You may think that marketing is akin to rocket science if you consider how much is written about it. It isn’t. In fact, your strategy can be quite effective with only a few simple instructions. The problem isn’t that it’s difficult. It’s that there is so much noise out there that it can be incredibly hard to find the actual signal and give the right response.
For that reason, in this article, we’re going to explore the easy and straightforward way for you to build up your e-commerce content marketing without all the distracting songs and dances.
Who Are Your Customers?
Know your customers- this is step one. Yes, it sounds obvious and yet a lot of people overlook it. Find out who your customers are. Do a bit of research. Find out what kinds of things they’re interested in through such tools as Audience Insights in Google Ad Manager. There you can specify who you’re looking to pull into your content and find out what they’re already interested in – including other websites. That last bit will be useful later on, so hold onto that.
Explore your audience a bit. Come at it from several sides. If you’re into dog grooming, for example, list that as an interest and then see what the demographics of the people who state that interest is. Then put in those demographics and see where ‘dog grooming’ lists, or whether it lists as all. Add more defining attributes to see if you can hone in on the group more accurately. All this will help give you insights into how your audience actually is, rather than who you think they are.
Find Influencers
As you’ve explored your demographics, you might have noticed websites and people appearing over and over. I hope you kept track of those, as this data can be incredibly useful. You see, there are two ways to try to enhance your audience. You can do it the hard way, where you try to show up one person’s radar at a time, or you can use other people’s networks to get a jump start.
Obviously, the second strategy is much more effective and one of the best places to start with this effort is to find people who overlap with your desired audience. What you’re looking for preferably is people who use influencers, but who have a product different from your own. In this way, your networks can be mutually beneficial.
What kind of people are you looking for? Anybody with a following, really. This might be blogs that discuss products in your sector or people with sizable followings on social media. If you do look at blogs, make sure you install Moz Bar, as this will let you know how these people actually rank.
The goal is to connect with them, so simply start by reaching out.
Create Content
Of course, all of that won’t make much of a difference if the quality of your content is poor. Even if it’s average it won’t do you much good as the internet is full of average texts. Instead, you’re going to need occasional pieces of truly outstanding writing. The aim here is to create the kind of content that other people will link to and share. It is especially beneficial to write an initial link in a chain, in other words, to start a discussion. Hence the importance of being high-quality links. Hence you often need to rely on outsourcing. There is more info to be found on professional writing services.
Note that the goal here is to occasionally create things that are of high quality while creating decent quality the rest of the time to satisfy the people who return to your websites for an occasional update.
Some ideas are:
- The decisive guide section. The goal here is that these guides really are hugely helpful and offer up insights, statistics, and quotes that people wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere. Note that these are big posts. What you’re looking for are posts that range in the thousands or perhaps even the tens of thousands of words.
- Resources. The idea here is that you create a page on which you collect a huge number of links of useful resources that your customers will need. These kinds of pages can do incredibly well online as people are always looking for pages that act as a starting-off point to whatever they need.
- Whatever is already doing well. Have you got a page that is getting more traffic than you anticipated? Go ahead and give yourself a little fist bump. Now go back to it and make it better. After all, it’s already going to be ranking well and it’s already demonstrated to have traction, so why not focus on making it an effective landing page for your site?
- Interviews and expert opinions. The great thing about referencing other people on your content marketing site is that if you do it well, then they’ll often talk about what you did on their own networks. In this way, you don’t just get access to your own network but their networks as well.
Whichever hint you follow there are certain common approaches to their filling that you must abide with. Roughly, every word of your content is valuable. This is the basic tenet of semantic analysis. To justify this to yourself consider that when a person is looking for content they rely on the machine (most likely the Google Search Engine) to present them with relevant results. The approach the machine takes to determine content relevance is quite different from a human perspective. The machine determines some key terms associated with the sequence that the user entered and presents results by an order that is defined by some factors. The factors include, but are more diverse than, popularity, number of references and types of references.
Although some of these qualities are dependent on the overall standing of your platform in the internet community, and hence cannot be influenced in one post, some of these are text-dependent. Thus you can choose your texts components in such a way to maximize their status within the search results. Thus we come back to semantic analysis. Semantic analysis is the component of the SEO system which is responsible for determining the search relevance of a post based on the words and their combinations present in the contribution.
