How to Plan Content for eCommerce Websites

October 30, 2022

Content for eCommerce Websites: Although complicated, content strategy is crucial to get correctly. The following three points should be taken into account while developing an eCommerce content strategy.

You can now start to create a content strategy that will draw in and then convert your desired audience on the strong basis of a technically sound site with a logical architecture built for the best user experience possible.

Ideally, you’ve completed your keyword and competitive research and have the knowledge you need to guide these next actions.

Applying a well-known framework for business innovation that takes into account these three important criteria will help you direct your efforts whether you’re revamping an existing content strategy or starting from new one.

People

Technology

Process

People

eCommerce Websites: The people who are driving your content efforts and your intended audience and consumers are the two key categories to take into account.

Who will oversee the content strategy for your company?

Your managing editor and content marketing manager/content director may be the same person in smaller e-commerce operations. But in mid-sized to large businesses, you’re more likely to need each in a different capacity.

The capacity to identify, extract, analyze, and synthesize potentially difficult material and data is a must for a journalist who is in charge of a content marketing team. Along with a keen eye for detail, outstanding copywriting, and editing skills.

Leaders in content marketing must now be familiar with the idea of ManTech and understand how it can or will be used to assist you in achieving your eCommerce objectives.

There are now thousands of ManTech solutions on the market, so you don’t necessarily need to locate someone with experience in your company’s own stack or platform. However, you do require a leader who can pick up the tools and technologies you choose rapidly.

Your ideal content marketing leader will bring equal parts creativity and communication abilities in addition to all of this analytical mindset.

This person will be in charge of not only informing the rest of the company about the successes of content marketing but also consulting and working with various internal stakeholders to make sure that operations are. Product development, sales, and other departments’ interests and needs are taken into account in the content strategy.

You depend on this person to inspire and lead a content team that may be huge and consists of a diverse group of creatives and analytical types.

The ideal candidate for a leadership position in content marketing already has demonstrable expertise in leading teams to accomplish particular business objectives.

Greater brands might decide to employ a content strategist. When hiring a strategist. Look for someone with a solid grasp of both strong content and the current state of search and content discovery.

This person is in charge of making sure that your content efforts line up with the objectives of your business. They ought to be really knowledgeable about your brand and the requirements of customers in your specific ecommerce niche.

Putting Together Your Content Team

eCommerce Websites: Who does your team need to have? What fundamental obligations must you further ensure are met?

You might have one team member covering several areas of accountability. You might have hundreds of team members working on just one, depending on the size of your organization.

Additionally, you may decide to contract out specific accountabilities to independent contractors or even have an agency handle the majority of your content generation.

In either case, guarantee that these essential aspects of your content marketing operation are taken care of:

Writing, photography, graphic design, video editing, and other forms of content creation.

editing with a focus on brand voice, optimizing material for search,

alignment with the client journey, and channel-specific formatting

Prioritization and project management.

promotion of content through sponsored or public relations means.

Who Would Be Your Ideal Client?

eCommerce Websites: Two essential components of any content strategy are persona building and customer journey mapping. These are not one-time tasks; rather, they are ongoing policies that you will frequently review and modify in response to performance data.

with whom you are attempting to connect.

What issues you can help them with?

Where to find them on the Internet.

how to communicate in their language.

Your content creators will use them to understand the audience they are trying to reach, and you will use them to identify gaps and opportunities in your content strategy.

There are many tools available for developing personas, but for those just getting started. I recommend Adam Heitman’s step-by-step Buyer Personas: A Beginner’s Guide for Marketers.

Mapping the Customer Journey

eCommerce Websites: I like Avinashi Kaushik’s “See, Think, Do, Care” approach for the customer journey in e-commerce above more conventional, linear models.

In this approach, conduct, not demographics or psychographics, defines your audience segments:

See: The most qualified audience you have access to.

Consider your audience’s size, qualifications, and indicated business motive.

Do: Reach your biggest, most commercially motivated, addressable audience.

Care: Current clients as determined by two business dealings.

Whether your target audience’s needs are informational, navigational, or transactional in nature, every piece of content you create must address one of these.

A crucial strategy to incorporate moving forward in your content planning is mapping content to your customers’ journeys.

However, there is also a lot of value in retrospectively applying this to the body of your current content using a content audit. This can be challenging for businesses that produced a lot of material before implementing a clear content strategy.

In addition to highlighting content gaps, you can intend to fill in new content development, and mapping existing content can help you find important chances to update or re-release your finest material.

Setting Your People Up for Success with Content Marketing

eCommerce Websites: You need to make sure that the proper individuals have the resources they need to get your company’s services and goods in front of motivated customers when it counts.

