To Blog or not to Blog? That is the Question!

Content is a powerful tool that you shouldn’t ignore while making business in eCommerce. Do you know the advantages that content marketing can bring to your business? Let’s find out together!

Content marketing is a technique of creating relevant and valuable content to attract and engage target audience with the objective of turning even part of this audience into customers. With valuable content, you can attract and retain their attention. It’ll arouse interest among your visitors and improve your brand loyalty among customers.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, small business marketers use content marketing for many reasons:

You should create content that begs to be shared. Frankly promotional content doesn’t work as efficiently as relevant content to your prospective buyers. Articles, webinars, white papers, eBooks, videos – build a system of information that’ll bring joy and benefit to your visitors.

Content components

Before talking more substantive about content marketing, it would be appropriate to point out its main components.

Videos may include tutorials, a recorded webinar or any other content that would be helpful or just interesting. Talking about blog articles, they are a great way to keep your content in front of customers and visitors. You can tell about current events in company, industry or whatever is relevant to your store. Whitepapers and eBooks are a great way to continually distribute important content. Sharing valuable information, you‘ll earn trust and respect which are very difficult to gain. Don’t forget about infographics, as visualization of information makes it much more interesting to read.

If you want to create a successful content marketing plan, use an editorial calendar. It’ll help to organize your content creation and distribution more effective. In the calendar, you can mark the upcoming piece of content as well as the responsible editor for it.

As an advice, publish the most delicious peace of content at the end of each month. It could be infographic, eBook, whitepaper or professional video. With their help, you'll spur the interest to your blog and your readers won't become bored!

International content

One of the eCommerce advantages is that you have an opportunity to make business all over the world. But I’m afraid it is not the pure truth. Only think: how are going to get international visitors? If the site structure and SEO assets are English-only, they can’t be meaningfully indexed by native-language search. That is the reason local shoppers may never find your store. Of course, it’s impossible to use all the languages of the world, but it's unnecessary.

You can segment your customers/visitors by their native countries or languages they speak and find out your popularity among them. Another way is to build a plan for the further development and decide which markets you want to gain. Anyway, the next step would be the adoption of your content according to the results of research.

You should know that speaking buyers’ languages may boost your conversion rate by as much as 500%! Here is the statistics to proof my words.

52.4% of the consumers buy only at websites where the information is presented in their own language.

85.3% of the respondents told that pre-purchase information in their language is a critical factor for making purchase.

50.8% of the consumers would buy a global brand over a local one, even without translated information.

56.2% of the total respondents told that having information in their own language was more important than a low price.

That is really matters if you want to diversify your sales markets, in other case it is probably won’t play a critical role in your business.

Content vs. Paid Advertising

According to the Roper Public Affairs study, most of business decision-makers prefer to get information from the articles of the companies they buy from instead of getting it from advertisement.

This statistics is not a surprise, as there is one huge advantage of the content marketing – it works. Of course, advertising works too, but totally different from content marketing.

According to the Kapost research, the content marketing of mid-sized companies costs 31% less than paid search, at the same time content marketing brings 3,5% more leads. Another fact that should be mentioned is that the Cost per Lead (CPL) in the long-term yield of content marketing drops by 80% in the first 5 months.

Let’s think together, why would 80% of prospective customers prefer to learn about your product or service via content rather than ads? The most common reason – interruption. With content marketing, your potential customers are coming to you but not vice versa. They come because they are seeking for meaningful information, response to their problems. If you’re there and have the answers, you’ll get your message across without interruptions.

 

P.S. There are many factors for different brands and industries that affect the value of indicators we had considered. Everyone has its own opinion about the way things should be done; but for sure, content marketing must be a part of the mix giving its strong ROI value.