Blogging is an essential part of any content strategy for ecommerce sites. Blogging can help:
- make your site more visible
- improve search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine rankings
- connect you with your customers
- establish credibility
- create and maintain brand loyalty
But how can you make sure you’re making the most out of blogging on your ecommerce site? Here are some strategies that can help you achieve ecommerce blogging bliss.
Take Customers on Your Journey
If you bring your customers on a journey – from your humble beginnings to where you are now – ensuring you update them on your thoughts and changes to your products, you’ll find you grow a base of people who want to go on that journey with you. Do it right and they’ll also leverage their own audiences in your favor! Coming up with blog post topics along this theme can be a little daunting when you first start out but it’s important to remember there’s no limit to what you can post about. Make sure your posts reflect your core values, brand, and appeal to your audience. Blog topic ideas could include:
- How you built your business. Tell your audience your story from the very beginning to the growth you’re seeing now.
- From prototype to product. Follow one of your products from your first draft to the completed item, discussing the challenges you overcame and how you might do this process differently in the future. Consider writing about product testing and new products about to be released too.
- Your people. Every story need characters and your story likely involves some great ones. Introduce your team to your audience – no matter how large or small. Discuss how you manage your teams, and their workflows. Offer insights into what it’s like to work in an ecommerce company.
- Your customers. Highlighting product reviews and case studies, or feedback about your website (that you changed as a result) can go a long way to showing that you listen to your audience and care about their opinions.
Know Your Audience
A key to success is focusing on what your audience wants to read, and providing useful content. You can do this by creating buyer personas, and even negative buyer personas, to help you better understand how you are meeting their needs with your products and your blog posts. By making yourself indispensable you’ll ensure increased traffic to your site. Finding gaps in online content in your niche can allow you to become an authority on certain subjects, further gaining the trust of your audience. If your products are in a competitive or flooded market try to work out what makes you different from everyone else.
Generate Leads
Blogging is great for increasing your contact database and gaining leads who could then go on to become customers. This can be done through offering long form downloadable content linked to from your blog posts allow people to learn more about a topic, or even through webinar sessions. Once you’ve collected your audience’s information you can focus on giving them more useful content and guiding them through their buyer’s journey.
Analyze the Results
There’s no better way to increase engagement on your blog than to analyze what does and doesn’t work on your site. Each and every audience is different, so it’s important to constantly review your performance and work out what resonates. Tools like HubSpot and Google Analytics are great for helping you do this. Tracking popularity of blog posts is also a great way to work out which content is evergreen – maintaining a constant stream of traffic. This content is great for re-sharing on social platforms because it retains its usefulness no matter how old it gets.
GREAT EXAMPLES OF ECOMMERCE SITE BLOGS:
- Solyent: How did one person build a global business in a matter of months? He started blogging of course! Soylent is a great example of how topics like bottle design and new products can bring in new people when the initial buzz of your product has settled.
- Mahabis: A great example of how a brand can use knowledge about their audience to post blog topics they’ll enjoy. It’s clear from their site that Mahabis know at least one of their buyer personas love to travel. Even though they sell shoes and associated products their blog also focuses on the lifestyle aspirations of their audience. Their audience want to travel, so they bring the travelling to their blog.
- Casper: Casper keep their blog simple, and on message with their main product, but the variety of posts is vast. You’re almost bound to find something you’d quickly like to read and get pulled into learning more about what they have to offer and their core values.
- Evernote: One of Evernote’s buyer personas (a semi-fictional profile of your customer) is probably a creative. Take a glance at their blog and you can immediately see this. With tips on novel writing, and how to bring creativity to the STEM world, Evernote is on point with their messaging.
Need help with your ecommerce site? As a proud Magento Business Solution Partner and HubSpot Partner Agency we have teams of dedicated developers, designers, and marketers who are passionate about ecommerce and content marketing. We can help increase your conversion rates and more effectively reach your audience.
