Perhaps more than any other product, what the urban consumers consume the most is content. This must be so because firstly, it’s free. We just have to log on to our social media accounts to find it being shared, exchanged and appropriated at breakneck speed on our newsfeeds. Secondly, it is interesting – rather, we can say that interesting content exists. It can be a blog, an insightful article, an image, a gif, a video or even one of those 360-degree videos that are all the rage on Facebook right now.
All of it qualifies as content. And it is endowed with an enormous power of dissemination. Web content travels at a speed unimaginable to traditional media, has a longer life since it can be archived and recalled at a click of a button, and can spread really quickly really fast. Just check out the Buzzfeed model of content generation to see how it was able to harness this power of shareability that the internet provides to establish its brand value.
Content-based marketing can actually be really helpful for your e-commerce business. Content marketing doesn’t necessarily operate on the basis of a traditional ad space. Firstly, content can be anything from a tweet to a whitepaper. Secondly, it’s not just about the content you generate, but also about the content you share, that defines your company’s image.Let us take a more detailed look at content marketing and how it can be utilised in e-commerce and online retail.
Can Content Marketing Get You More Loyal Customers?
What is Content Marketing?
Essentially, content marketing involves generation and sharing of web content, which can be anything from a tweet, a blog post, an article, a video, or a social media post among others. The beauty of content marketing is that the content doesn’t necessarily have to be explicit advertising. Instead, the aim of content marketing is to be able to hook the viewer into the content and then create an association with a brand, rather than proclaiming the brand at the outset. It is because of this that content marketing becomes a more subtle form of marketing.
It is, therefore, worth underlining that good content marketing involves good content. The value of content increases with the amount it is shared, and good, relevant content gets shared faster.
It is also important to understand that content marketing is an extremely flexible and scalable strategy. For example, B2B content marketing would generally involve information rich, serious content like whitepapers, newsletters and articles. While B2C content marketing might involve a Facebook post or a Vine, depending upon your industry and audience. The core idea remains the same, which is to interest the consumer into entering the shop space through the content.
How to Effectively Use Content Marketing?
1. Make Your Content Interesting to Your Audience
One approach is to think about what your customer might look at while researching a product online. For example, if you are into electronics, then product reviews, industry predictions, unboxing videos, etc. are excellent ways to engage with potential customers. Your tone, expertise and the overall quality of your content would be a huge factor in swinging the consumers’ opinion in your favour. Check out some of these fun unboxing videos to get a better idea of this point. Not only is content like this informative, but it is also fun, and the chances of it getting shared are much higher.
2. Be Careful About Your Language
While it is true that content marketing provides you with a lot more ad space than traditional advertising methods, this fact can also turn into a nightmare. Add to that the fact that social media makes it an extremely low-cost marketing option (According to this survey, content marketing is 62% cheaper than traditional marketing options). Simply put, more content means more things can go wrong because it allows you to overindulge.
Relevance, therefore, becomes an important keyword here – in two ways – relevance to your brand and relevance to your customer. Every content marketing piece that you post must have a specific purpose. Think of them as something both you and your customer would like to engage with and share.
3. Drive Your Point Home
Don’t forget the all important Call-to-Action when you are doing content marketing. A CTA is the point in the copy when throwing the ball in the customer’s court. It is now their turn to find out more, to get in touch with you, to follow up. Traditionally, a CTA is supposed to be aggressive and crisp. It is supposed to push the customer to act. But this isn’t necessarily how we can do things in content marketing. Sometimes subtlety works better than aggression. Basically, what we are looking for is a link that connects you and your brand as the creator of the content.
4. Analyse Your Data
You might utilise what you think is a great content marketing tactic, but it doesn’t seem to be working. What do you do? The internet allows us to think about user behaviour in a radically different manner than ever before. It offers insightful metrics like the time a user spends on a page or their click-through rate to allow us to think about abstract terms such as relevance and interest in a more concrete manner. Therefore, it is important to keep tweaking your content marketing strategy according to the customer interaction data that you collect through your posts and webpages. There are many content analysis tools available on the market for this purpose.
5. Make Shareable Content
This is perhaps the most important point in the whole article. The value of a content marketing post does not necessarily lie in its quality as such. Rather, it is dependent on how much it gets shared. How the content is created and displayed therefore becomes at least as important as what exactly the content says. Just think of the vast amount of memes and gifs that are floating around on the internet. Or for that matter, all the WhatsApp forwards. We rarely get to know the original authors of this content. Yet, we engage with it on a daily basis – it becomes a part of our lives. It is this process of becoming a part of someone’s life that builds a customer loyalty.
To know more about content marketing, get in touch with Browntape. We are India’s leading e-commerce experts and we are always happy to help!
