Ecommerce websites are a dime a dozen these days. I know, this sounds like a bad opening line but that’s the harsh truth. Throw a stone anywhere in the online space and there is every chance it’s going to hit an eCommerce site. The guys at RJmetrics have done some nifty number crunching and come up with a metric that shocks and surprises at the same time – 10-12% of the websites on the internet are eCommerce sites.

Yes, that’s a big number and this number will keep going up as more and more shoppers chuck traditional retail for online retail. This is good news for the eCommerce industry, but if you take a look at this scenario from the competition perspective, it is not a pleasant sight. It is war out there, with every eCommerce site trying to shout the loudest to grab customer attention. They are firing on all cylinders to make an impression on their target audience. But is it working? Yes and No. The competition is really tough out there and there are as many successes as there are failures; in fact it is skewered more towards the latter than the former.

So, can you do anything that sets your website apart from the competition?

Yes, there are plenty of things you could do.

For e.g. you can offer product discounts all year round, or you could send targeted marketing mails, or create a social media page for your business or offer product personalization. The problem is everybody else is doing the same thing or something similar.

So what do you do? Give up! No, not by a long margin! Why not take the help of content to score over your target audience? Content! Yes content with a C, that’s what, is working for plenty of eCommerce businesses these days especially the ones who don’t have an arm and a leg to spend on marketing their business and differentiating it from their competitors.

Content offers you a level playing field against the bigger competitors who have more resources, financial or otherwise, than you do. No, high quality content that generate leads, improves brand reputation and triggers sales isn’t available for free, but it is still an affordable way of proving to your customers that you are better than your competition.

Let’s just say great content future proofs your eCommerce site against competitor assault. Every piece of content you publish, irrespective of the format you choose, acts as a building block for your credibility and trust.

A number of online shoppers have trust issues with a site being able to protect their data or just the fact whether it can replicate the offline buying experience. Content serves to get rid of such trust issues.

To put it simply, if your eCommerce site has to grow, you need content, and you need lots of it, regularly.

But here’s the thing, your web property is an eCommerce site. It is out there to sell products and services. That’s why it was created in the first place; the job of an online store is to trigger conversion and sales. So, your primary goal will be to create and publish content that can prompt these sales, directly or indirectly.

Before we start taking a look at how content acts as a driver of eCommerce growth, let’s get one thing clear – Content doesn’t directly lead to sales. It sets in motion a chain of decision making that culminates in sales after a period of time. 

Content is the Differentiator

Imagine having a Eureka moment, one day. You’ve a great idea for an online store and believe there will be a huge demand for the products this store will sell. But, while researching the market you realize your business has to face down competition from well-entrenched businesses in your niche.

It will be a tough ask to survive and prosper.

What do you do?

No, you don’t reject your idea, but find out ways of differentiating your offering from other players in the niche. One of way of doing this is by using content to define your individuality.

Ikea is one of the biggest furniture sellers in the world. Competing with this player can be well-nigh impossible.

But, clearly, Room&Board doesn’t think so.

Room&Board uses visual content to make an impression on its target audience, an audience that might have a soft spot for Ikea, but are looking for other options. It is trying to win the battle image for image, visual for visual, reputation for reputation, credibility for credibility.

Yes, product images are the best sort of visual content. Unbounce has a great article on getting the most out of your images for optimizing your sales efforts; it is a must read on the subject.

Increases Brand Virality

The cut throat world of eCommerce means you take every help you can get to increase awareness for your brand.

For many businesses, social media is turning out to be an effective tactic for fueling brand visibility.

The 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report gives us valuable insights into the minds of marketers and how they view social media:

• 83% of marketers who participated in the study said they integrated social media and traditional marketing activities.
• 92% of marketers said social media marketing led to increased exposure and more website traffic.
• More than 50% of marketers who’ve been using social media for more than three years reported it helped increase their sales figures.

What do these figures tell you? You are not thinking right, if you aren’t using social media; it helps improve chances of your brand going viral.

But, this won’t happen if you don’t implement the right social media strategies for your eCommerce site, and offer shareworthy content.

Yes, content rears its head again. If you want to run with social media, you gotta have content.

A case in point AO.com

Reviews, comprehensive product information (description and images), clear delivery information and Facebook mentions is the kind of shareworthy content that comes together on AO.com enabling the brand to maximize the potential of social media.

Interesting Content Keeps People on your Website

Online shoppers are demanding, discerning, finicky and perennially short of time. Show me an online shopper who isn’t impatient and I will show you a cow that can fly.

But, as an eCommerce business, it is imperative visitors spend time on your site.

So how do you tackle this problem? A solution will help improve your website’s conversion ratio.

What you need to adopt is a two pronged approach – 1. Design a website for impatient users and 2.  Think of ways to keep these users on your site.

Interesting content is one way you can keep users on your site for long.

Zappos saw a 6-30% increase in its conversion rates after it started using videos on its product pages.  But, remember, your videos shouldn’t suck. There is a good product video and a bad one. The latter bores people to death and the former persuades them to stay on your site and, in a best case scenario, buy the product. The Best Product Videos Ever (And Why They Make you Buy) tells you more about videos that can generate a tremendous amount of buyer interest in a product.

