When you set up your Shopify store, you need to actively search for and draw in clients to sell your wares to.
Therefore, you need to craft content that appeals to your target market and offers them value. In other words, your content shouldn’t revolve around praising your products. Rather, create informative content in the form of guides, ebooks, and videos.
They can be about the industry in general or specific problems that your products address. With such quality content, your audience holds your brand in high esteem when it comes to that industry or niche.
This means that you will be the go-to for anything in that niche. Apart from building trust for your brand, creating consistently quality content increases the valuable organic traffic to your Shopify store, heightening your chances of converting. How does it do this?
Optimized quality content ranks well on search engine results pages. In this article, we show you how to leverage content marketing to amplify the success of your Shopify online store.
Ways To Boost Your Shopify Store With Content Marketing
Many online businesses spend a considerable amount of money on pay-per-click or other types of ads. While this might manifest as a small uptick in traffic to your Shopify store, it doesn’t drum up the valuable organic traffic you desire.
However, with content marketing, you spend considerably less to get a tangible gain by taking advantage of Search Engine Optimization or SEO and other smart internet marketing strategies through content. Let’s take a closer look at what you can do to kick some life into your content marketing strategy.
Craft Unique Content
This seems like cliche advice. But there’s a reason it’s given so often; it’s common sense. Everyone in your niche is vying to capture the same audience.
You, therefore, have to find a way of separating your brand from the chaff. So, if you have a blog, writing generic 500-word posts amounts to zilch. You need to put some thought into the kind of content you’re offering to your audience.
Longer posts shed sufficient light on a topic so that the audience can glean enough value from them. However, don’t make these posts so long that your audience loses interest halfway through the content. If you’re creating images or videos as your content, you should ensure that they’re of the highest quality.
You can make the videos unique by applying motion graphics and animation, capturing and retaining the attention of the audience. With the ideal content, you stand a better chance of attracting more leads and eventually converting them into sales.
Incorporate Storytelling In Your Content
Plenty of the content that businesses put on their blogs is centered around informing and educating the audience about the different aspects of the product.
Some even go as far as including other touchpoints in the general industry. Now, this isn’t a bad thing. We’ve actually advocated for it earlier in this article. However, we’ve also mentioned that the market is saturated. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to change tack.
One effective way of doing so is by incorporating storytelling into your content. This kind of content enables you to leave a personal impression on each and every one of your target audiences. And how do you tell stories with your content? Why not start with your own story?
Customers like to know the origins of the brand and how you came to be where you are today.
They relate to these kinds of stories because they humanize the brand, stripping it of the detached character associated with some enterprises. Additionally, you can have interviews with people who have some pull in your industry. If this doesn’t seem feasible, you can interview customers who have successfully used your products.
This draws in new clients that have been straddling the fence regarding your offerings.
Guest Posting
Another aspect of content marketing that brings value to your Shopify store is tapping into the influence of more successful and renowned industry brands.
There are several authority sites that people trust when it comes to the niche that your products fall in. If you can find an opportunity to feature some of your created content on these sites, your brand’s association with these authority sites is like a stamp of approval. Your target market will pick more interest in what you have to offer.
If you’re just starting out, you need to reach out to sites that have more traction in your field and wield some authority. Non-paid guest blogging opportunities at this stage are more feasible and are a great way to get started with this content marketing strategy.
If you don’t have any connections in the industry – after all, you’re just starting out – you can actively cultivate these connections by leaving comments on more established blogs.
Additionally, you can become active on social media, interacting with authority names. When you finally reach out to them for a guest posting opportunity, you won’t be a completely new name.
Alternatively, you can query a search engine to find these guest posting opportunities. A simple “niche + write for us” query brings up several results of sites in your niche that welcome posts from other people. Use this chance to get your name out there.
Once you get your brand name on one authority site, you are more likely to get more traffic to your Shopify store. By getting more guest posting opportunities, your content will reach a broader audience. This not only increases the traffic to your store but also builds the rep of your brand name.
Embrace The Power Of Video Content
97 percent of marketers believe that consumers watch videos about products before proceeding to acquire them. In the United States alone, over 75 million people watch online videos every day.
This stunning stat shows why several businesses heavily incorporate video in their content marketing strategy. Video can be used in different kinds of content. You can embed videos into your blog post to make them more engaging.
Furthermore, your Shopify theme more than likely allows you to add a video on your products page. If it doesn’t, you're missing out on the impact video has on the growth of your Shopify store. After all, other marketers who use it grow their revenue 49 percent faster.
We talked about the value of using your content to sell stories. Video plays a big role in doing so. While your audience might like reading stories about people who’ve used your products or about your brand’s journey, they will definitely prefer to watch videos of the same.
The audience is 95 percent more likely to retain the message in your videos compared to only 10 percent when it comes to plain text. Apart from telling stories with your videos, you can also use the medium to show your audience how to use your products and get the most out of them.
Use Social Media To Prop Up Your Content Marketing Strategy
When you create pieces of content that are good engaging and meaty, you need to get it out to your audience so that it can achieve its potential. One of the best ways to get this content out is by using social media marketing.
These social media platforms provide an extensive base of your target audience. Facebook alone is expected to host close to 1.7 billion users on its platform. With such a large number of people, you are assured of finding a considerable portion of your target audience on a single platform.
Uploading content on social media also allows you to interact with your customers regarding the content of your posts. This interaction creates a closer bond and also reels in new customers.
Additionally, the viral nature of social media reduces your input in actively marketing your content. Video content dovetails well with the mechanics of social media. Once you post your content, your audience pushes it for you, achieving an even greater reach than you would get from other forms of promoting your content.
With your brand or link to your Shopify store included in the content, this viral spread of your content will lead to more visits to the store and increase your sales and referrals. The numbers support this.
On social media, audiences prefer graphic content compared to text. The former garners 53 percent more likes.
Furthermore, graphic content has an 84 percent click-through rate. With the large size of your social media audience, the numbers look great when it comes to boosting visits to your Shopify store. And what it all boils down to is the fact that using social media to market your content builds loyalty with your target audience.
The platforms are a good place to cultivate your brand ethos and bond with customers and potential clients.
Use Email Marketing and Tools
Meanwhile, there are also a number of benefits to using email marketing to promote your content. First, email allows you to reach a targeted audience, as you can send your messages only to people who have opted in to receive them. This means that you can be sure that your emails are being sent to people who are interested in your content.
Secondly, email has some of the highest open and click-through rates of any marketing channel. This means that your messages are more likely to be seen and acted upon by your audience.
Then, it s a cost-effective way to promote your content, as there are many free or low-cost email marketing tools available - this is perfect for new Shopify store owners with limited budgets.
Finally, using email marketing tools make it easy to track the success of your campaigns, so you can see how many people are opening and clicking on the content you create, and make adjustments as needed.
Sending emails to promote your content can drive traffic to your website or blog, as readers click on links in your emails to learn more. This can help increase your website's visibility, and reach, and helps your overall SEO.
In A Nutshell
When you need to grow your online store, you have to do a lot more than choose an appropriate Shopify theme with all the bells and whistles that make it easy to run.
To advance the progress of your store, you need to invest time and resources into content marketing. There are various ways you can market content to bring positive attention to your Shopify store.
You need to craft unique content, incorporating storytelling techniques to make it compelling.
In the same breath, look for authority sites where you can present this content to a wider audience. Another way to use content marketing is by embracing the power of social media.
These platforms give you unparalleled access to a large market base. Social media does a particularly good job of promoting your video content – the kind of content that audiences prefer.
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