There are many tools for performing semantic analysis but their functionality is similar. You enter the words whose value you want to check and they give you the words popularity and, adverbial, “power” to influence the machine. Also, as this is crucial, any entered concept ties to other concepts that are commonly found with it on the internet. Judging the relevance of presented options gives you a chance to see which conceptual ties the people look for and the search engine recognizes. By modifying your text in accordance with the semantic analysis you can maximize its relevance.
On the other hand, additionally to the vocabulary of your text being relevant you may wish to consider the appeal of the attitude of your text to the people. Persons tend to cite only those pieces they agree with. The agreement, in turn, is most determined by the shared emotional outlook. Luckily, there are ways to determine emotional trends for marketing. This is called sentiment analysis.
This is the newest form of a web marketing tool, still in its developmental stages. This is only more reasons to apply it. Because it is still considered a technical tool most marketing specialists do not yet use it. You can, and thus upscale your competitors. Sentiment analysis works on identifying subjective trends in writing contextualized by topics. Thus an accurate usage of it allows for an option to evaluate whether you opinion conforms to the public’s opinion regarding the issue. Of course, you do not need to conform. Many influencers are powerful because they redefine public opinion. Opposition is cool. Yet you have to know the stance you are taking in determining your content marketing strategy. You must pay attention to the tools and opinions you voice, especially considering the social movements that are defining the internet scape today.
Rinse And Repeat (Again And Again)
Building an online reputation in this way can take time – particularly if you’re hoping to rank well for search purposes. So from here on in you just have to keep on repeating the above process. It can take a while to start showing up on people’s radars and it can take a few times of showing up before people start recognizing you for who you are.
Therefore, content marketing is a long-term strategy. More importantly, it goes well with other strategies to get exposure. Don’t shy away from buying the occasional burst of AdWords and Facebook adverts – particularly if a piece of content is doing exceptionally well.
Also, a lot of traffic gets lost because of poorly built sites. Don’t let that happen. Always be monitoring such things as bounce rates and dwell times. These are important numbers as they tell you how often people don’t stick around on your site for very long.
Note that different articles will have different bounce rates. If, however, your whole site has a pretty consistent bounce rate then that can signal that you’ve got a design problem that you need to tackle.
Make sure you do, as even a 10% reduction in bounce rates can make a huge difference to your bottom line if you’re getting significant amounts of traffic.
Make Your Users Love Your Site
The design commentary needs more elaboration. It is the case that the most important thing about website visits and user retention is the experience people have browsing your content. We discussed your contents filler, now let’s pay attention to the browsing experience. User Experience Design, or simply UX, is a collection of tools that let you evaluate how supportive your website is for browsing.
UX analysis allows you to quantize the user behavior on your pages. In general, it allows you to see if certain functional components of your platform stand in the way of people enjoying it. If such issues arise designers also have standard solutions. More specifically, this form of analysis may reveal the browsing approach that people take to your content. It can suggest to you how to tie posts together while paying attention to the user’s own way of stringing your content.
Conceptualizing user behavior in a diagrammatic form enables you to see things from a perspective surpassing that of semantic and sentiment analysis. In a certain way, it visualizes the user’s mode of thought. Given this mode of thought you can manipulate users content retention, and to determine the necessary and sufficient levels of content quality and depth necessary for its desired position in the conceptual chain.
Conclusion, and What’s Next
In this article, we have given hints on how to write your content, how to decide on topics to talk about, and how to structure your blog to make it relevant for the users. Additionally, we covered topics about page design and good SEO practices. Yet we haven’t covered the greatest benefit of a complete combination of all these factors into a working coherent system. Consider that often, as we have mentioned, this requires professional editing. There are highly regarded services that allow for stable content with high quality.
If all the elements are put together well then you can expect certain stability of your resource. This stability allows you to predict the SEO and popularity components of your page. Predictive analytics is crucial for determining a long-term marketing strategy. It is also important for capitalizing on your outreach and link development. In other words, with a great content structure and statistics, you can sell your product in the future. Thus you can be certain of the capital values the page will bring next.
Although predictive analytics is more hype in classical marketing it is another thing that may discern you from competitors. The future quantitative outlook may break you away from competition because unlike everyone else you will be able to make a nuanced long-term plan for your project.
