Ecommerce marketing is a completely different animal than it was five (or even two) years ago. In the past, a blog was considered a nice-to-have, if it was considered at all. But these days, a marketing plan without an ecommerce blogging strategy is like throwing a party without inviting any guests.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything direct-to-consumer brands and online stores need to know about winning with an ecommerce blog.
Why Online Retailers Should Leverage Ecommerce Blogging
“Blogging is a great way to build your audience and generate more traffic and sales for your business. You shouldn’t treat it as an unnecessary luxury.”
–Dan Wang for Shopify
If a blog isn’t a core part of your ecommerce marketing strategy, you’re losing out on traffic, organic list growth and sales. As selling online becomes more and more competitive, having great products is no longer enough. Every day, over 500 new online stores are launched on Shopify alone.
In the competitive online marketplace, an ecommerce blog is the most affordable and effective way to help you differentiate your brand and attract new customers.
Benefits of Blogging
“A thriving audience is every brand’s most valuable asset. In the new world of customer choice, content isn’t just ‘king;’ it’s currency. Especially written content.”
– Aaron Orendorff, former Editor-in-Chief at Shopify
Businesses that leverage ecommerce blogging on a regular basis generate more traffic and new subscribers than those without blogs. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the benefits of a brand blog.
Brand Building
- Reach new audiences
- Showcase your products
- Share your company’s story and values
- Become a trusted authority in your niche
Traffic & Lead Growth
- Drive new traffic to your site
- Convert visitors to subscribers
- Grow your email list and generate new revenue opportunities
Acquire & Retain More Loyal Customers
- Engage people across channels with blog content
- Decrease your customer acquisition cost
- Give customers a reason to keep coming back — even when they’re not in the shopping
No other marketing tactic, channel, or strategy can do all of this as well as a blog can.
How Ecommerce Blogging Build Brands
What makes someone buy a product is not the same thing that makes someone loyal to a brand.
It’s easier than ever for consumers to Google the product they need, put it in their Amazon cart, and get it shipped to their door in no time flat. How can small businesses compete?
The solution is to find a way to differentiate your brand, build a community, and bring more potential customers to your website even before they’re ready to buy something. And for businesses that sell online, ecommerce blogging is the perfect way to do that.
“I wanted to create a community, something beyond just a shopping experience for our customers. And content is how that happens.”
– Chris Holt, CEO of Campman
related to their products.
As you’ll see in the examples throughout this guide, ecommerce brands of all sizes are using blogs to drive traffic, acquire new subscribers, and grow their businesses.
Document Your Ecommerce Blogging Strategy
The first step toward blogging success is creating a documented content strategy, or DCS. A DCS is a plan that lays out the business objectives you want to accomplish with content (in this case, your blog) and the approach you’ll take to get there.
It’s been proven time and time again that people who put their goals down on paper are much more likely to achieve them — so don’t skip this step! A Content Marketing Institute study found that highly successful B2C marketers are 293% more likely to have a documented content strategy than their less successful counterparts.
Without a documented content strategy, you run the risk of committing “random acts of marketing” — like publishing a blog post without promoting it to the right audience, or failing to measuring its success.
How to Document Your Ecommerce Blogging Strategy
A complete blog strategy should include eight key pillars that cover the what, why, and how of your ecommerce blog.
- Purpose: Your business challenges and goals
- Brand identity: Your brand’s voice and personality
- Customers: Your target customer profiles
- Publication: A plan for what to publish and when
- Distribution: A plan for getting traffic to your articles
- Conversion: A plan for converting visitors to subscribers
- Measurement: The KPIs you’ll measure to track success
- Technology: The tools you’ll use to execute your strategy
We already talked about purpose — your reasons for starting a blog — in the “Why Blogging?” section above. If you’re like most marketers, all those goals sound good to you.
But the fact is, you can’t optimize everything at once. Your job is to narrow it down to the goals that are most important right now. You can always build in the others later.
Now, brand identity. You should already have a good handle on this, but it’s worth documenting how your brand’s personality will shine through in your blog content.
As Andrew Brookes of Zazzle Media puts it, too many companies rely on tired words like human, helpful, and professional to describe their brand voice.
