The Importance of Content in E-commerce – Why Should Ecommerce Stores Invest in Content Marketing in 2021?
Much has been written on the subject of content marketing in recent years, but we’ve found there’s still a lot of confusion around the subject.
Whether it be as part of an SEO strategy or a branding exercise, we think it has amazing potential to create organic reach for many businesses.
That’s why today we’re going to give you our view of why content marketing is worth investing in for South African e-commerce businesses in 2021.
First, we’ll go over what the point is of content marketing in an e-commerce web site’s context and then we’ll go over why we think it’s an amazing long-term investment for many different kinds of e-commerce stores.
What is The Role of Content Marketing in Ecommerce Businesses?
First off, let’s break it down.
What is content marketing, and what’s the overall purpose behind it?
Well, we think the Content Marketing Institute, a leading educational and training business in the field, puts it best:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
In other words, it’s consistently putting out content that your customers find valuable to create an “ecosystem” of information around your site, which ultimately drives sales by keeping them engaged with your site and your brand.
What Makes a Good Content Marketing Strategy?
There are three things we further want to highlight from their definition, that we think neatly summarise what makes up a good content marketing strategy:
1. Content needs to be put out consistently.
Consistency is key, for two reasons. Firstly, it forces you to keep working on the content marketing strategy.
If you don’t, it’s all too easy to get distracted by other tasks and let content marketing fall by the wayside. You won’t see real results unless you put in the time and effort consistently.
2. Content marketing needs to be aimed at a clearly defined audience.
It doesn’t help driving a million people to your site if not one of them is a potential customer. Whilst driving traffic is always the main concern, a close second is driving quality traffic with a high potential to convert.
3. Content marketing’s ultimate purpose is to drive bottom-line value (sales).
We don’t believe in any form of marketing that’s not somehow measurable down to the level of bottom-line value.
In the digital age, there’s simply no excuse not to. That’s why you should always be considering the best kinds of content to focus on that a) drive traffic (naturally) but also (b) drive sales.
Why is Content Marketing Important for E-commerce Businesses?
So, now that we know what content marketing is, and what makes a good content marketing strategy we can get to the heart of the matter.
Why should you invest in a content marketing strategy, when there are much better options for creating short term growth?
Well, the simple answer is it’s unparalleled as a vehicle for long-term, sustainable, growth in the new age of digital marketing.
Reason 1: Marketing is Evolving
Much to the chagrin of marketers everywhere, consumers keep changing the way they engage with marketing materials.
In many ways, the average consumer globally is getting smarter in terms of knowing when somebody is trying to market to them.
That’s not to say this avenue of marketing is completely dead, as long as there is demand for products there will still be demand for direct advertising to help people find them.
What we mean, then, is that it’s increasingly less viable as the primary means of marketing your business.
In this evolving landscape, businesses are scrambling to find new ways of bringing in customers to fill this void.
Content marketing presents a great opportunity to do just that, letting organic search and traffic take the place of traditional “hard-sell” marketing.
Reason 2: Content for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
SEO is an often overused and misunderstood term, but an invaluable digital marketing tool.
What it is can be broken down from the name: optimising your website for search engines.
What this means in practice is a little more complicated.
In reality, SEO is a delicate balancing act between creating web pages that appeal to human being and pages that appeal to search engine crawlers (we’re looking at you, Google bot).
Modern search engine algorithms use both of those to appraise how relevant a given web page is to a consumer, and therefore how highly to rank it when people use the platform to search a relevant phrase.
This is where content marketing comes in.
Firstly, it lets you answer the common questions people have about our brand and generally add value to your consumer’s lives, making it great for people.
Secondly, by applying some basic SEO practices we can get crawlers to love the content too. Mostly this revolves around ensuring it’s formatted correctly and phrased in a search engine friendly way.
Reason 3: A Vehicle for Digital Branding
A lot of branding for retail businesses has, in the past, been an in-person experiential affair.
The experience of walking into a retail outlet. The interactions with the staff, the general vibe and atmosphere of the place and a million other tiny nuances.
What if we take that away, though?
Well, there’s a void, certainly, that marketers need to try and fill if they want to reap the rewards of branding (brand recognition and brand loyalty).
Content marketing is also a great vehicle for this.
It’s an amazing platform for establishing yourself as a thought leader in a particular space, or simply giving rich information about what your business sells and what you stand for.
What’s more, this kind of content marketing strategy can sometimes conflict with what’s best for SEO, but it can also often be run simultaneously to benefit both.
Disadvantages of Content Marketing for E-commerce
As with most things, it’s not all good news.
1) It Takes Time (A Long Time)
The main disadvantage of content marketing is that it’s a long-term process.
If you’re looking for results right now, or your business is struggling to stay afloat, you’re better off looking elsewhere.
As a general guideline, it can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months for a content piece to reach its full ranking potential in the Google algorithm
In the world of business, that’s an insanely long time.
So that’s why we recommend all of our clients get the fundamentals of their digital marketing strategy down first.
Paid search and social media marketing are both much better for creating instant results, so we typically always start with those.
2) It’s Hard to Get Right
The second thing we’d caution against is that it can be tricky to do well.
Writing compelling content is not easy, and on top of that compelling content itself is not enough to do well in the search algorithms.
As we mentioned, what appeals to people and crawlers can be wildly different.
This is why we recommend thinking of content marketing as a long term investment. It’s likely going to be expensive to do it properly, and doing it poorly will yield almost no results at all.
To make matters worse, consider the lead time above. If your strategy is not working, it could take months to know for sure.
All of this leads to our general advice on the subject of content marketing: Invest early but invest last. 4
I.e., start your content marketing strategy sooner (rather than later) but ensure you have the fundamentals down and your revenue flow is stable before investing in it.
Summary – The Importance of Content in Ecommerce
Content marketing is an amazing vehicle for tackling many of the challenges associated with digital marketing in today’s day and age.
Marketers are faced with an increasingly complex world and consumer base and should be looking at innovative new techniques like content marketing to drive real value for the business and for their customers.
It’s a long-term investment, so if you’re considering it as an avenue for marketing your e-commerce business, we recommend starting as soon as possible.
We hope this helped you understand the subject better, and starts you on your way to determining if content marketing is right for your e-commerce business.
If you enjoyed this article or found it helpful, check out more e-commerce marketing content on the inSyte blog or listen to the inSyte Podcast.
This article was brought to you by Syte.
We’re a specialist e-commerce digital marketing agency dedicated to driving up your bottom line.
We run content marketing strategies for a variety of clients across many industries. If you’re interested in hearing what we could do for your business, feel free to reach out with the form below or check out our case studies page to see what we’ve been able to do for other clients.
