With a well-established, technically robust website boasting a thoughtfully designed architecture aimed at delivering the ultimate user experience, you are now ready to embark on shaping a content strategy that not only draws in your desired audience but also successfully converts them.
Presumably, you’ve already gone into the realms of keyword analysis and competitive research, and you’ve harnessed those valuable insights to steer your next moves.
Whether you’re revamping an existing content strategy or commencing from square one, navigate your actions by embracing a widely recognized business innovation framework that takes into consideration pivotal elements like People, Technology and Process.
People
The concept of “People” involves focusing on two primary categories: those spearheading your content endeavours and your targeted audience and clientele. Who will take charge of your company’s content initiatives?
In smaller e-commerce setups, your Managing Editor and Content Marketing Manager or Content Director might be a single individual, whereas in mid-sized to large enterprises, you’ll probably require separate roles for each.
Guiding the best content marketing team requires acute attention to detail, exceptional copywriting and editing capabilities, and the aptitude of a journalist to uncover, assess, and succinctly summarize occasionally intricate information and data.
It is now of utmost importance that content marketing leaders are well-versed in the realm of martech and comprehend its potential for advancing your e-commerce objectives.
It’s not necessarily imperative to find someone already well-versed in your company’s specific tech stack or platform. Given the multitude of martech tools available in today’s market, what’s important is securing a leader capable of rapidly adapting to your chosen technologies and tools.
In addition to possessing a sharp analytical mindset, your ideal content marketing manager should bring an equal measure of creativity and effective communication skills to the table.
The manager will bear the responsibility of not only disseminating the achievements of content marketing throughout the organization but also serving as a consultant and collaborator with various internal stakeholders. Their mission is to ensure that the content strategy represents the interests and requirements of operations, product development, sales, and other functional areas.
Furthermore, you are entrusting this person with the task of motivating and overseeing a potentially substantial content team, comprising a diverse range of creative and analytical talents. The right candidate for a leadership role in content marketing should already have a track record of successfully managing teams to attain specific business objectives.
In the case of larger brands, opting for a Content Strategist may be a strategic choice. When seeking a strategist, look for a professional who not only comprehends the fundamentals of excellent content but also possesses a high-level understanding of the state of search and content discovery.
This individual will bear the responsibility of ensuring that your content initiatives align with your company’s overarching goals. They should possess an in-depth familiarity with your brand and a keen insight into the needs of your specific e-commerce audience.
Establishing Your Content Team
Whom should you enlist for your team, and furthermore, what essential responsibilities must you guarantee are addressed? Depending on the scale of your brand, you may find a single team member juggling various areas of responsibility, or conversely, you could have a multitude of team members concentrated on a single area.
Alternatively, you might opt to assign specific responsibilities to freelancers or even engage an agency to handle your content creation.
Regardless of your approach, it is imperative that these critical functions within your content marketing operation are accounted for:
- Content creation encompasses tasks such as writing, photography, graphic design, video editing, and more.
- Editing, with a particular focus on maintaining brand voice, optimizing content for search engines, aligning with the customer journey, and adapting the format for specific channels.
- Project management and prioritization to ensure efficient workflow.
- Content promotion, whether through public relations efforts or paid channels.
Your Perfect Audience
Persona development and customer journey mapping stand as important components of any comprehensive content strategy. They aren’t isolated tasks but rather dynamic guidelines that you will frequently revisit and revise in response to performance data.
Persona Development
Personas serve to enlighten you about:
- The individuals you seek to engage with.
- The problems you can address for them.
- Where you can locate them online.
- How to communicate effectively with them.
These personas play an important role in content planning, helping you identify gaps and opportunities. Furthermore, your content creators will rely on them to gain a deeper understanding of the audience they are striving to reach.
Customer Journey Mapping
You can use Avinash Kaushik’s “See, Think, Do, Care” customer journey framework, particularly as an e-commerce alternative to conventional linear models. In this framework, audience segments are delineated by their behaviours rather than demographics or psychographics:
- See: The broadest qualified audience accessible to you.
- Think: Your most extensive addressable qualified audience exhibiting some commercial interest.
- Do: Your largest addressable qualified audience displaying substantial commercial intent.
- Care: Current customers, defined by having completed two commercial transactions.
Every piece of content should fulfil a specific need for your target audience, whether that need is informational, navigational, or transactional in nature. Integrating content mapping into your customer’s journey is a vital tactic to include in your ongoing content planning.
Additionally, there is substantial value in applying this approach retrospectively to your existing content inventory through a content audit. This can be challenging for companies that have already generated a substantial volume of content before implementing a defined content strategy.
Mapping your existing content can help identify valuable opportunities to refresh or re-release your top-performing content. It can also shed light on content gaps that you can address in new content development.
Prepare Your Team for Success in Content Marketing
Once you have the right team to present your business and products to eager consumers at crucial junctures, the responsibility lies with you to guarantee they possess the necessary resources for execution.
In 2022, the top-performing B2C brands in content marketing allocated 26% of their overall marketing budget to content marketing. A progressively larger share of this budget is earmarked for supplying marketers with the technology and tools required to generate, enhance, and promote content effectively.
Technology
Cutting-edge technologies, especially those integrating AI or machine learning components, are ushering in a multitude of intriguing possibilities for e-commerce firms aiming to tailor content and engage with potential customers on deeper levels.
Here are some key factors to bear in mind when selecting the technology to fuel your content strategy.
Stack or Suite?
On average, B2C companies use approximately digital technologies in their content marketing endeavours, with analytics tools and email marketing software taking the lead.
