Content marketing

Creating content to tell stories about your brand in blogs, emails, videos, or social media is referred to as content marketing. You can develop meaningful and engaging content for your customers by developing a content strategy.

A content strategy is the part of your marketing plan that defines how you use content to demonstrate your expertise and build a relationship with your audience. The following factors are included in an effective content strategy:

choosing marketing channels that are popular with your audience
developing relevant content and effective content formats
setting goals to measure the success of your content

After you've created your content, you can plan the publication of your content using a planning calendar.

Choosing content marketing channels

By developing content for a few marketing channels, you're providing your audience with different ways of engaging with your brand and finding your store. Consider developing content for one or more of the following channels:

You should design marketing content based on the characteristics of each channel. Tailor content for each channel by optimizing the text, images, or videos. Make use of specific channel features, such as hashtags or mentions, to help your audience find your content. Because a customer might encounter your content on more than one channel, don't add the same content everywhere. Instead, create content that can be coordinated on different channels to tell different parts of a story. For example, an Instagram image post featuring your staff could lead to an "About us" page in your online store.

You don't need to be on every channel. Create a strategy that you can sustain and develop content for the channels where your customers are most likely to be.

Setting goals

Before you develop any content, define the business goals that you want to achieve through your marketing efforts. Aim to create content with the goal of delighting your audience, as well.

You can use content marketing to help you with the following goals:

brand awareness
product demand
email subscribers or social media followers
sales volume
event attendance
customer loyalty
recommendations or reviews
customer service
influence with your target audience

Use the goals that you define to measure the success of a content marketing effort. For example, you can measure an increase in brand awareness by the number of impressions on a Facebook post, or you can confirm whether an Instagram post increased the demand for a product based on referred sales.

Add referral links to your store when you create a profile for a social media account, an email campaign, or any content for a secondary website. You can use these links to help you determine the value of creating content for those channels based on their conversion rate. Learn more about tracking conversion details for orders.

Developing content

A challenge of content strategy is determining what types of content appeal to your customers. To create engaging content consistently across your channels, define a content mix of a few recurring formats and post types. You can create written content or media content, such as videos or images.

To help customers find your store, the content that you develop should cover subjects or information related to your products. Consider the keywords that a customer might use to find your store in a search engine, and create content that is tied to those keywords. Because many content channels offer search, using SEO strategies can help your audience discover your content.

Try to define a content mix that makes sense for your brand and audience that also differentiates you from competitors. Consider one or more of the following formats for your content mix:

News - information about your industry or current trends
Inspiration - motivation to pursue a particular lifestyle, such as quotes or photos from around the world
Education - facts, tutorials, or how-to blog posts
Product promotion - high-quality images of your products being used, demo videos, or testimonials
Contests - free downloads, discounts, or other incentives that your customers can win
Customer or influencer features - images or videos that feature your customers or the people they follow
Community events - information about meetups, fundraisers, or learning opportunities, especially if you’re a local business
Q&A - questions, polls, or answers to common inquiries
Behind-the-scenes - videos or articles about your products, staff, business operations, brand story, or industry

To make it easier to create new content within a format, you can build templates and designs. For example, you can save Instagram hashtags so you always have them handy when you post, or you can apply the same filter to all of your photos to achieve a consistent aesthetic.

Planning content in a calendar

By using a calendar to plan content updates, you can make sure that you develop a variety of content and publish it at the frequency that your audience expects. Add each social media update, blog post, video, or other content marketing effort to the calendar so that you can check that your channels are updated regularly. You can also use a calendar to plan coordinated content for a variety of channels or schedule content for upcoming holidays or events that are relevant to your customers.

Publishing time can make a difference in engagement. To determine the best times to publish content, you can read industry research relevant to your audience or channels, or just start slow and measure customer engagement with the content. You can even use your own habits as a guideline.

To save time, you can use scheduling tools to prepare content in advance. Within your content mix, include ideas you can plan for in advance, reproduce, and publish regularly. Balance your mix with formats that you can quickly create and others that take more time to produce. Prepare several pieces of content at the same time so that you can spend your time focusing on other aspects of your business.

A predictable publishing schedule helps customers learn what to expect. When you plan content in a calendar, make sure you can sustain the content development and won't get overwhelmed.

Using content strategy across your online presence

When you plan your content strategy, seek opportunities to apply it anywhere that your audience interacts with your store. Use a similar style, message, or image across the following locations:

store content such as product descriptions or your checkout
order and shipping notifications
social media profiles

Don't forget to keep the conversation going, especially on social media channels or within blog comments. When you respond to comments, share posts from others, and answer questions, consider how the interactions relate to the rest of your content mix to tell your brand story.