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Best Content Marketing Practices for Shopify Stores

Best Content Marketing Practices for Shopify Stores

Anyone who’s ever had the privilege of running a business knows how tough the competition gets at times. You started your business because you have a great product, and you believe it’s more than capable of going toe-to-toe with your competitors. 

However, the problem is that getting people actually to visit your store is much harder than it looks, especially in the digital age where literally anyone can get beautiful eCommerce sites for cheap. 

What’s the silver bullet you can use to get your Shopify site to stand a bar above the rest? 

You guessed it: marketing.

You can have the best product in the world, but unless you take advantage of modern marketing best practices to get your brand to stand out, your great products will go unseen. 

Fortunately, Shopify stores and digital marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly. 

This article will introduce you to the world of content marketing. There are other types of marketing that can help drive awareness for your brand, but content marketing is probably one of the best investments you can make, and the sooner you start, the better. 

You’ll be introduced to the different types of content you can create, what channels to focus your time and attention on, and the trick I use to get an edge over my competitors!

First Things First: Understand The Basics

Part of what determines the success of your content is the context surrounding it. In this case, the context refers to the channels you post it on. 

Choosing the Right Channels

All of your content will, of course, be available on your site, but by posting it on social media, on Medium, or some other location, you allow your content to be promoted by those platforms. 

For eCommerce stores, the best places to distribute content tend to be Facebook and Instagram because they’re both incredibly visual platforms. 

People go on Facebook to communicate with friends and see what’s going on in their lives, while Instagram is more for showing off products, influencers, and other types of visually compelling content. 

With this in mind, it’s easy to see how content promoting products would thrive on these platforms, especially if you own a lifestyle brand. But if your products were catered instead of career success products, LinkedIn would actually be the better option to go with. 

Planning Your Content Creation

Once you know where you’re going to be distributing your content, it’s time to think about what type of content you will be putting out. It’ll likely revolve around your products or your brand, so that’s an excellent place to start. 

It’s critical to keep your target audience in mind when thinking about what type of content you’re going to make, so make sure to pin down who your ideal customer is. What are they like? How old are they? What are their buying habits?

The clearer you are in your answers to those questions, the easier it’ll be to appeal to your target consumer’s desires

Tracking the Effectiveness of Your Content

Many Shopify owners make a common mistake by creating content for its own sake, sending it out, and then hoping for the best. Doing this is not only a less than optimal approach to creating valuable content; it’s also not great for morale. 

Creating great content is hard work, so don’t you want to make sure you get the most out of it?

To track your content’s effectiveness, take advantage of your platform’s analytics insight features if available. Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin are all great for this since they make it easy to see how your posts have performed regarding engagement, clicks, etc.

Suppose you’ve integrated your Shopify site with Google Analytics. In that case, you’ll even be able to track how many people are visiting your website pages, and if you use UTM tracking, you’ll be able to see which channels your traffic is coming from. 

Sounds a lot better than guessing, right?  

Optimize the Structure of Your Blog

When you create content, primarily written content, it’s essential not just to write it for the eyes of your readership but also for Google’s web crawlers. 

Why? 

Because Google’s Web crawlers are what help your content appear on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), which contributes greatly to the discoverability of your website content, and if people visit your website for the content, they’ll likely see some of your products! 

So how do you make it easy for the Google web crawlers to see your content? Organize it with the topic-cluster model. 

A good way to understand the topic cluster model is like this: You have topic categories, and each category has its own pillar page, and the pillar pages have supporting content. 

So if your Shopify site sells drones, a primary category on your blog might be “Drones for Kids,” a pillar page might be “Drones for Kids: The Complete Shopping Guide for Parents,” and supporting content might be about smaller recipes, such as how to make a great matcha latte. 

Organizing the content on your blog like this is not only good for web crawlers, but it also helps readers navigate your site and easily find the content they’re interested in.  

My Trick? Leveling Up Content with Video

To ignore video as a valuable form of content would be to miss one of the most significant opportunities available to content creators. If you’re doubtful, take a look at all the successful influencers who produce relatively simple content! 

When you create videos for your blog, especially YouTube videos, you increase your chances of YouTube’s billions of users viewing, liking, and subscribing to your content. And since you’re allowed to include links in your videos, you can use them as a way to bring people to your site.

Video, like blogging, is a form of content that any business owner can and should take advantage of. The biggest hurdle is learning how to make them! 

While that may seem like a considerable hurdle, keep in mind that the videos don’t need to be perfect. The goal is to put something out and get better over time. Start with what equipment and skills you have now, and over time you can improve your production quality, get better camera equipment, outfit your studio with the best soundproofing materials, and more to get to something highly polished.

But it all starts with getting started! Don’t believe that’s enough? Just see our first videos compared to what we produce now!

Standing Out in the Digital Age

Having your own Shopify store is a great way to make money off of products you’re proud of, and content marketing is a great way to drive awareness for those products in a way that delivers genuine value to your users. 

We’ve covered some of the best practices for content marketing in this article, but there’s still a lot more out there for you to learn. 

Keep in mind that not every content marketing strategy is going to look the same. For some sites, creating beautiful slideshows works best, whereas for others, hosting a podcast seems to drive the most traffic. 

The only way to determine which type of content will work best for your Shopify store is to get out there and test the market. You may not see results when you first start, but that’s just because it takes time for these things to gain traction. 

Don’t give up, be consistent, and above all else, enjoy the process! 

This is a guest post contribution by Dale McManus. Dale has helped hundreds of thousands of people just like you around the world learn how to create a website over at CreateAProWebsite.com. Whether you want to make a beautiful blog, portfolio, or business website, he’s got you covered with easy to follow guides and tutorials!

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