“There’s us thinking you wanted an unprofessional, inaccessible rant written solely for robots and with little confidence or expertise,” he says.
Next comes customers, another area you already know well. Chances are, you’ve documented your target audience’s basic demographic info — age, location, gender, income bracket, etc. For your blog, you’ll need to dig deeper.
“Think about your customers, how they act, what they read, and how they behave. If you’ve done persona and audience research properly, you’ll have acquired all of this knowledge anyway. Don’t just use it to decide what to sell to people; use it to understand how to talk to them.”
– Andrew Brookes, Content Manager at Zazzle Media
Consider your audience’s personalities, interests, and hobbies. If you sell yoga mats, for example, you obviously know your customers like yoga … but what else do they care about? Spirituality? Weight loss? Overall health? Most likely, you have customers that fall in each of those categories. Different topics will attract each of these audience segments, so make sure you should include them all in your blog strategy.
Once you have the what and why written down, it’s time to focus on the how. In the rest of this guide, we’ll take a closer look at the other five pillars of a successful blog strategy: publication, distribution, conversion, measurement, and technology.
Publication: How to Create High-Performing Ecommerce Blogging Content
For some resource-strapped marketers and business owners, the time it takes to plan and write blog content is the biggest deterrent to starting an ecommerce blog.
But take a deep breath. We’re here to help you find clarity in the chaos.
Options for Sourcing and Creating Blog Content
The first thing to know is that you don’t have to write all your blog content yourself. In fact, you probably shouldn’t.
So, what are your options for content creation?
- Write content in-house. This is a good option for larger marketing teams, but it’s typically not realistic for small businesses to create all their own content on a regular basis. You just can’t produce enough to make a blog successful.
- Work with an agency. Agencies are another option that are better suited for large marketing teams. They typically come with a hefty price tag and long-term commitment, which can be risky for a small business with shifting priorities.
- Work with freelancers. This is the route a lot of lean teams take because it’s relatively inexpensive. But as anyone who’s worked with freelancers knows, managing external writers can be a timesuck, especially when you’re working with more than one at a time. Not to mention, freelance writers’ jobs usually stop when the article is complete — leaving you on your own to promote the content and measure its success.
- Use licensed content. Licensed content refers to content created by a trusted, professional publisher that’s available for you to use on your own website. This is a great option for small teams that want an inexpensive way to drive more people to their sites without spending hours researching, writing, and editing each week. Licensed content costs 3x less than original content, and our own research has proven that it’s just as effective.
“I tell my team, ‘Look, there are five new posts on the website.’ It looks really impressive to have that level of output, but I know it took less than an hour to publish all five of them.”
– Amanda Fowler, Communications Manager at OrthoCarolina (on licensed content)
And of course, you don’t have to stick with just one source of content. You might find that licensed content works well to drive traffic and new subscribers, while blog articles you produce in-house are good for espousing your brand values and making a deeper connection with customers.
Use Ecommerce Blogging for Each Stage of the Awareness Funnel
Different types of content have different purposes. Your ecommerce blog can help you attract new customers and move them through the shopper journey with your brand, from awareness to purchase to retention.
But no single post can do it all.
Every blog post you publish has a job to do. What works to bring someone to your website won’t necessarily motivate them to make a purchase. That’s why creating content for every stage of the funnel is so important.
“Content is the fuel that influences people across the funnel. It’s not only top of the funnel; it’s also critical for deepening consideration and increasing retention.”
– Kami York-Feirn, Social Media Specialist at Osprey Packs
What does this look like in practice? Let’s break down the types of content you should publish at each stage, along with some real-world examples.
Awareness content is anything that educates and/or entertains your target audience without promoting your products. Awareness blog articles can help build brand awareness (shocker!) and trust with potential customers.
Awareness content also drives a very clear outcome: website traffic. When consumers visit your website, they’ve officially entered your sales funnel. Then, you can begin moving them down the path to purchase using branded content and product content.
Research has shown that awareness articles prime your audience to buy something from your online store. A study from Conductor found that people who read educational content from a brand are 48% more likely to buy one week later. So while they might not buy something on their first visit to your site, they’re far more likely to come back and make a purchase at a later date.
