
How to create a content plan for e-commerce websites
On your solid foundation of a technically sound website with a logical architecture created for the best user experience possible, you can craft a content strategy that will attract, then convert your ideal audience. Whether you’re renewing an existing content strategy or starting from scratch, guide your efforts by implementing a popular business innovation framework that accounts for three key factors: people, technology, and process.
1- People
There are two major groups of people to examine, those driving your content efforts, and your intended audience and customers. Let’s ask a question: who will manage your content team? The way you structure your team sends a powerful message about what your team is currently prioritizing and deprioritizing. Now, who will lead your company’s content efforts? In smaller e-commerce operations, your managing editor and content marketing manager or content director might be the same, while in mid-sized to large companies you’re more likely to need each in a separate role. Leading a content marketing team requires a razor-sharp eye for detail, excellent copywriting and editing skills. Also a journalist’s ability to locate and extract, analyze, and summarize sometimes complex information and data.
It is critical now that content marketing leaders are happy with the concept of martech and understand how it can or will be used to help you reach your e-commerce goals. You don’t need to find someone already experienced in your company’s own stack or platform, there are thousands of martech tools on the market. You need a leader who can get up to race with the technologies and tools of your choice. Alongside, all this analytical mindset, your ideal content marketing leader will take equal parts creativity and communication skills. This person will be responsible for communicating content marketing’s successes across the organization, and for consulting and cooperating with various internal stakeholders to ensure that the interests and needs of operations, product development, sales, and other functions are represented in the content strategy. You’re seeing for this person to motivate and manage what may be a large content team comprised of a wide range of creatives and analytical types. The right person for a leadership role in content marketing has demonstrated experience managing teams to achieve specific business outcomes. Larger brands may choose to work with a content strategist. When choosing a strategist, seek out a professional who understands good content and understands at a high level the state of search and content discovery. This person handles ensuring that your content efforts align with your company’s goals. They should have a deep understanding of your brand and the needs of audience members in your particular area of e-commerce.
A- Creating your content team
Who do you need in your team? What core accountabilities do you need to ensure are included? Depending on the size of your operation, you might have one team member covering many areas of accountability or you could have dozens of team members on just one. You might want to outsource specific accountabilities to freelancers or have an agency provide the bulk of your content creation. Make sure these critical functions of your content marketing operation are covered. First, content creation, including writing, photography, graphic, design, and video editing. Second, editing with a particular eye to brand voice, content optimization for search, alignment with the customer journey, and formatting for specific channels. Third, project management and prioritization. Remember to promote your content whether via PR or in paid channels.
B- Who is your wanted target market?
Any content strategy must involve the creation of personas and the mapping of client journeys. These aren’t one-time actions, and they’re ongoing recommendations that you’ll judge and update as performance data changes.
Personas help you in determining:
- Who you’re attempting to reach out to.
- What problems can you assist them with?
- Where you can find them on the internet.
- How to converse in their native language.
You’ll use them to recognise gaps and opportunities in your content strategy, and your content creators will use them to understand who they’re trying to reach. Several persona construction resources are available, but I recommend Adam Heitzman’s step-by-step Buyer Personas, a beginner’s guide for marketers. As an e-commerce alternative to more classic, linear models, I prefer Avinash Kaushik’s “See, Think, Do, Care” customer experience paradigm. With this approach, your audience segments are defined by behaviours rather than demographics or psychographics. First, see the most qualified audience you can find. Then consider your most addressable, qualified audience with commercial intent. Do your best to transfer out to your most capable, the addressable audience with a high level of commercial purpose. Remember to treat present customers with respect, as shown by two business transactions. Whether the need is informational, navigational, or transactional, each piece of content must match the demand of your target audience. Content mapping to your customer’s journey is crucial to incorporate in your content strategy moving ahead. Applying this retroactively to your existing content body with a content audit has a lot of value. This can be hard for businesses that have accumulated a lot of material before implementing a content strategy. Mapping existing content can support in identifying significant possibilities to update or re-release your finest material and highlight content gaps that can be addressed in future content development.
C- Setting your team up for victory with content marketing
With the proper people in place to get your business and products in front of motivated consumers at the correct times, it’s up to you to make sure they have the tools they need to succeed. The best-performing B2C firms in content marketing spent 26% of their entire marketing expenditure on content marketing. An increasing portion of that expenditure provides marketers with the technology and tools to develop, optimise, and serve content.
2- Technology
Emerging technologies, particularly those using AI or machine learning, are planning many enticing opportunities for e-commerce businesses to personalize content and join with customers in more meaningful ways. For choosing the technology that will fuel your content strategy, there are a few things to remember.
A- Mass or series?
B2C organizations practice an average of four digital technologies in their content marketing operations, with analytics tools and email marketing software topping the pack. However, we notice a shift away from employing a single device to tackle a problem. When another can use the insights gained by one tool, the power of AI is better realized. As a result, marketing executives find that different databases and manual workarounds are superfluous and obstruct their content marketing efforts. Organizations can establish complete suites of flawlessly linked technologies, which may serve several purposes in your content marketing, or content may be one part of a larger platform.
B-Automation or creative automation?
We’ve been using automation for years to take some of the legwork out of repetitive tasks such as keyword research and competitive research.With the advent of AI, we’ve moved far beyond simple automations to intelligent automations, where our technologies are not only completing tasks but executing optimizations, prioritizing tasks, and even making decisions. Automation relies on humans to feed the right data and instructions into the system, in order to generate the right result. Intelligent automation allows us to feed massive, unstructured data into systems which then analyze and activate the information. For example, early content tools automated the process of calculating keyword density in content (a useless metric today).
For years, we’ve used automation to drop some of the efforts from monotonous chores like keyword research and competitor analysis. By introducing artificial intelligence, we’ve advanced from simple automation to intelligent automation, in which our technologies complete tasks, execute optimizations, focus on activities, and decide. Humans are asked to enter the correct data and instructions into the system to produce the desired outcome. We can feed large amounts of unorganised data into intelligent automation systems, then analyze and activate the data. For example, early content tools automated calculating keyword density in content, a useless metric today.