How To Create an Effective Ecommerce Content Marketing Plan for Your New Business

It’s exciting to build and complete your first online store.

You started your journey to the top of the ecommerce sales mountain. You’ll need some tools to get there, and digital marketing is an outstanding tool.

According to HubSpot’s report on the state of marketing in 2021, 82% of B2C marketers actively use content marketing in their businesses. This number was 70% in 2020. This alone tells us how valuable it can be to have an ecommerce content marketing plan for your business.

So what if you don’t have one yet? What can you do to create a content marketing strategy?

If you’re just getting started, fear not. You’re not alone. The process of building a strategy may seem daunting, but we’ll walk you through it step-by-step until you master it.

Are you ready to build your first content marketing strategy?

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• What an ecommerce content marketing plan is.
• How to create an ecommerce content marketing plan.
• Other options you can explore outside of content marketing.

Jump ahead to whichever topic interests you:

• Ecommerce Content Marketing 101
• Create Ecommerce Content
• How To Market an Ecommerce Store in the Beginning Without Content Marketing
• Final Thoughts: How To Create an Effective Ecommerce Content Marketing Plan

Ecommerce Content Marketing 101

An ecommerce content marketing plan is a blueprint you can use as a marketer to build an audience and convert them into new customers. With a plan, you don’t just get to grow your online business or make profits. You also bring structure and coherence to your business.

An ecommerce content marketing plan will build customer trust for your brand, position you as a subject authority, and help you solve the problems and pain points of your customers.

Let’s break it down a little further.

An ecommerce content marketing plan will help you determine:

• Who your content creators are.
• Reasons for content creation.
• Who your target market is.
• How to schedule and publish your content online.
• A promotion strategy for your content.
• Responses to look out for from your target audience.
• How to measure success.

Benefits of Ecommerce Content Marketing

You have much to gain from content marketing efforts for your ecommerce business. In fact, it's considered an ecommerce website best practice.

Here’s a walkthrough of some benefits business owners can enjoy from a content marketing strategy:

• A content strategy cuts down your costs.
• A content marketing strategy helps you set up your business goals and objectives.
• A content strategy helps you track progress on your ecommerce website.
• Good content strategy drives traffic to your ecommerce store and increases conversions.

Now that you know what a content strategy is and why you should have one for your business, let’s explore some elements you need to build one.

Create Ecommerce Content

• Create a persona for your target audience(s).
• Choose your platform.
• Set your content goals.
• Research and create content.
• Publish content and monitor metrics.

Like any other aspect of your ecommerce business, you need a strategy for your content. You can adapt your approach to changing market needs, but you’ll always follow some key guidelines. Here’s how you create content:

Create a Persona for Your Target Audience(s)

To tailor your ecommerce content to your ideal customer, you must first know who they are.

Develop buyer personas around your target customer. A persona is a fictional character representing your ideal buyer through the buyer's journey, actual data, and marketing insights.

A good rule of thumb is to dial down on specifics with each persona.

How do you do that?

Here are some general features your personas can have:

• Demographics like age and gender.
• Personality to help identify their behaviors and habits.
• Motivation — what drives their purchasing decisions.
• Problems they are trying to solve or needs they want to meet.

Choose Your Platform

Find out where your customers hang out. Every buyer persona consumes content differently, and you will find patterns. Once you figure out how your customers consume content, you can find a suitable platform to reach them.

Need a guide on how to choose a platform? Ask yourself these questions:

• What’s the most popular social media platform your customers use?
• Do they have any unique preferences on how they consume content?
• What type of device do your ideal customers use the most?
• How long do users stay on their favorite types of content?

Set Your Content Goals

Set your content goals to get your potential customers to enter your sales funnel. Your ecommerce product will play a massive role in the goals you set.

For example, you may craft your content around financial management and market your product to website visitors if you’re selling accounting software.

Many ecommerce brands produce content for one of four main reasons:

• To rank high on the search engine results page (SERPs).
• To gain backlinks.
• To educate and inform your audience.
• To increase social engagement.

Which one’s yours?

Research and Create Content

Having set up the ideal foundation for your content strategy, you can now conduct research and create content for your customers. Create the type of content they love.

It could be:

• Podcasts.
• Product reviews.
• YouTube videos and other video content.
• User-generated content like forums, testimonials, and customer stories.
• Webinars.

Key activities you can perform early on include keyword research, SEO strategies, and competitor analysis. Beyond that, you can brainstorm or use tools like Google Trends to monitor trending content.

At this stage, you should also create a content calendar to schedule your posts. Scheduling keeps your posting regular, contributing to a high-quality ranking of your ecommerce website.

Publish Content and Monitor Metrics

Having gone through this entire process, you’re now ready to publish your content. You can post your content to:

• Your blog.
• A white paper.
• Social media — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn.
• Infographics.
• Email marketing.

With eight out of every ten companies investing in social media marketing, that could be an excellent place to start. Using your scheduler, you can post to your pages as frequently as you like.

Monitor your metrics and measure your success based on your content goals. Metrics help you fine-tune your strategy until you reach optimum sales. They will also help you determine your return on investment. You can use measures such as:

• Conversion rates.
• Time spent on page.
• Shares on social media.
• Engagement.
• Backlinks.

How To Market an Ecommerce Store in the Beginning Without Content Marketing

It’s pretty challenging to start ecommerce companies without content marketing. After all, how will people know about you or your products? How will you convert page visitors into repeat customers?

But it’s doable. You can try:

• Paid social media marketing campaigns.
• Influencer marketing.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC).
• Referrals.
• Guest posts.

Final Thoughts: How To Create an Effective Ecommerce Content Marketing Plan

An ecommerce content marketing plan is a crucial cornerstone for achieving your business goals with your website. If you follow all these steps above, you can build an effective content strategy for your business. Combine it with other marketing techniques, and there’s no stopping your business growth.

Although good content strategies are outstanding, factors such as website speed and SEO optimization also boost your ecommerce ROI.

You can make a unique, beautiful store quickly with Managed WooCommerce. Build your WooCommerce store today and get ahead of your competition.