Content Marketing for E-Commerce Sites

[b4004040]

Let's have a real discussion about content marketing for B2B and B2C e-commerce sites.

As an SEO/inbound marketer (these days, I'm not sure what to call myself other than my first name), it's part of my job to keep a pulse on what's going on in the online marketing community. My daily routine starts with checking several sites for news/discussion (Moz, Inbound.org, SearchEngineLand, etc). Anyone actively involved in the community knows the word "content" appears in more articles than any other word (ok, maybe there a few others). Want to increase brand awareness? Generate content. Want to drive more traffic to your site? Generate content. Want to build quality links? Generate content. Want to discover the Higgs particle before the physicists? Generate content (and distribute to the right audience, so not to the chemists - ok maybe to the chemists, they're a related audience). Content, content, content, we're told! Yes I did see the Rand's WBF from a couple months back about content-less marketing, but frankly his suggestions fall under the traditional model of advertising and word-of-mouth. We're online marketers baby, we're expanding and changing the traditional model - with content!

Enough of content marketing about content marketing. Let's see some content marketing for the small B2C, mom n' pop client who sells gardening tools. Let's see the amazing infographic you made for your local pizzeria client that drove traffic to their site. Let's see the Q+A discussion thread you identified and contributed to as means to display 'market leadership' in your niche of home air purifiers.

Look, I love the idea of content marketing to increase brand awareness and drive traffic. Displaying market leadership by answering questions and offering something beneficial to your target audience should be the way to grow business (along with having a good product/service, I guess). But it's much easier said than done. And to be clear, I never expected otherwise. The motivation for this post was to start a discussion about real-world, applied content marketing, not content marketing about content marketing.

Let the conversation begin.

[OnlineMarketingGuy]

Rule #1: A company MUST be 110% committed to the resources for content.

Rule#2: Inbound content traffic is the weakest form of traffic from a conversion perspective.

Rule#3: Because of Rule #2, you must change the process in which you convert.

Most of my clients are smaller ecommerce sites. While content is king, and content marketing drives traffic, remember what we learned about SEO that took 15 years to figure out: It's not just about traffic.

Basically, I convert my client's funnels from a click-->conversion process to a click-->lead acquisition-->lead nurture-->conversion process.  Content is a great way to acquire leads, even if your site is an ecommerce site and regardless if it is B2B or B2C or its size.

This means you need to integrate all your promotional tactics into a comprehensive plan that marries SEO, content, email, and ecommerce into one, unified program.

Let's define a lead as an email address for now.

A few ideas to generate leads from content:

1. Offers - About the best way to get anyone's attention. Consider a free download or a coupon that you need to be sent via email. FREE is good.
2. Comments - I am always asked what is the best commenting system. My response is ALWAYS the one that allows you to own the community. So, comment systems like disqus,etc, I ignore. They are GREAT from a community standpoint, but you can't capture the email address from the person leaving the comment. So, KISS, and make sure that you can acquire the commentors email address.
3. Free Subscriptions to content

Now that you have their email address, you can create campaigns that strenghten your value propositions and get people into a buying state of mind. Then, go for the kill and ask for the sale! Convert!

Best,
Guy

P.S. Side Note: IMO, gone are the days that you treat each tactic as its own silo. They need to be fully integrated with each other in order for your marketing to convert.

[Felip3]

Yes I agree with you, content marketing it's much more complex than seems like, also gets harder depends on your product.

I think the solution for your gardening tools example would be generate "how to" content... In our company we sell tools, recently our copywriter did a post with the title: How it Works and How to Use a Pocket-Hole Jig in the post you can see links to the product page.

Does any one else have real-world application of Content Marketing for E-Commerce Sites?

I think will be very nice if we can get together on this post a few of those examples.