How to Create a Product Content Strategy for E-commerce

Hubspot reported that 82% of marketers are 70% more active in inbound marketing in 2021 than in 2020. It improves brand awareness and engagement of the target audience, which contributes to increased ROI and the percentage of successful deals. Investment in advertising campaigns pays off if they generate income in the form of orders.

Content strategy includes a publication plan, blogging, social media pages, website updates. It also includes expanding the range, updating product lines, and special conditions, discounts, promotions. The main goal of a product inbound marketing strategy is to plan tasks and offers for the consumer for a particular period, usually 3-6 months.

Many people underestimate the value of inbound marketing in general, but as the experience of successful global companies shows, it is vital for brand awareness, sales, and consumer engagement. The optimal and popular content formats are short videos (2-5 minutes), text descriptions, photos, and infographics. Synchronizing posts with social media helps in scaling by using word of mouth effect as organic marketing.

Depending on the direction of the e-commerce business, the content plan may differ, although its format is universal for online retail, dropshipping, and classic e-commerce models. The strategy is based on 3 tasks to be completed within the allotted time:

Inbound marketing implies well-coordinated work between different types of promotion. SEO, social networks, thematic groups, blogs, and internal optimization are the basis of the promotion strategy. To build brand awareness and increase sales, create a timeline that clearly defines:

Planning will allow you to focus on the actual tasks without being distracted by the daily content publishing (which can be outsourced). Plan creation and approval save time since pre-prepared material is uploaded to the landing page on schedule and indexed, improving business performance. According to HubSpot's research, promotional videos and brand stories are the most common types of content generated by ad agents.

Optimal content management includes the timely publication of articles and reviews on the blog and the actualization of data in the showcase. Product cards for e-commerce are the main attribute and foundation for businesses. Many retailers and dropshipping representatives make the same mistake that reduces sales to a minimum: they do not optimize cards even for local search engines, let alone global ones such as Google, Yandex, or Bing.

The development of the integration capabilities of business systems (for example, PIM) made publishing and updating content much easier and faster than manual input. Semi-automatic tools allow you to filter by tags assigned to each product group and customize search results by materials, sizes, colors, and other attributes.

For the marketplace, the absence of critical data threatens to ignore the product card by the search engine. On the contrary, an oversaturation of details brings the product to the top of recommendations. PIM makes the process semi-automatic, solving the problem of manually filling hundreds of sentences of the same type. The information is pulled according to metadata directly from the supplier's or manufacturer's database, and customers receive the most accurate descriptions and characteristics.

This system can be used as an addition to the others. CRM works with both customer data and content management on the resource and in mailings. Also, CRM marketing allows you to implement cross-selling, up-selling, and promotional offers. This tool also collects information about user preferences and helps to analyze it. Based on the data obtained, it is easier to adjust the inbound marketing strategy and set the development vector in e-commerce.

A content management system is needed both in blogs and in stores/marketplaces. With its help, you can publish articles, fill out product cards, implement filters and tags, and create entire catalogs. Attributes, hashtags, and keywords are also registered in the system, which indirectly and directly affects technical and external SEO.

It is a system for managing product information directly. It integrates with the supplier's database and third-party services. Its features allow you to update data automatically, pulling up the description and characteristics from the manufacturer to related items directly. At the same time, the data can be broadcast on social networks, advertising offers, and other resources using a link. Tages are another feature for pulling the corresponding text, pictures, and video into cells from the source (DB). A detailed description of the PIM functionality can be found here.

Analytical tools allow you to track the efficiency of both the whole website and individual positions. For example, you can check how much traffic a particular product attracts to your resource, what products are most in-demand among consumers, and which positions are not indexed at all. Also, these tools allow marketers to analyze competitor platforms and identify the best strategy.

SEO is divided into technical and external. Technical includes optimizing the website, template, design, texts, anchors, keys, and more. External includes marketing outside the target resource: posting feature articles, expert opinions, and product reviews with landing page anchors and relevant keywords. The overall SEO performance decreases separately, but the combination of these types will raise the desired resource to the top of the search results.

A successful strategy drives brand awareness, sales, ROI, and business scaling. To create it, you need to follow trends and adjust your e-commerce to market trends. An essential factor is a communication with the consumer because most conflict situations can be avoided with active communication and discussion of problems.

Also, when you plan a content strategy for e-commerce, a priority direction should be updating and detailing information about goods. The better the customer is aware of the product's characteristics, the lower the probability of a return, which is an undeniable advantage for e-commerce.

In the realities of 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic grips the whole world, online stores and marketplaces have become the most promising business. In a lockdown environment, digital consumers have flocked online searching for entertainment content, information, and goods. Now it is vital to give users everything at once more than ever. That is, the priority of the inbound marketing strategy should combine:

If these factors are met, ROI will increase, and the brand will receive the "User-friendly" status as well as organic advertising in social networks, blogs, and forums. Now competition in the online shopping world is increasing daily, so it is most profitable to offer consumers unique products or services. They will distinguish you from the same type of stores and improve conversion, bringing new customers.

A smart e-commerce inbound marketing strategy coupled with optimization tools will scale your business and improve the customer experience.