a blog to your eCommerce site is something that you should include as part of your growth strategy. eCommerce blogging, and blogging, in general, can be quite daunting, to begin with. But once you get started, you’ll soon realize that it’s actually quite enjoyable.
Due to increasing market saturation, online business owners have a much harder task of attracting new customers. Especially when competing with larger corporations with seemingly unlimited budgets. Starting a blog is a great way to communicate with your target audience, and give them an insight into your brand. By creating an emotional connection with potential customers, you create a community of fans who are exposed to your business.
Let’s have a closer look at some basic tactics to reclaim a market share from the giants of the industry.
1. Focus On A Flexible Business Model
It may seem that large corporations always have the upper hand. But when you look closer, you’ll see that they also have some glaring shortcomings. One such weakness is the fact that they become so bogged down in bureaucracy, meaning their business model starts to become static. For these companies, shifting business focus has become a laborious and costly task. On the flip side, such a shift for small businesses is far less stressful.
The benefit of such freedom is hard to overstate; your business can continuously adapt, alter prices and number of services, focus on new products or offer customers something else entirely. This level of flexibility allows small and medium-sized companies to stand out from their competitors, which is precisely where innovation and creativity occurs.
2. Establish Authority By Employing Content Marketing
This is the step in which blogging heavily comes into play. By this point you should also have a particular niche you aim to occupy. Consumers rarely perceive eCommerce giants as an authority figure in one specific field. Instead, they are regarded as universal corporations that sell a variety of goods and services at affordable prices. (Case in point – Amazon, eBay, and other massive platforms.)
Establishing your company as an authority in a specific field or industry is a great way to gain some ground and target your demographic. The simplest way to establish your authority is to begin generating relevant and useful information specifically curated for your ideal target customer.
Experienced content creators would begin with bare essentials, such as a weekly blog, and regular email newsletters. First things first, business owners need to be on the same wavelength as their customers. This content can take on the shape of a video tutorial, white papers, infographics or even research conducted by the company. Incidentally, this information will help your rank higher in search engines.
3. The Power Of SEO
The other important aspect worth discussing regarding content marketing is SEO. By definition, content marketing is the creation and moderation of content that your customers will want to look up via search engines. Content marketing aims to inform on issues and generate interest.
If you create content that’s not just presented well but also has practical value, it’ll be much easier to generate leads. Setting up a visible CTA would also be beneficial to your efforts. A CTA doesn’t need to sell something directly; you may want to opt-in for a more subtle approach and ask for something as simple as an email.
Any person who lands on your blog may not want to know more about your product from the get-go, but it’s the starting point that. Your target audience will always be grateful for useful content if it’s presented in a way that speaks to them. Don’t be afraid to paint your vision, new ideas, and tell exciting stories.
First of all, it will allow you to sell your brand. Reach out to your ideal consumer, adjusting the market along the way.
4. Add A Personal Touch
One of the most common complaints that regular customer may have when dealing with major corporations is that they deal with a faceless entity. This, in turn, may be the driving force behind the idea that corporations only care about their bottom line – profits. Small businesses can derive tangible benefits from this often common stereotype. One of the best ways to use this situation to your advantage is to come up with a content marketing style that is your own. It may be sarcastic, witty, or even genuinely honest.
In most industries, a small amount of adequate humor helps to create a link between business and customers. Owners should look for ways and means to handle and interact with customers on a personal level. This can be both a personalized email sent after each purchase (as a thank you) or a handwritten letter in response to a complaint.
5. Find Your Niche
This was briefly touched on, but it’s time to focusing on a narrower market. Spreading your efforts too wide, especially if you’re just starting out, can mean you end up targetting no one. Finding a niche is one of the most practical ways to compete with larger companies. Instead of doing many things relatively well, your company should only do a few things REALLY well.
By outlining your niche, you’ll be able to determine the target socio-demographic indicators much more easily and concentrate all your energy on these potential customers. In addition to identifying the right audience, this approach will also help you optimize your site. One common way to achieve this is to target customers in certain countries by geo-dependent keywords and phrases.
6. Don’t Be Cheap With Design
Creating a website of the highest quality is an absolute necessity for eCommerce companies. First impressions matter. As your website and blog is the window into your business, you may want to apply some ‘make-up.’ In fact, only a few business owners understand how important it is to have a simple, attractive, intuitive website design.
Visitors should be able to navigate each page with ease with just a few clicks and be able to find what they need quickly. Less is more. The simpler, the better. But never make it look cheap. Take time to see your website or blog through the eyes of your customers. Or better still, ask a friend, family member or even customer to give you some honest feedback about where things can be improved.
A clear understanding of your target audience is critical to achieving success with your content strategy. But it is equally important to continue the learning process during its implementation. Continually review and analyze data to help understand which content brings more results and involvement. Learn the behavior of the audience and identify insights.
Over time, your blog will serve as the foundation for justifying investing in maintaining a blog. eCommerce blogging is certainly something that every online merchant should test out. Make sure you measure your results, implement new findings, track KPIs and achievements. Consistently tracking metrics and iteration is the key to achieving long-term success. Once you start to see progress, double down and watch blog become your number one lead generation machine…
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Author Bio
John Obstander is a marketing enthusiast, habitual mobile app blogger, and an academically inclined writer. His joint project with NerdyMates aims to offer a solution to many writing-related problems.
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