Branded content bridges the gap between your audience and your product. Once people are aware of your brand, you want them to consider making a purchase — but it’s still not time for the hard sell. You can (and should) plug your products when it makes sense, but your content should not read like an ad.
Product content includes product descriptions, photos, videos, and reviews. Your blog typically isn’t the place for this type of content, unless you’re announcing the release of a new product. Product content is more likely to live on social media, your product pages, and other parts of your website.
As a marketer, your goal is to move people down the funnel, keeping them interested until they’re ready to make a purchase, and then keep them coming back for more.
This is how the top consumer brands approach blogging, and the strategy is just as effective for small ecommerce businesses. Recently, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs partnered to publish B2C Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends, and their findings validate the power of full-funnel content marketing. Among survey respondents, they found that:
- 56% create content based on the stages of the sales funnel.
- 79% use content to successfully build brand awareness.
- 52% use content to generate revenue.
- 81% use content to build customer loyalty and increase retention.
The bottom line? If you’re not publishing content for every stage of the funnel, your competitors have a clear advantage. Think about it this way: Your blog should be more like a magazine than a catalogue, and more like a resource library than a journal.
Promote Your Product (Without Being Annoying)
You should be integrating products with the content experience in a natural, thoughtful way — not going for the hard sell in your blog content.
One way to do this is to feature related products below each blog post. Superfeet, a brand that sells high-performing shoes and insoles, does this really well.
“When someone is reading about hiking on our blog, they will actually see a graphic at the bottom of the page that talks about how they can improve their hike by wearing Superfeet hiking insoles.”
– Jessica Spencer, Marketing Specialist at Superfeet
Featured products should complement your blog content, not distract from it. For example, it wouldn’t make sense for Superfeet to include the product banner above on a post about their nonprofit partner.
Create an Editorial Calendar
The next big question is how often you should be publishing to your blog. To keep stoking the fire, you’ll need to consistently produce new posts. Research shows that:
- Small businesses that leverage ecommerce blogging produce 126% more new subscribers than those that don’t.
- Publishing 11+ times per month leads to 4x more new subscribers on average.
The ultimate goal is to create a persistent, engaged audience through storytelling. And you can’t do that without an editorial calendar to keep you on track.
In our experience working with hundreds of small brands, we’ve found the publication cadences that work best for brands at each stage of blog growth.
Getting Started
If you’re just getting started with blogging, start small by publishing posts a few times a month.
Awareness
2-4 articles per month
Product-Focused
1 article per quarter
Tribe Building
1 article per quarter
Ramping Up
If you’ve been blogging for a while but want to get more strategic, this editorial cadence is for you.
Awareness
4-8 articles per month
Product-Focused
1 article per quarter
Tribe Building
1 article per quarter
Thriving
If you’re seeing great results from your blog and want to keep building momentum, follow this cadence.
Awareness
8-12 articles per month
Product-Focused
1 article per month
Tribe Building
1 article per month
Need help getting organized? The brilliant folks at CoSchedule have created a simple but effective editorial calendar template that you can snag for your brand. Get yours here.
Pro Tip
If you’re using licensed content or writing your own blog posts in advance, consider publishing all ecommerce blogging posts for the month on the same day. Not only will you save time, you’ll also have more time in the month to get mileage out of your new content.
And let’s be real: Your readers don’t care if a blog post was published on the 1st or the 21st. They just care that it’s high-quality.
Distribution: How to Reach Your Audience with Ecommerce Blogging Content
You know that old adage: If content is published on your blog and no one is around to read it, does it make a sound?
Nope.
You can publish the most incredible articles in the world, but it won’t help your business if the right people don’t see it. That’s why content distribution is so important.
Affordable Advertising on Facebook and Instagram
It’ll probably come as no surprise that Facebook is one of the biggest traffic drivers out there. Facebook boasts 2.32 billion monthly active users, so you can bet that your target audience is active on the social media giant. And as younger consumers continue to spend more time on Instagram, brands are finding it to be an effective content promotion channel as well. This is great news for your ecommerce blogging strategy.
Fortunately for you, both social media platforms are owned by Facebook, so you can launch Facebook and Instagram ads from Facebook Business Manager.
