If you have an online shop, you know that one of the most time-consuming and essential parts of being a shop owner is attracting customers to your shop. Some may find it organically by searching your keywords or through a recommendation from a friend. But if you don’t put in some effort to help people find your products, it’s unlikely that your sales will increase dramatically.
That’s where content marketing comes in. Content marketing involves using a variety of content, including things like videos and blog posts, to help people find your shop and products. It’s a constantly evolving practice, so with that in mind, here are some content marketing trends that can help you increase traffic to your shop and make more sales.
Trend: Repurposing Old Content
Content marketing takes time if you create content yourself, and time and money if you pay someone to create content for you. Since most shop owners don’t have an unlimited budget for marketing, it makes sense that one of the big trends in content marketing is finding ways to repurpose your existing content.
Here are some examples:
- Pull a few highlights from an existing blog post and put them in an email. Make sure to include a link to let people read the whole post.
- Take your FAQ from your website, if you have one, and make them into a video that you share on social media.
- If you’ve created short videos (TikToks, for example) about how to use your products, put them together into a longer video or a webinar.
The key here is not to cut and paste your old content. Instead, reformat it for the platform where you’ll share it and make it as compelling as possible.
Trend: Target Content to Your Dream Audience
A lot of sellers believe that the best content is content that appeals to the widest possible audience. However, there’s a growing recognition that content can’t and won’t appeal to everyone and that, when it comes to driving sales, your best bet may be to focus on your ideal customers and tailor your content to them.
For most people selling digital products, the ideal customer is one who buys frequently and is always interested in new products and designs. If you focus your content creation on appealing to THAT person, the one who’s constantly revisiting your shop in search of what’s new, then you’ll be able to build a core group of passionate buyers who are always eager to buy what you’re selling.
Trend: Empathetic Marketing
In the early days of marketing and sales, there was a lot of emphasis on FUD: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The idea was that you could motivate consumers to buy your products by playing on negative emotions. It was effective in some ways, but with today’s savvy shoppers, it can backfire and hurt you more than it helps.
Empathetic marketing puts the focus on empathizing with your prospective customers by understanding what they need. You can do that by asking yourself these questions.
- What do my customers need?
- Why do they look for my products?
- What problem do my products solve?
For example, if you’re someone who sells printable party products on Etsy, you might make your content empathetic to a frazzled parent who’s overwhelmed with the time and expense involved with planning a kid’s birthday party.
Trend: Invest in Long-Form Content
One of the questions that I frequently get asked about content marketing is whether it’s best to create short content or long-form content. There’s a growing emphasis on long-form content because Google prioritizes quality content and long-form content typically includes more useful information and relevant keywords than short-form content.
For example, you might create a long-form blog post where you break down the steps to use your products. If you sell printables, you could share steps to optimize the quality of the printed products. For seamless digital patterns, you might share printing information and demonstrate some ways to use digital patterns in a scrapbook.
Trend: Optimize for Voice Search
If you’re like most people, you use voice search at least some of the time. Perhaps you have an iPhone and use Siri to get answers to questions or you often find yourself saying, “Okay Google” and asking a question. Research shows that 41% of US adults and 55% of teens rely on voice search daily.
One of the easiest ways to optimize for voice search is to answer questions on your website. The obvious answer is including FAQ, but you can also use questions as headings for a blog post. Here are some examples that might apply in a blog post about digital patterns.
- How can I use digital patterns?
- Can I resize a digital pattern I buy?
- What’s the best way to print a digital pattern?
You get the idea. Think about the questions that your customers are likely to ask about a topic and use those questions as keywords in your content.
Trend: Interactive Content
It has become increasingly common for brands to create interactive content for their target audience. Some brands pay a ton of money to create virtual reality marketing, but there are less expensive ways to capitalize on this trend.
- Use Instagram Live or Facebook Live to do a live Q & A with your followers.
- Create a survey on social media or send it out via email and use it to segment your mailing list and create appealing content.
- Encourage your social media followers to use a free item that you give away via a link and share photos of what they’ve done with it. Make sure to include a hashtag that’s unique!
This type of interactive content increases your connection with new and existing customers, helping to build brand loyalty and trust. If you have some money to put into interactive content marketing, you may want to consider creating videos or guides with an interactive element.
Content marketing can do a great deal to connect you with your customers and make more sales. They key is to stay on top of content marketing trends like the ones I’ve listed here.
Do you need help with content marketing? Click here for my Content Hacks!
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