However, a notable shift is currently underway, moving away from the reliance on a single tool to solve a specific issue. The true potential of AI becomes more evident when the insights generated by one tool can seamlessly benefit another. As a result, marketing leaders are discovering that the need for disconnected datasets and manual workarounds hinders the performance of their content marketing efforts.
Today, organizations have the capability to deploy comprehensive suites of interconnected tools. These suites may encompass various functions within your content marketing strategy, or content may serve as just one component of a broader and integrated platform.
Intelligent Automation
For years, we’ve used automation to streamline repetitive tasks, such as keyword and competitive research, reducing manual labour.
With the advent of AI, we’ve progressed far beyond basic automation to embrace intelligent automation. In this realm, our technologies not only complete tasks but also perform optimizations, task prioritization, and even make decisions autonomously. Automation relies on humans to input the right data and instructions, ensuring the desired outcome.
In contrast, intelligent automation empowers us to input vast amounts of unstructured data into systems, which then analyze and activate this information. As an illustration, early content tools automated the calculation of keyword density, which has become an obsolete metric today. Now, intelligent automation can:
- Analyze search data and on-site consumer behaviour.
- Identify content gaps in the customer journey.
- Generate content to fill those gaps.
- Target this content to searchers who exhibit similar future behaviour.
It is important to define precisely what you expect your content marketing technology to achieve and establish metrics for evaluating the outcomes of these endeavours.
Who is Responsible for Your Content Marketing Technology?
Effectively harnessing any technology necessitates a profound comprehension of its inner workings by the person operating it. Nevertheless, in the realm of content marketing, creative and interpersonal abilities hold equal significance.
The pivotal question is, who bears the ultimate responsibility for deploying, managing, and ensuring the success of your content marketing technology?
In smaller enterprises, this role may fall to the Content Marketing Manager.
For larger e-commerce entities, establishing a distinct and well-defined position for martech management (or even an autonomous role for content marketing management) could be a prudent choice.
The individual in this role should possess a comprehensive understanding of your business objectives and, at a profound level, grasp how your technology aligns with and bolsters these goals.
Process
With your team in place and equipped with the appropriate technologies, ensure that you incorporate a scalable process into your e-commerce content marketing workflow.
Roles and Workflow
To prevent redundancies and conflicts within your content workflow, it’s necessary to take the time to clearly define roles. This involves creating a comprehensive list of tasks for each team member’s responsibilities and specifying the business and marketing outcomes that each person is accountable for.
Considerations include:
- What approvals and permissions are necessary before content can be published? Who is responsible for obtaining these permissions and advancing each piece of content through the process?
- Which team members have access to specific technology tools, and what are the expectations for their use in performing their respective duties?
- How is reporting managed, and who is tasked with sharing successes and opportunities with the rest of the team?
- How frequently will team meetings occur, and who needs to participate in them?
- How are team members expected to collaborate and communicate, and what measures can be put in place to facilitate these processes?
- Do content team members have open access to internal stakeholders whose knowledge is essential for creating authentic content?
- Likewise, how does your content team engage with operations, sales, R&D, and other stakeholders?
Editorial Calendar
Your Editorial Calendar serves as a dynamic roadmap for your e-commerce company’s content endeavours, and every team member should have access to it, even if it’s just in a view-only mode.
Google Sheets is an excellent choice for this purpose unless your comprehensive marketing suite already uses an editorial calendar feature.
Ideally, your Editorial Calendar should encompass:
- Content concepts and ideas.
- Approved content concepts ready for development.
- The objective of each piece.
- The designated channel for publishing each piece.
- Channel-specific details (e.g., subject line and audience segment for emails, categories and tags for blogs, etc.).
- Content creators’ responsibilities.
- Required research and information for each piece.
- Supplementary content, background information, and references.
- Calls to action.
- Approval prerequisites.
- Target dates for submission and publication.
- Updates on status and progress.
For optimal results, assign one team member as the custodian of the calendar, typically your Managing Editor or the individual responsible for this role. This person’s duty is to keep the calendar current as each piece advances through your company’s workflow.
Content Inventory
Your content inventory can exist as a separate tab within your Editorial Calendar or as a distinct document on its own. Constructing a content inventory can prove challenging, particularly if you’ve been publishing for an extended period and have amassed a substantial volume of undocumented content. However, the effort is undoubtedly worthwhile.
In your content inventory, you should meticulously record the following details for each piece:
- Name or title.
- URL, if it possesses a permanent address, or a draft URL if it doesn’t.
- Relevant topic, broad category, or association with a product/service.
- Publication or distribution date.
- Significant metrics (such as annual or monthly pageviews, search visibility, conversions to specific actions, etc.).
During your content meetings, refer to the content inventory as you plan new pieces. Consider:
- Opportunities to refresh existing content that is still performing well, rather than commencing from scratch.
- Utilizing pieces from your existing inventory to complement new content through internal linking strategies.
Final Thought
Content strategy is intricate yet immensely pivotal to nail down. While setting your goals in writing is commendable, you require a fully-fledged strategy to steer your endeavours effectively. Such a strategy not only keeps your team members aligned and focused but also serves as a reference point for justifying your actions and decisions.
It’s important to note that documenting your strategy doesn’t render it immutable. In reality, the most triumphant content strategies are subject to periodic review and adjustment, driven by the outcomes they yield.
Would you like to read more about how to create eCommerce Content Strategy related articles? If so, we invite you to take a look at our other tech topics before you leave!
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