One of the biggest mistakes that an ecommerce company can make in this era of competitive online marketing? Creating content just for the sake of having them.

It’s very likely that your competition has been putting more thought and effort into their content marketing. As a result, they’re not only able to create relevant and highly engaging content, but they’re also able to give it a significant boost in terms of traffic and searchability; making it more ideal for conversions.

Here are four ways you can create an effective content strategy for your business—

1. Pay attention to your keywords

To determine what your audience is actually looking for, you have to know what search terms they use to find what they need. You want to have a collection of keywords or phrases that you can use for your blog posts.

Typically, these will fall into several categories—

• Informational or keywords that imply the user’s intent to learn about a particular topic, subject, service or feature? (What is a content strategy, how to make a content strategy…)
• Transactional or keywords that show a user’s intent to purchase or complete a transaction (Paying someone to handle content strategy, hire a content strategy specialist…)
• Commercial or keywords that is a hybrid of both informational and transactional searches, which you can direct to specific product or service pages (Content strategy tips for retail blogs, content strategy ideas for your business…)
• Navigational or keywords that overtly direct users to a specific website (Content strategy by Leadspanda, Leadspanda content strategy ideas…)

2. Use your keywords as a cornerstone for content you produce

Doing research and understanding the subtle differences between your keywords means you can now use them to craft content that will prove to be more relevant to your readers.

• Informational searches are best used to create how-to posts, guides and even infographics.
• Transactional searchers and commercial keyword categories are best for crafting your product and service descriptions and categories.
• Navigational searchers are handy for planning your site navigation, product pages, and brand FAQ.

3. Create timely content

With your keywords in place, it’s important that you give your content a significant boost by making sure you’re visible and searchable when it really counts. The easiest way to do this is by being conscious of upcoming major events and holidays.

• Promotional content specific to major and global holidays require a little preparation. These occasions include holidays like Christmas Thanksgiving, New Year etc. Skewing content to accommodate these occasions can be prepared ahead of time so that you are able to release timely content.
• Niche holidays are great and quirky ways to create shareable content. Not everyone will be writing about these unique holidays, so you’re basically raising your chances of getting noticed by adding it as part of your content strategy.
• Get to know your audience. Creating timely, relevant content is dependent on how well you actually know what your audience wants and needs. It may take a little bit of research and work, but if executed well, it will be a great way to establish rapport with your audience.

4. Be specific about what you want you want to achieve

To generate leads using content, it needs to go back to your business goals. The critical thing here is being specific. Do you want to achieve a certain number of form fills? Did you have a target of email subscribers you want to reach?

• Start, again, by defining your audience. You will be able to create better, more engaging content if you actually know how to reach your audience.
• Go through previous content and learn about what kind of content has proven itself to be effective.
• Instinct and expertise are key to creating effective content, but nothing beats your ability to actually test and see what content, call-to-action or offer actually made a difference for your numbers.

Content is an essential and critical part of any ecommerce strategy these days. And keeping these simple steps in mind when creating content means you will be able to craft more relevant and engaging content that will actually make a difference for your business.

If you need help setting up a content strategy for your business, give us a call today.

And if you have more ideas and tips on how you can improve your content strategy, leave a comment below.