One of the most underrated tactics that Shopify stores often miss out on leveraging is content marketing. Content marketing involves using content (like blogs and videos) to promote your brand, stimulating interest in your products through these engaging content pieces.
With content, you can engage your potential customers, show them why your brand matters most, use the content to increase your search engine ranking, and ultimately, provide a unique shopping experience.
But, what kind of content can you create and how can you start?
We listed 8 content marketing strategies you can easily implement to acquire new customers easily and provide a more unique experience for your shoppers.
8 eCommerce Content Marketing Tactics
1. Blog about the lifestyle you promote
For eCommerce brands, blogging is a way to inform customers about the lifestyle your products promote and help them live a certain way. For instance, a fitness brand can make blogs about healthy foods or guides to keto or paleo diets. Many consumers usually just look at reviews and product pictures when making a decision about the product they want to buy. So, for eCommerce brands, blogging is Many eCommerce brands blog
Here’s how Mr Porter, a menswear brand, creates content to keep its customers engaged with unique reads.
2. Provide a visual shopping experience with lookbooks
The popularity of Instagram and Pinterest have proven the importance of visual content. Consumers love to browse through pictures of specific products used in different ways, whether it’s an ingredient of different recipes or a dress styled for different occasions. You can set up such a browsing experience for your store visitors with a lookbook.
Place a lookbook on your Shopify store using the Lookbook app. The Shopify app is built to help you create stunning galleries, allowing you to customize them in different ways, from format to the colors and style. It also allows you to tag the product featured in the pictures so that shoppers can directly add them to their cart.
Install Lookbook and provide a visual experience to your Shopify customers.
3. Tap into user-generated content to share your consumer’s story
New store visitors are more likely to shop an item if they can get an authentic account of what the product looks like and works. Proving your products’ quality is easy with user-generated content (UGC). UGC is any content—text, videos, images, reviews, etc. —created by people, rather than brands.
90% of consumers say user-generated content (UGC) holds more influence over their buying decisions than promotional emails and even search engine results.
While reviews help you collect user-generated content, you can make it a trend for consumers to share pictures and stories of them using your product through hashtag campaigns on social media. You can then repost these images onto your Instagram feed.
Most importantly, you need to get this user-generated content onto your Shopify storefront. Use Instafeed to embed your Instagram feed on your homepage and display pictures of consumers using your products easily.
You can make it easier for your consumers to view these images by making your Instagram feed shoppable. Using Cameo, you can allow shoppers to view each Instagram picture in detail, see the featured products within each image, add them to their cart directly.
Also read: User-Generated Content: Why It Is Important and How to Use it to Increase Shopify Sales
4. Help shoppers find the right product with interactive quizzes
Decision fatigue is a common problem for online shoppers. Many store visitors end up not purchasing because of the numerous choices they have and the lack of any guidance to figure out the right item for them. A well-crafted quiz can help these shoppers understand the right products for them, helping them shop quicker.
You can set up quizzes on your Shopify store using Octane AI. The Shopify app lets you build quizzes from scratch, allowing you to customize the look of the quiz. These quizzes can add an interactive and fun element to shopping for your store visitors, making it more enjoyable than just browsing your large catalog.
5. Create videos to tell your story
73% more visitors who watch product videos will make a purchase. Videos help you engage customers better while shoppers themselves can use these videos to get a realistic understanding of a product.
Videos are rising in popularity, from Reels on Instagram to Tiktok and YouTube. Leverage this rise in popularity by creating videos for your products. You can embed these within the product pages to help shoppers on your Shopify store easily see how the product works and increase engagement within your store.
Besides creating product videos for your Shopify store, you can create videos to share on social media or on YouTube. With easy video making tools like Typito, creating a professional video is easy. The Shopify app lets you build your video within a drag-and-drop video builder and allows you to add audio, effects, and animation elements. The most time-efficient way to create striking videos!
Here’s how French Press Coffee creates videos to guide their shoppers to use their products:
6. Send post-purchase emails that create value for the consumers right away
One of the best ways to ensure a customer comes back for a repeat purchase is by helping them post-purchase. Once a shopper has bought an item, they are sure to take time figuring out how to use the product or experimenting with it. Why not help them find creative ways to use your product?
Set up post-purchase emails that help customers figure out the best ways to use your product. For something technical like a coffee maker, you can send a post-purchase email that includes how to use the coffee maker. For products like dresses, you can send an email that outlines the best ways to wash the item and an inspirational gallery to show how other customers have styled the item.
This value-driven content sent to customers post-purchase is sure to make you more memorable as a brand.
You can create striking graphics for these emails using Canva or within your email marketing app.
7 Send engaging newsletters that help you build a relationship with customers
Many eCommerce brands send weekly or fortnightly newsletters to communicate with their customers. These newsletters inform customers about the workings within their team, new product ideas, and any cool reads related to the products or lifestyles they sell.
This continuous communication can help you foster a relationship with your customers. By discussing a new product idea or showing snapshots of your factory, you can make your customers care about your brand and your products more.
Newsletters are a more direct way to communicate and an email marketing app like Klaviyo allows you to send visually appealing emails.
8. Set up events that solve a problem for your target audience
While this isn’t a traditional content marketing tactic, events are the perfect way to acquire new audiences. Events allow brands to focus on specific problems they are specialized in solving while attracting audiences who would need this help (and who would later consider shopping for your products).
Your events don’t have to be elaborate. Find that one problem that your target audience wants to solve and plan an information session around it. For instance, a tea brand could set up meditation sessions online for free to capture audiences seeking to live a specific lifestyle, Or, a beauty brand could host events that allow audiences to learn about at-home skincare routines.
You can market your event through traditional marketing channels and even give your audience actionable tips with a virtual guide. Within the session, you can subtly plug a product within your Shopify store that helps audiences solve their problem while also mentioning other ways to tackle the problem.
This way, you are introducing your product to audiences facing this problem without pushing them to shop.
Build a relationship and guide your consumers to shop from you with good content marketing
We hope this guide helps you tap into content to help you acquire new customers and engage existing ones. Content marketing is a powerful strategy that eCommerce brands need to adopt to make themselves stand out.
With so many eCommerce brands in the market, your brand’s unique way of communication is sure to make shoppers want to flock to your Shopify store. Content marketing is one of the best ways to go about it, allowing you to show why your product is special and building a connection with your shoppers.
If you’re not sure where to start, we suggest starting with the most powerful medium— visuals.
Shoppers love to browse through images and what better way to do this than with lookbooks! Use the Lookbook app to display how customers use your products and help shoppers visualize the different uses of one product. The app lets you customize the look of your lookbook and even choose where you want to display it.
Get started with lookbooks and create stunning galleries and convert your shoppers better.
Vanhishikha is the Content Marketer at Expert Village Media. She can be found looking for strategies to grow online stores, or browsing through Instagram.