How to create a content plan for e-commerce websites

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.

- Separate search data and website consumer behavior with intelligent automation.

- Discover the content gaps in the customer journey.

- Produce content to fill in the blanks.

- Target it to future searchers who exhibit similar behavior.

You must identify what you need your content marketing technology to do and how you will hold the results.

C- Who is the partner of your content marketing technology?

To make the most use of any technology, the operator must thoroughly understand how it works. Creative and interpersonal abilities are essential in content marketing. Who is in command of your content marketing technology’s implementation, operation, and success? This could be the Content Marketing Manager in a smaller company. You might create a separate, defined function for martech management or content marketing management in larger e-commerce firms. This person must have a thorough knowledge of your business objectives and how your technology contributes to them.

3- Process

Ensure that scalable procedures are part of your e-commerce content marketing workflow. Now that you have the proper people in place and the right tools.

A- Functions and workflow

Consider the effort to identify responsibilities in your content workflow to avoid duplicates and conflict. This will include a list of duties for which each member of your team is accountable, as well as a breakdown of which business and marketing outcomes each person handles.

- What clearances and permissions are required before the release of content? 

- Who is in charge of collecting such permits and advancing each piece of content?

- Which team members have way to each piece of technology, and what are their expectations for how they will use it? Their responsibilities? 

- How frequently will conflicts be held, and who will be required to attend?

- How can you support team members in collaborating and communicating?

- Does the content team have unlimited access to internal stakeholders whose expertise is required to create authentic content?

- How does your content team collude with operations, sales, R & D, and other stakeholders, for example?

B- Editorial Calendar

Each member of your e-commerce team should have entrance to your editorial calendar, which is a living roadmap for your company’s content activities. Unless you have a comprehensive marketing suite that gives an editorial calendar as an option, Google Sheets is an attractive solution for this. Your editorial calendar will have a track of content ideas that have been accepted as viable concepts. Following that, the goal of each item and the platform on which it will be printed are laid out. Third, information specific to a channel, such as emails, subject lines, and audience segments, as well as blogs, categories, and tags. Remember to specify who is in charge of content creation and the research and information needed for each piece, backlinking content, supporting content, and background content. There’s the option of using calls to action, and support is required, deadlines for submission and publishing, as well as status updates and progress comments. Have one team division manage the calendar for optimum performance, and the most logical person for this is your managing editor or whoever fills this role. As each item runs through your company’s workflow, this individual is to modernize the calendar.

C- Content inventory

Your content inventory could be a different tab in your editorial calendar or a whole independent document. Building a content inventory can be difficult, mainly if you’ve been distributing for a long time and have a lot of undocumented content, but it’s well worth it. Your content inventory should hold track of the name or title of each piece, as well as the URL if it has a permanent address. Then, if appropriate, the topic, broad category, or product and service to which it relates. You might prefer annual or monthly pageviews, search visibility, or conversions to a specific action as the date of publication or distribution and the metrics that matter. At your content meetings, refer to the content inventory as you plan new pieces.  Is it possible to update existing content that is still operating correctly instead of beginning from scratch? Is there anything in your current inventory that you could use to supplement new content with internal linking?

D- Taking it all together

Content strategy is exciting to master, but it is critical. Documenting your objectives is fantastic, but you’ll need a well-thought-out plan to lead your efforts, ensure that team members stay on track, and use them to keep your actions and decisions. Documenting something doesn’t make it permanent. The most effective content strategies are evaluated and repaired regularly, as outcomes suggest.