Have you been looking for a simple marketing plan template to follow in your eCommerce business?
Well, you are in luck! Today, we are sharing a marketing template that will take you from a content marketing beginner to a pro eCommerce content creator in no time.
Why eCommerce Companies Need Content Marketing
Content marketing provides many benefits to eCommerce companies, including higher conversion rates and lower customer acquisition costs.
For example, according to Kapost, websites that use content marketing have a 2.9% conversion rate, compared to the 0.5% conversion rate of websites that do not.
That’s almost 6x the conversions you could be missing out on if you do not use content marketing!
If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of content marketing for eCommerce companies, we have a full article on that here.
But if you are ready to learn how to create content that drives traffic and conversions, just keep reading!
7-Step eCommerce Content Marketing Plan Template
Follow this 7-step template to create a successful content marketing plan for your eCommerce business.
Step 1: Decide on Your Main Goal
While content marketing can help you accomplish many things, you need to decide on your main goal first.
It will help you tailor your strategy and avoid wasting resources on marketing targets that are not as important to your bottom line.
This approach is known as quant-based marketing: working backward from your goal to the steps required to accomplish it.
Step 2: Create a Buyer Persona
Buyer personas are in-depth descriptions of your target customers.
They help you deliver the right content to the right customer, at the right time.
If you already have customers, consider sending out a survey. To encourage participation, you can offer your customers a chance to win an Amazon gift card in exchange for answering your questions.
If you do not have customers yet, do some target audience research of your own.
Go beyond demographic factors like age and gender. What is your target customer interested in? What are their main pain points? Where do they usually hang out online?
Step 3: Take Advantage of Your Competitor’s Weaknesses
Then turn them into your strengths.
Doing competitor research will help you identify opportunities that you would have otherwise missed.
One way to do this is to check out review sites like Yelp and Amazon to see what customers are complaining about (and what you can do better).
Step 4: Create a Keyword Research Plan
To climb through Google’s rankings, you are going to need to know a thing or two about keywords.
Your target keywords are phrases customers use to look for the product or service you offer.
You can get started by using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs.
Ahrefs will help you identify keywords your competitors already rank for and decide how difficult it would be to outrank the competitor for that keyword.
Step 5: Create Truly Valuable Content
Put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes. What would they want to know before buying your product?
Then, look at other articles written on the topic and see what you can do better.
Can you make a more in-depth how-to guide? Can you put a unique spin on something that has been done a hundred times before?
You can also use a tool like BuzzSumo to find the most shared content about your topic.
Or, check out Q&A sites like Quora, to find out what your customer’s most frequently asked questions are.
Step 6: Decide on Your Main Promotion Method
There are a couple of things you can do to get the word out about your content: social media, email marketing, influencer marketing… The possibilities are endless.
We recommend focusing on search engine optimization (SEO).
Why? For one, SEO and content marketing complement each other perfectly. Google loves websites that regularly publish high-quality content!
SEO is also incredibly cost-effective and boasts a multitude of other benefits you can read about in this post.
Step 7: Choose the Right eCommerce Platform
Some eCommerce platforms are better than others when it comes to content marketing.
If you are serious about content marketing, your choice will come down to the support and resources these platforms provide for search engine optimization.
You need to be able to create categories, sub-categories, modify the URLs, and provide your customers with a great overall user experience.
Whether you choose Shopify, WooCommerce, or BigCommerce, make sure it supports the SEO functionality you need to make the most out of content marketing.
How HandmadeSEO Can Help
Having a content marketing plan template is great, but having a whole team of content marketing experts on your side is better!
Here at Handmade SEO, we create and execute complete content marketing strategies that help drive traffic and conversions for your eCommerce website.
Want to see how we can work together?