The B2C companies that excel in content marketing allocated 26% of their overall marketing expenditure to it in 2018. The technology and tools that marketers require to develop, optimize, and promote content are being provided with a rising share of that spending.

Technology

Emerging technologies, especially those that incorporate AI or machine learning components. Are creating a ton of really exciting options for e-commerce businesses trying to customize content and engage customers more deeply.

When selecting the technology to underpin your content strategy. Keep the following points in mind.

Suite or Stack?

In their content marketing operations, B2C enterprises typically employ four digital technologies. With analytics tools and email marketing software leading the way.

But what we’re observing right now is a move away from employing a single tool to address a single issue.

When insights produced by one tool can be applied to another, the power of AI can be more fully utilized. As a result, marketing executives are discovering that inconsistent datasets and manual workarounds are unneeded and hurt their content marketing efforts.

Today, businesses can roll out complete toolkits that are seamlessly linked; these tools may include a variety of content marketing activities, or they may be only one part of a larger platform.

Intelligent Automation or Automation

We’ve been employing automation to reduce some of the labor-intensive aspects of repetitious chores like keyword and competitor research for years.

With the development of AI, we have advanced from basic automation to intelligent automation. In which our technologies perform optimizations, prioritize activities, and even make judgments.

Automation depends on people to input the proper information and instructions into the system in order to produce the desired outcome.

Massive amounts of unstructured data can be sent into systems for analysis and activation via intelligent automation.

For instance, early content technologies mechanized the calculation of keyword density in content a metric that is now meaningless.

Analyze user behavior on the website and search data.
The customer journey’s content holes should identifes.
Produce material to bridge the gaps.
Target future searchers who behave similarly to it.
It’s crucial that you decide what your content marketing technology should accomplish and how you will evaluate its performance.

Who Owns the Tech for Your Content Marketing?

eCommerce Websites: Any technology must be operated with a thorough understanding of how it functions on the side of the user. However, interpersonal and creative abilities are equally important in content marketing.

Who is ultimately in charge of your content marketing technology’s implementation, operation, and success?

This might be the Content Marketing Manager in smaller businesses.

You might think about establishing a single, clearly defined function for martech management in larger e-commerce firms (or even content marketing management on its own).

This person needs to be deeply knowledgeable about your technological support for your business objectives.

Process

Make sure that your eCommerce content marketing workflow includes a scalable procedure with the proper people in place and technologies to support it.

Routines & Roles

eCommerce Websites: By taking the time to precisely define roles. You can keep your content pipeline free from duplication and conflict.

This will very probably include a list of duties that each member of your team is accountable for. But it also has to account for the business and marketing outcomes that each team member is responsible for.

Editorial Schedule

Each team member should have access to your editorial calendar, even if it is only in view-only mode, as it serves as a living, breathing roadmap for your eCommerce company’s content initiatives.

If you don’t already have a comprehensive marketing suite that offers an editorial calendar as a feature. Google Sheets is a wonderful option for this.

Your editorial calendar should ideally record:

Content concepts.
Content concepts have to give the green light to proceed.
The aim of every component.
the platform each article will publish on.
information relevant to a channel (e.g.: for emails, subject line, and audience segment; for blogs, categories, and tags, etc.).
Who is in charge of producing the content?
For each component, research and information are needed.
supporting information, background information, and materials to link to.
Demands for action.
Required are approvals.
Dates for submission and publication.
Notes on progress and status updates.

Have one team member “own” the calendar for the best outcomes (the most logical person for this is your Managing Editor or whoever fulfills this function). The calendar will update by this individual as each item moves through your company’s workflow.

Inventory of Content

Your content inventory can be a different tab in your editorial calendar or it might be a completely different document.

It can be difficult to create a content inventory if you’ve been publishing for a while and have a lot of undocumented content already. But it’s well worthwhile.

For each item, your content inventory should track:

Name/title.
if it has a permanent address, and URL; if not, draft URL.
When appropriate, it refers to a topic, a wide category, or a particular good or service.
publication or distribution date.
Important metrics (you might choose annual or monthly pageviews, search visibility, conversions to a specific action, etc.).

When planning new pieces during your content sessions, refer to the content inventory.

Putting Everything Together

Although complicated, content strategy is crucial to get correctly.

Although writing out your objectives is a fantastic idea, you still need to have a well-developed plan to direct your efforts, make sure your team members stay on task, and use it as a reference to support your decisions and actions.

It is not irrevocable just because it is documented. In actuality, as results demand, the most effective content tactics are examined and revised frequently.