I’ve focused on videos here as they are a sure fire way of generating visitor interest. But, you could use a mix of diverse content formats on your products pages to revv up its interest quotient.

Content Drives Deeper Customer Engagement

There are two primary aspects of customer engagement – generating interest and personal interaction. The use of visual content in the form of videos and images sows the seed of customer interest in your products.

But deeper customer engagement is not only about eliciting customer interest in your products but also your brand. How do you get your customers to engage with your brand?

Here’s something you could do? First, get your online store a blog. Use it to publish content regularly. Apply the Pareto Principle here or what is commonly known as the 80/20 principle. Create content that will work hardest to generate income for your eCommerce business; avoid everything else. Track your blog post views to find out which content works and which doesn’t. Make sure you have more of the former and less of the latter.

What should the content be about? Should it be about your business or your products or something else? There is no secret formula here. Why not make it a mix of content that indirectly offers some information about your products; also make sure it offers insights about the domain and focuses on the kind of information that people are looking for.

The Hunter Boot blog is more like the brand’s mouthpiece, which offers information about brand events and advertising campaigns. The blog also makes use of the Facebook Likes widget, Twitter Live Feed widget and the Instagram Live Feed widget to bring social media experiences to the blog.

On the other hand,

The Threadless blog hosts a variety of content that can interest its target readers. The focus is on its products but it also publishes content that is user driven.

The North Face has a blog called Never Stop Exploring. It offers value added information to the North Face Community (people using North Face products).

There is one common thread defining these blogs – The content can be read by a general audience as well. Yes! It is that good.  But what it’s also doing is promoting a product without pushing sales.

The next part is to make sure that the links to all your published content are shared across your social media accounts (You need those too). Think of each piece of content as a ‘conversations facilitator’. You are connecting with your customers, both existing and potential, by way of your content. Great content can lead to some amazing conversations.

Something else you could do is guest blog. First, you need to find the best places to guest blog and follow it up by pitching ideas to the mega-authority sites in your niche that accept guest blogs.

Why is guest blogging important?

Is it because it helps your SEO efforts? Hmm…. yes that too…but the real benefit of guest blogging is ‘reputation and trust’. Blogging on authority sites boosts niche credibility and this is a huge benefit, especially in eCommerce. Prospective customers will be more confident about buying your product.

The presence of your content on an authority site essentially acts like a ‘recommendation’ for your target audience to visit your site and buy from it. A link pointing towards your site is just an ancillary benefit (a big benefit nonetheless).

But this isn’t the end. Keep monitoring results; keep tracking and keep measuring. You’ve got all-in-one dashboards like Cyfe that give you an in-depth view of the efficacy of blogging and other content marketing efforts. This helps you refine your content strategy if it’s not working for you and ensure it delivers the results you are looking for.

Content Humanizes your Brand

There is a great article on Convince and Convert about 9 Ways to Humanize your Brand ; no prizes for guessing the element that plays a huge role in brand humanization.

It is content.

But there is a rider. You will need to identify a thought leader in your organization and center the humanization campaign on him/her.

This person will represent your brand and its branding efforts in the online world. Your brand will be identified with this person and vice versa. All posts on your eCommerce blog will be credited to this person; he/she will reach out to those high authority sites you have identified for guest blogging, it is this person’s author bio that will figure at the end of each guest post. This person will also be in charge of sharing content across all your brand’s pages on social media.

What you are doing is creating a personal brand for your eCommerce brand. Sounds confusing? Think of your brand as two different entities, one personal and another, a sales entity. You are building a personal brand that makes no bones about being aligned with your business entity.

It’s all you. That person who your target customers are interacting with on social media or through the comments sections on your blog is your brand. It’s just that he/she is a human, somebody with a voice of his/her own, somebody with essentially human characteristics and who your target audience can connect with at a personal level. By connecting with this ‘person’ they are also connecting with the brand. Don’t think they don’t know this, but they are quite comfortable with the idea because you’ve taken pains to humanize your brand.

Customers love to do business with people they know. The word ‘know’ is wholly personal. This is why your eCommerce brand needs to humanize and this is why you need the help of content.

But is identifying a thought leader really all that important? Can’t you just add more personality to your brand; give it a voice to call your own, try to associate it with certain human characteristics (humor, assertiveness, empathy etc.)? Of course you can, but in such cases your actions will take their own sweet time to bear fruit.

If you are prepared to wait, go ahead and do it, but if you aren’t, identifying the right person for the job will be a better idea.

Content is King is Passé, Content is Everything Now!

I know how people have been saying content is king for ages now! The problem is there are very people (in the world of digital marketing) who’ve actually realized its importance. Content is not king anymore, it is everything.

Every marketing endeavor dances to the tune of content; the online world is gravitating from marketing as a sales exercise to a relationship building endeavor, and this is why quality content is assuming tremendous importance in eCommerce. It is fuelling growth because it acts as a pivot for meaningful conversations, which over time can lead to sustainable relationships with target customers.

Ignoring content to boost eCommerce site growth is simply a bad idea, something that needs to be avoided at all costs.

( Image Source – Content )

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