3 Commandments of Content Marketing in Ecommerce. How to Boost Sales with Content?

Will investment in content marketing deliver real revenue to your e-store? Or maybe it just will end up as a sales disaster. Users will enjoy your sophisticated photos and hilarious movies, but will buy at competitor’s store, because it’s cheaper. Comparing prices on the web requires just a couple of clicks!

It might happen. You can put a lot of money, effort and workforce into creating content that will have no impact on sales. But you can avoid that sad fate.

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Stopping halfway

Such doubts make marketers stop halfway. They want to have a cake and eat it, try this content thing, but without risking too much, so they blog, but irregularly, scared of investing in producing outstanding graphics or videos. Creativity is nice, they say, but we won’t pay the bills with likes and traffic. We need solid sales, they conclude and go back to rattling off another post.

But average content won’t deliver revenue. In the age of its overproduction, nobody wastes time on mediocre materials. If you want to do content marketing, be serious.

It implies the first and cardinal rule: be original and deliver value. But how?

1. Be unique

Content marketing can’t be limited to blogs, infographics, and video, which you automatically associate with the term. After a moment, you might remind yourself of podcasts, slideshows, white papers and ebooks. But there is more!

Remember that the form is as important as the content. Bonobos marketers know it well, so they prepared a quiz to help their customers find the best chinos for them. The quiz involves serious questions:

And more abstract ones:

The quiz is fun, short and sweet.
Such forms are still used rarely, so presenting one will help you stand out. They also engage users more and deliver knowledge in an entertaining way.

2. Don’t let visitors go! Use Marketing Automation

You tempted many visitors to your website with an exquisite post or great tool – congrats! But these crazy crowds will soon leave, and only the peak on Analytics chart will remind you of their presence.

Content marketing will help you attract traffic, but you need to make an effort to keep visitors: make them buy or leave their contacts addresses.
You can use:
1) Gated content: it means that the access to the content requires giving an email address. You might gate your ebooks, whitepapers, or parts of interactive materials.
Bonobos, for example, asks for your email address before you start filling in the quiz. You can answer questions, but to get results you must type in your email address.

It’s a great idea for lead generation!

That way your user gives you her address convinced that she will obtain something valuable, and she had fun doing the quiz, what raises positive feelings. Also, she gave you a lot of information about herself in the quiz, so you can start personalizing communication right now.

2) Contact forms: you can put them on the website as an iframe, popup or sidebar. Personalize their content –put references to what user viewed it to the source of her visit. Offer a substantial benefit in exchange for an email address. After subscription, you can start an automated welcome cycle: a couple of messages designed for new users, introducing them to the brand and showing what do you offer. That way she will recognize the brand better and will more probably open your messages.

3) Monitor user behavior: use Marketing Automation Platform to identify visitors and monitor their behavior to personalize offers. An excellent tool to deliver such offers are dynamic banners: they display products selected for that particular person, basing on the data gathered in the system.

3. Measure effects! KPI for content marketing

Effects of content marketing are hard to measure? Nonsense! You have many metrics to track.
Content marketing has 3 basic aims:
• attract new visitors
• engage them
• make them purchase.

For each of them we can assign KPIs to monitor our actions. Use the following:
• traffic on the website
• actions (comments, shares, mentions, likes, downloading gated content, time spent on the site), views
• purchases.
[inspired by: Neil Patel].
Wow, that’s a lot of numbers to help you see how visitors respond to your materials. When analyzing these you can precisely identify problems with your content strategy, for example if you see a massive traffic and little leads, you know what you must improve your lead generation practices.

Monitoring efficiency of your actions will also allow you to test them and optimize on a regular basis. Not to mention that you will get to know your users better. Which materials generated the highest traffic or many leads? What interests your audience or entices to buy?

Successful content marketing

Increasing brand awareness, building trust and relationships, engaging… yes, content marketing does all that. But its core role is to increase traffic and turn visitors into customers. So find right metrics to measure the performance of your content, apply the best Lead Generation practices (remember about personalization) and dare to be original!