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It should come as no surprise that many businesses today are making the most out of digital tools and technology for their marketing efforts. The number of active internet users has grown up to 5 billion in recent years, pushing a lot of companies to experiment with different online marketing strategies to attract and engage their target audience in the digital space.
As an e-commerce business, it’s a no-brainer that digital marketing should be at the core of your marketing plans. From social media content to email campaigns, search engine optimization, and influencer marketing, there are a variety of tactics that you can use to drive more people to purchase from your business. You can also run a business blog to showcase the value of your products and services to your desired consumers.
Anyone can call themselves a blogger, but not everyone can become an effective content marketer. It’s easy to lump blogging and content marketing under the same bracket since they’re all about creating and distributing regular content to a specific audience. However, there’s a fine line between these two concepts.
Let’s take a look at the history of blogging: it used to be synonymous with keeping a personal journal or diary. With the rise of the web, there have been several sites where people could freely talk about their interests and share their thoughts on their online blogs. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that blogging became so popular and marketers saw their real value for attracting more people and driving business growth.
Sure, blogging still refers to the process of writing stories and articles that are published online. But for e-commerce businesses, it comprises a part of a greater content marketing strategy and supports other tactics to achieve a specific goal and objective. Business blogging is also much more comprehensive and follows processes that aren’t typically observed in regular blogging.
Here’s an overview of the benefits that having a business blog can bring to your e-commerce brand:
Business blogging is a great way to organically draw more consumers to your website. Every time you have a new blog post, it’s an additional indexed page on your website that search engines, like Google, can recognize and show in their results section.
The chances of ranking at the top of search engines are higher if your blog post contains relevant keywords and is aligned with the popular searches that your target audience is looking for. With an optimized business blog, you can have 55% more visitors to your website.
Blogging is also a great way to let people know more about your business and create demand for your products or services. For example, how-to articles or informative guides can showcase the value that your products can bring to your consumers’ lives. You can also develop infographics, entertaining videos, or interactive content that has a high chance of going viral and being shared by your audience so you can reach more people.
E-commerce blogging is also a powerful tool for lead generation. According to reports, businesses that run blogs are more successful at attracting quality leads and can generate at least 67% more leads than those who don’t have one.
What you need to make sure of is that your blog posts have a strong call to action that can transform your web visitors into leads. For example, you can have a form at the end of the post where readers can enter their information in exchange for a free offer such as discounts. This will make your readers more likely to convert and buy from your e-commerce business.
Consistent blogging is an excellent way to keep your customers in the loop about your latest products and services. For example, you can announce store updates and new offers through a blog post. You can also promote your blog content through an email campaign to your existing subscribers which can help drive repeat sales.
Many e-commerce marketers struggle with maintaining a loyal following and readership on their business blogs. But that’s normal with content marketing. Blogging is supposed to be a long-term strategy and building a community of readers won’t happen overnight, however, there are several strategies that you can use to drive more traffic to your blog:
It’s important to identify and write about the topics that your audience is really interested in. You’ll need to develop different reader personas and research their search behavior, intent, and general interests. This will help you create better content ideas and produce blog posts that actually matter to your desired consumers.
To run a successful e-commerce blog, you should stray away from sharing generic content that readers can get from other businesses and brands. You have to know what your competitors are already writing about and find a way to improve your content strategy by brainstorming fresh and unique ideas. By offering something new and exciting in the digital landscape, you can attract the interest of your target audience to your blog.
Another effective way to get more readers to your e-commerce blog is to optimize your content for search engines. This means you have to master the process of keyword research to find the best terms and phrases that your target consumers are searching for online. You’ll then have to include these keywords within your post or on the headline. This can greatly help your blog to rank in search engines and increase visitors and regular readership.
Headlines are an essential element of blog posts. It’s what creates interest and convinces consumers to click on the link and read the entirety of your content. With plenty of content accessible online, you have to develop captivating headlines that will grab your audience’s attention within a few seconds and make them read your post instead of your competitors. Be straight to the point so your consumers will instantly know the value of your post.
Readers can get easily tired of lengthy blog posts that only contain chunks of text and paragraphs. You can improve the quality and readability of your content by including photos and illustrations in your post. You can add images in between sections and paragraphs to give your readers a break from long pieces of words and help them digest your content.
You can also promote your blog posts on your social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Some marketers get snippets or quotes from their articles and share them with their current followers on their social media. This can help encourage your existing online community to visit your blog. You can also repurpose your blog content into different formats, such as videos or infographics for posting on social media.
A huge part of your blogging strategy is having a consistent posting timeline. It’s essential to have a content calendar where you’ll outline how often you’ll upload new posts on your blog. Being consistent in posting new content isn’t only useful for growing your blog archive but also brings more website traffic as it helps boost your search engine ranking.
You can also increase your readership by turning active blog visitors into subscribers. It’s important to have a registration or subscription form at the end of your content or on your homepage where consumers can decide to leave their information. Once they’ve signed up to become blog subscribers, they’ll receive email notifications whenever you have a new blog post.
There’s no doubt that blogging is one of the most cost-efficient ways to do content marketing. It may be a bit tricky at first to identify the right strategy to attract and sustain your readers. But once you’ve found the best practices to engage your readers, your e-commerce blog will be flourishing in no time.