6 best types of content marketing to grow your e-commerce

In today’s busy and competitive ecosystem, it became harder and harder to gain visibility among the millions of brands that are putting enormous marketing efforts to attract the attention of customers. However, it is still possible to stand out from the crowd and one way to do so is content marketing.

As we’ve seen in our previous article, content marketing is the must-have marketing approach nowadays. It costs 62% less than traditional marketing but still generates 3 times the amount of leads. It is more enjoyable and it generates more traffic and leads. 

It also significantly increases conversion rates. Actually, an e-commerce that implements content marketing sees its conversion rates increase 6 times more than those who don’t. 

Yes, I know what you’re telling yourself, now that you see and know all the benefits of content marketing, you definitely have to invest in it but you don’t know which type of content to focus on. Don’t worry we got you covered.

In this article, we’ll talk about the different types of content you can use to skyrocket your e-commerce revenues and build a strong community of followers around your brand but before we go further, let’s talk about some important notions.

One of the most important things to remember is that no marketing (whether it is content or other forms of marketing) is effective if you don’t define and understand your target customers. 

So first make sure to clearly understand who your customers are in order to effectively speak their language and provide the content they seek and they’re attracted to. Remember if you don’t know your customers, how will you know that your content actually educates them and solves their problems?

When it comes to e-commerce customers, they usually look for entertaining or educative content. Their decision-making process can be very short and is often based on emotional factors. They tend to prefer content that is short, fun, visual, and shareable. 

Understanding your customers’ interests and behaviors gives you the opportunity to tailor your message and to focus your efforts on specific types of content that will deliver real results. So to help you out, we’ve put together this list of 6 content types.

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1. Blog articles

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That’s the first thing that pops to almost everyone when hearing content marketing and while it is the most popular form of content when it comes to B2B companies, it is often neglected by e-commerce stores and B2C companies. 

Blog posts are a great way to answer your consumers’ questions and provide insights when talking about complex topics, in addition to that, it helps you showcase your expertise and position yourself as a leader in your industry since you’ll be covering topics and addressing questions that are related to your niche. 

Blogging gives you an invaluable opportunity to rank higher in search engines and thus drive significant traffic to your website. Depending on what type of brand. If you are a popsocket brand, your customer might look for the word "popsocket", but if you are a shoes’ brand, your target customer might not look for "shoes"but rather to an exact brand name like Nike. 

It also helps to build backlinks (get cited) from other websites and blogs and thus increase your domain’s authority.

You can use blogging in many ways, for example, you can write product-focused articles, checklist or even storytelling about your brand and your customers. You can also repurpose it into small types of content such as infographics or videos.

Beardbrand is the perfect example of e-commerce that used blogging to grow their business. Eric Bandholz, the founder of Beardbrand, quit his job as a financial advisor at a bank because of the pressure to conform. Soon after he left, he started his blog dedicated to beards, beard styling, and beard products. Soon he saw the demand rising and his educative posts getting more and more visits, he then decided to launch his e-commerce.

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Over the years, Beardbrand kept investing in content and made it a core aspect of their marketing strategy. Content is so important for the company that, it’s the first thing you’ll see when you enter their website’s homepage. 

Today, the brand generates 500k visits per month and 65,10% of their traffic comes from search. 97,68% of the traffic generated comes from organic search and the brand actually ranks for 2746 keywords (HUUUGE!)

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This means that Beardbrand generates around 320k visits per month only through organic search. Their most famous article, How to Grow a Thick Beard Fast: The Only Guide You’ll Need almost reached 200k visits.

So if you’re still thinking that blog articles aren’t made for B2C and e-commerce brands, you might want to reconsider it. 

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2. Video

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It’s impossible to talk about content types without mentioning video. Video has become a powerful content marketing medium. After all, it provides a big amount of information in a small amount of time compared to blogs and texts. That’s why nowadays it plays a big role in the success of brands’ marketing efforts. 

In 2019, video accounts for 80% of all internet traffic (HUGE!) and videos on Facebook are watched for about 100 million hours each day. So if you’re an e-commerce and you want to invest in content marketing, video is definitely something you should prioritize. 

There are different ways to use videos. You can add it to your product page to help your customers get a better idea of what they’re buying since 96% of today’s consumers find videos helpful when purchasing online. 

Video is also a great way to create an emotional bond with your customers by using storytelling about your brand, your products, and your customers. 

Another interesting stat, actually, “how-to” videos are growing by 70% year by year and this is an invaluable opportunity to attract new people with tutorials and step by step instructions on how to use or assemble your products.

To illustrate that, we’ll continue with our previous example of Beardbrand (yes, you got it right, I am trying to fix my beardless problems). The brand use video as one of its main marketing focus. They publish 1 video every 2 or 3 days on their Youtube channel. 

The great thing about them is that they map their content for each stage of their customers’ journey, from the top to the bottom of the funnel.

This helps them drive 83,18% of their social traffic from Youtube which represents almost 60k visitors per month coming only from Youtube.

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They also embed their videos in their blog posts which makes their content more interactive and leads them to rank higher in search engines. 

Knowing that people are 95% more likely to remember a call to action after watching a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text format, it is a necessity to implement video on your content marketing strategy.

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3. Infographics

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By combining the eye catching side of visuals with the informative nature of texts, infographics became one of the most effective and valuable type of content marketing. It is easily accessible and simple to read.

Infographics summarize valuable information and present those in a clear and visual way. This helps to easily assimilate huge amounts of information with small efforts and in a short time. All of this makes infographics the most sharable type of content on social media.

Infographics have many benefits such as easily catching your targeted audience’s attention. It gives you the opportunity to make your content go viral and since they’re easily embeddable, you can get many backlinks to your website. 

