What content strategy to stimulate sales on an e-commerce site?

Using content to drive online sales is a strategy that is now used by many business owners to reach new audiences, build brand awareness, and deliver valuable information to new customers and loyal ones.

Earlier online shopping was viewed with suspicion and concern, today the majority of people prefer a digital storefront to a real storefront. With consistent double-digit growth year after year, e-commerce has the potential to be the primary arena for buying and selling.

A whole host of new competitors can appear overnight in online shopping and even big-name brands struggle to retain customer loyalty.

In this highly competitive environment, originality is privileged but not always necessary. With better marketing and more money, websites that steal the format and even the product of others come out on top.

While some companies see content as a weapon to attract customers from their competitors, others use it to expand their customer base and build brand awareness.

What content strategy for your e-commerce site?

Content is the lifeblood of online marketing, the heir to billboard and newspaper advertising. It exists in every nook and cranny of the web, wherever there are eyes to see it.

Where there is no traffic, the content creates and sustains it. Where there is traffic, content broadens and diversifies it considerably. With increasing sales and huge savings, content marketing is the new way to move a product forward.

Used to being spammed with promotional offers and one-off deals that last forever, the modern customer only rewards useful content with their attention. It can come in a variety of forms, from text to video, but should be relevant, valuable, consistent, clear, and engaging.

Another way of looking at it is to think of the whole Internet as a market. Users are consumers and content developers are producers. This market operates on the same principles as any other market: supply and demand. The product (content) differs in quality and meets different consumer needs. These, in turn, eagerly seek out content that suits them.

Content is the addition to the product that creates a story. The story, in turn, “sells” the product to its target audience. It starts as soon as you choose a website name and URL. The content should therefore answer a few key questions, such as:

• Who are you and what exactly are you doing?
• Why are you better than your competition? Why should I choose you?
• Who are your services/products for?
• How much do they cost?
• How do they work? Will they be beneficial for the user?
• What do you expect from the user?
• What will be the impact on the lives of customers?

To create the ideal content for your eCommerce site, you need to identify and understand your visitor and customer base. By playing on their needs, wants and preferences, you will be able to create engagement. An engaged customer not only buys your products but participates in the community that surrounds your brand and organically increases your visibility through actions.

Content-Type

There are many types of content that can be used to reach out to and attract customers. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses and makes the best use of its differences to diversify the clientele.

From there, a larger process of identifying your new customer base and creating content that caters to them begins. With each step, your sales will increase and your business will grow …

What types of content to do for an e-commerce site?

1) Textual content

The most common among content types, the text is used to convey additional information about a product, its history, uses, etc.

While text should always be present, the degree of its presence and the type of text largely depend on the product you are selling. For example, a customer interested in purchasing clothing or fashion products may not respond to long descriptions. He may be drawn to stories that feature movie stars and music idols wearing the same clothes.

Indeed, a complete and personalized product sheet will allow visitors to have all the information they were looking for and reassure the purchase.

In addition, the creation of a “blog” within your website will allow you to integrate a significant amount of content (via SEO: study of keywords, in-depth work on text optimization, semantics…)

The most successful textual content is represented by:

Case studies;
Lists;
Critics;
Guides.
Each of them is aimed at a certain type of audience and is suitable for specific products.

2) Images

In content marketing , images are truly worth a thousand words. However, some of these words are keywords and repeated phrases. If images are essential today to attract customers, they must always be accompanied by text and additional information:

Description of the offer
“ALT” tags
Images are important, as they will reassure the prospect of his purchase and help him project himself with your offer.

Many visitors use Google Images to refine their searches, hence the importance that your images are well optimized and well referenced to increase their visibility on this search mode!

In addition, most customers retain information about a product when the presentation includes relevant images.

3) Infographic

Computer graphics, which makes it possible to attract a more specialized audience, is a medium comprising text and images.

This type of content provides information such as statistical data, trends, or timelines. With increased relevance and the ability to be cited on other websites, infographics are a great way to increase your website’s authority and rank.

4) Videos

The same set of statistics suggests that all internet traffic is made up of videos, with projections only suggesting an increase in the future. Simply put, videos are shareable. They captivate prospects and create attraction.

Videos are easy to watch and give more information than a single image.

From the perspective of customers, four times as many prefer to watch a video about a product rather than read about it.

Organic traffic and paid traffic

The best way to quantify attention is traffic – whether organic or paid.

Organic traffic: comes from social media sites, SEO traffic from other sites, search engines, or direct traffic.
Paid traffic: comes from paid promotions of your site on other sites, which is Facebook’s business model and represents a large portion of Google’s revenue.
Search engines such as Google are among the major engines and influencers in the online environment. When people want to find out more information about a certain type of product or the topics surrounding it, they “Googlelise” it. Search engines work with algorithms and a focus on keywords – sets of words that have a high degree of relevance.

E-commerce sites use it as a strategy to get ahead of their competitors and expand their customer base.

Promoted, shared, and advertised through many types of content, your eCommerce site will eventually generate its own traffic.

At every step of the buying and selling process, relevant content can boost your online sales and make your brand stand out among others.

Content marketing has become one of the most important strategies in today’s market, as it creates and distributes valuable and relevant information and aims to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.