Yes, that’s right: Facebook Business Manager. None of that “boost this post” stuff. Boosting posts gives you much less control over your audience than launching ads from Business Manager, so you’ll just end up spending more money for lower-quality traffic.
You may already be using Facebook and Instagram to run product ads. Product ads are a great way to reach potential customers who are in the shopping mindset. But what about all those people who have never heard of your brand? That’s where content comes in.
You already know how to create content for each stage of the sales funnel. And the same applies to distributing that content via Facebook and Instagram. That looks a little something like this:
As VaynerMedia’s Nik Sharma puts it, there are three reasons this is important.
- “Driving a paid click to a piece of branded content is only a few cents, compared to driving a click to a brand or landing page, which could be up to $5-6 per click.”
- “With retargeting, you’re able to immediately build qualified audiences.”
- “Great content doesn’t sell a product; it sells an opportunity to better an aspect of your life.”
Generating inexpensive traffic, reaching interested people, and using content to elevate your brand? It’s a win-win-win.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t be running product ads. That would be terrible advice. Instead, use content to warm up an unaware audience and engage potential customers who aren’t ready to buy from you quite yet.
Luxury watch brand DuFrane Watches does this really well. A DuFrane watch isn’t an impulse purchase. In fact, their customers’ typical decision-making process is three months. We can’t expect a single touchpoint to close the deal.
First, DuFrane advertises to their target audience using top-of-funnel awareness content that may have nothing to do with watches, but are connected to the brand’s identity and their target audience’s interest, desires, emotions, and needs. Then, they retarget website visitors with mid-funnel content — for example, this article that showcases DuFrane Watches alongside products from other brands that embody the “Texas Gentleman” archetype.
Finally — and only when people near the bottom of the funnel — DuFrane hits them with gorgeous product ads built to drive sales.
Using this approach to Facebook and Instagram advertising will make your ads more efficient — and keep them from seeming spammy.
A few more notes on distributing blog posts via Facebook and Instagram:
- Audience: How do you make sure you’re reaching the right people? The goal of awareness ads is to bring a lot of potential customers to your website at a low cost, so you’ll want to target a broad audience.
But that doesn’t mean you should target everyone and their grandma. Refer to your documented content strategy where you defined your audience. Then, run a targeted awareness campaign for each unique audience segment. To ensure high-quality traffic at the lowest cost, align content to your audience targeting on Facebook.
- Frequency: We recommend swapping out your awareness ads every two to four weeks to avoid ad fatigue.
Ad fatigue is when people completely ignore (or even block) your ad because they’ve seen it too often. Not only does this drain your budget, it creates a bad experience for consumers. And unhappy people won’t buy from you.
Get a Step-by-Step Guide to Facebook Ads
Need help setting up and optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns? We’ve got your back. We have a 45-minute on-demand training on this very topic that you can watch for free.
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Keep ’Em Coming Back with Email Newsletters
Email is a tried-and-true way to reach your audience and bring them (back) to your website. Sure, other channels help you do this, too, but what makes email so unique is that you actually own your subscriber list. On channels like Facebook, you have to pay each time you want to reach your audience. With email, you control exactly who you’re marketing to.
(Don’t have a big subscriber list? We’ll talk about how to generate more subscribers from your blog in the next section of this guide.)
It’s no secret that email marketing drives incredible ROI for ecommerce brands. A whopping 80% of retailers agree that email is a top driver of customer acquisition and retention, and the data backs this up. In fact, one DMA report found that every $1 put into email marketing drives $38 in return — a jaw-dropping 3800% ROI!
But if your emails serve you more than they serve your audience, people will notice. And they won’t think twice about hitting unsubscribe.
That’s why email is the perfect channel to distribute your blog content. By putting entertaining and educational blog posts alongside your products, you’re giving your subscribers who aren’t in the shopping mindset a reason to engage.
Conversion: How to Use Ecommerce Blogging as a Subscriber Generating Machine
You’ve done all the hard work to bring people to your website. Don’t let it go to waste by letting them disappear into the ether.
92% of your first-time website visitors aren’t looking to make a purchase — at least not right away. They may be window shopping, looking for information about your brand, reading your blog … the list goes on. It’s your job to convert them to subscribers so you can continue marketing to them until they’re ready to b