You can also use infographics to repurpose other types of content such as blogs, studies, and videos to produce shorter content that is more likely to get shared.

The perfect example to illustrate the usage of infographics is what Guinness are doing. They are marketing their beers (drink with moderation guys!) through different infographics that tell the story of the company and at the same time, describes perfectly their product. 

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4. Images

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As we’ve mentioned above, visual content is becoming more and more important especially when it comes to e-commerce. An image is worth a thousand words and I'm in a good position to tell you what it is to write a thousand words!

So whether it is on your website, your blog, your product pages, or on social media, including images is mandatory to attract the attention of your customers. So for that, you’ll need to use images that support your messages, embrace your brand identity, and connect with your audience.

Including images in your content has many benefits. It helps you break up text and make it easier to scan. It also lets your customers have a better understanding of what you’re selling. Content that includes images is more shareable and gets 87% more engagement.

With the rise of social media platforms focusing on visuals such as Snapchat, Pinterest, and Instagram, it became crucial for e-commerce brands to focus their content marketing efforts on these platforms. Actually, it’s estimated that 60% of Instagram users have discovered a new product via this platform.

So if you want to grow your brand awareness and to constantly stay in touch with your audience, investing in these visual social media platforms is a must.

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Daniel Wellington, for example, is one of the first e-commerce brands that invested in Instagram and this helped them grow from a small e-commerce store to a multimillion-dollar company. Their core marketing focus is on Instagram, where the brand has almost 5 million followers, 6k posts on their page, and more than 2.200.000 posts with the hashtag #DanielWellington. 

The strategy they used is what we know today as influencers marketing. They were one of the first brands to spot the opportunity and take full advantage of it. 

Their content doesn’t only focus on the product and its features but focuses more on storytelling. 

They, for example, publish content that aligns with the lifestyle of their audience. 

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They also showcase customers’ stories and thus encourage their customers to share their experiences and post pictures with their products. (I mean who doesn’t want to feature in a channel with 6 million followers)

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So if you’re an e-commerce, especially the ones in the fashion industry, focusing on these visual-focused platforms is crucial to driving growth and brand awareness.

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5. User-Generated Content

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UCG (User-Generated Content) is one of the most important types of content nowadays, mainly since customers trust other customers more than brands. So if you’re an e-commerce brand, focusing your content marketing efforts on UCG is crucial to build trust and reinforce your relationship with your customers.

The good thing with UCG is that your audience does pretty much all the work for you since they’re the one creating the content, whether it is reviews or pictures or videos.

This will help you save time and money while sometimes even boosting your SEO. It helps you build brand awareness and support your lead generation strategy.

At the same time, it helps you get audience insights and feedback. It is more reliable for customers as the content is generated by other customers (which they trust more than you). All of this leads to gaining more traffic and increasing conversion rates. 

There are many ways of using UCG. It can be product ratings and reviews shared directly on your website or through other websites and blogs. This will increase the backlinks your website receives and thus increase your domain authority and rank higher in search engines.

UCG also goes together with social media. You can, for example, create a special hashtag for your campaigns and lead your customers to share content with the hashtag. You can also launch contests and challenges on the various platforms. 

To illustrate that, we’ll take a look back at our previous example: Daniel Wellington. The brand uses UCG perfectly to boost their content marketing strategy. 

Daniel Wellington executed UCG so efficiently that the hashtag # DanielWellington was used in more than 2.200.000 posts.

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6. Interactive content

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Interactive content is used to engage your audience through participation. So rather than just reading or watching, your audience actually interacts with you in different ways. To put it simply: it’s a conversation, where you don’t have to actively participate. 

Interactive content can take many forms: surveys, polls, calculators, quizzes, or assessments. 

With its different and unique nature, interactive content helps you distinguish yourself from your competitors. It attracts people and encourages them to spend more time on your website. It drives a lot of engagement and sharing on social media. 

Depending on your e-commerce activity, you can provide different types of interactive content. The most important is to keep it unique and valuable for your audience.

The best example to illustrate it, is … is … (drum roll) is Beardbrand (yes, once again). 

If you’ve visited their website earlier, you have surely noticed the quiz they have on their homepage since it’s the first thing you see on their website.

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The great thing about it is not only that it's interactive but it's also an amazing lead generation tool (I’ve taken the test, you know, beardless problems… and it was actually really fun and engaging). 

The quiz was powered by Typeform and it was such a huge success that even Typeform interviewed Eric Bandholz to breakdown his strategy.

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At the end of the quiz, the brand asks you for your email in exchange for the results and this proved to be so successful that the brand collected more than 150k emails only from the tool and the quiz’s results got shared thousands of times on different social media platforms.

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And that’s just one within many benefits. After analyzing the data they collected, Eric and his team noticed that the majority of their customers mention travelling as one of their top hobbies, and this led the brand to design travel-friendly products in terms of size. 

So if you’re considering which type of content you should focus on, interactive content is definitely something you should consider. 

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Before ending this article, I’ll share with you some tips and things to remember before choosing your content types:

• Make sure the content types you choose are relevant to your brand and to your audience. 
  

• Don’t stick to just one type of content and try many approaches.
  Content marketing isn’t an exact science, so test, test, and test. (keep the good and throw the bad)
  

• Producing great content isn’t enough, so make sure to spend as much time to distribute it through various channels.
  

• Repurpose your content and make sure to repackage it and share it more often on different channels. 
  

• Include storytelling in your content to create an emotional bond with your customers and to strengthen the relationship with them.

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Finally, e-commerce content marketing is an invaluable opportunity to raise awareness around your brand and to drive more engagement. Choosing the best types for your e-commerce is crucial for your strategy’s success. 

PS: Don’t forget, content works best when it’s relevant and targeted to a specific audience.