Bear North Digital is an experienced, practical agency with a reputation for innovative strategies and proven results. Let us help you create the digital content marketing strategy that will take your business to new heights.
Assess the Purpose of Your Content
A clear sense of why you are reaching out to consumers should provide the foundation for your content marketing strategy. Defined goals enable businesses to develop appropriate content and identify the ideal media channels and target audience for the content.
Consider the content from a customer’s perspective. How are they supposed to react to your message? What behavior do you expect from customers, and how does it fit into your larger content marketing strategy?
Put Your Site at the Top of Search Results
Your Shopify site will gather dust unless customers know about it. Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a buzzword in marketing for over a decade. SEO is essential for harnessing the power of modern search engines and driving your content marketing strategy.
In the early days of e-commerce, companies could boost the ranking of their websites by keyword stuffing (adding keywords unnaturally) or tricking the search engine algorithms by hiding keywords. Current web browsers can detect these strategies and penalize websites that use them.
Whenever you optimize a website, it is the best practice to incorporate search engine keywords organically into the content so they improve the page’s rank and provide useful information to your customers.
Hook Your Customer From the Star
When a potential customer sees your ad, views your homepage, or sees your company’s link in their search results, timing is paramount. You might have seconds to draw their attention and keep it long enough to lead them to the next step in your content marketing strategy. Your web content must engage and motivate your audience.
In today’s competitive marketplace, you can’t afford to confuse or frustrate your customers. Optimized content, tailored messages, and clear calls to action make it easier to convert page views and ad clicks into sales and leads.
Match Each Customer With the Right Message
Every customer is different. Today’s internet user has immunity to the generic advertising messages that clog their spam folders and hog precious space on their computer screen. The best way to get your voice heard amid all the advertising noise is to send each customer the right message at the right time.
Crafting and delivering tailored messaging takes work. You need to know the different segments of your audience, sort each customer into the right segment, and find ways to reach them as individuals.
A comprehensive content marketing strategy using email and social media has the power to make personal connections with potential consumers so that they lower their defenses against your message by actively seeking it out.
Potential customers will try to reach you online using their computers, tablets, phones, and other devices. Provide all your consumers with an optimal experience.
Develop Buyer Personas as Part of Your Segmentation Strategy
Treat your customers as whole people rather than demographic labels. Many businesses find it useful to develop buyer personas or ideal customers for every segment of the population they market to. A buyer persona is a fleshed-out representation of a person that includes personality traits, lifestyle, goals, and communication style, along with traditional demographics.
Once you have a buyer persona in mind, you can use it to relate to your consumers and as a research tool for developing your content marketing strategy.
Buyer personas can be a jumping-off point for marketing brainstorming sessions. Marketing research firms use buyer personas when recruiting participants for focus groups and interviewing customers about their experiences.
Modern business owners need a conceptual framework that humanizes customers and appreciates their complexity. Customers on social media and in other online contexts will spot and avoid companies that fail to treat them as people.
Create a Sales Funnel
Drawing traffic toward your website with that perfect, tailored hook is just the beginning of a complete content marketing strategy. Your Shopify page should lead consumers gently toward products and make it easy for them to find what they need and want.
The conventional sales funnel follows the AIDA model:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Decision
- Action
An effective sales funnel moves through these stages continually throughout the shopping experience. As shoppers decide to click on your ad, investigate a product, take advantage of a promotion, and proceed to checkout, your content marketing strategy should answer each of the following questions for the customer:
- What is going on?
- Why should I care?
- What should I do?
- How do I do it?
An e-commerce page that fails to answer these questions gives your customer a reason to close the tab and move on.
Create and Curate Relevant Content
Content is at the heart of a consumer’s desire to visit and promote commercial websites. A site without new content and a message that boils down to a bland plea to buy products will entice no one. Your site needs to be a hub for cutting-edge, trendy, innovative articles, videos, and more.
One way to make your product stand out is to demonstrate that your company is engaged, relevant, informed, and helpful. If you provide your customers with the advice they need, when they need it, they will remember you and your products.
Use Images and Videos
A picture or video can be worth a thousand words if you know the story you are trying to tell. Choose images carefully. Share videos that reinforce a positive brand image and establish your company as a trusted source for vital information.
Don’t rely on only one medium. Use a variety of content types to reach your audience in different ways.
In any online community, there will be individuals with hearing impairment, visual impairment, or other sensory and cognitive limitations.
Creating accessible video and audio content allows you to promote inclusivity and reach a wide customer base. Include alternative text, closed captioning, transcripts, ASL interpretation, and other features based on the needs of the communities you serve.
Raise Questions in the Mind of Your Consumers
An effective website should create an enticing balance of questions and answers. Your customer should never be confused, but neither should they be content and complacent.
Customers should want to learn more and discover. They should trust you to have the information they need at each step.
The perfect web content transforms your website and Shopify e-commerce site into a dialogue with your customer. Your web content raises questions in their minds. Action-oriented links on your site point them toward answers. The journey will end with a purchase and plant the seeds of questions that will have them returning to your site again and again.
Follow Up on Customer Engagement
You can’t always rely on customer loyalty to arise organically. Sometimes, you need to know the right time to reach out.
Whenever possible, your content strategy should include mailing lists, newsletters, and other active marketing that targets your new and repeat customers. They need reminders that your products and services are relevant in their lives and that your brand remains the solution to their problems.
Engage With Communities
Consumers are not islands in the online marketplace. They gather on social networks, chat rooms, discussion forums, and various places around the web. They share information, promote products they like, and use the internet to find validation and purpose.
Your product or service could be a godsend for members of niche communities. If you can establish your company as a trusted member of an online community, you will earn an enduring and continually growing customer base. Your customers will have a social motivation to amplify your message.
Keep an Eye on Trends and Current Events
Internet users use social media and news sites to keep track of what’s going on in the world. Posts that have timely information on breaking news stories go viral. If you know about a news story that relates to your business or reflects your brand image, you can use it to:
- Inform your consumers.
- Reinforce your brand image as trendy and knowledgeable.
- Express your company values by responding to the event.
- Help your audience respond to the event.
Leverage Social Media Channels
If your business has struggled to reach the communities who need your product or service, consider whether you’ve made the best use of your digital resources.
Many older companies developed in the days before the rise of social media and rely on other communication channels. Other companies have social media accounts that merely repeat their marketing messages without engaging meaningfully with their online audience.
Your content marketing strategy should get the most out of social media by using it to grow your audience, start conversations, and join communities.
Think of social media as a party. You wouldn’t try to sell your product to everyone you meet. Instead, get to know people, make friends, and let the conversation turn naturally toward your business offerings.
Build Relationships With Online Influencers
Becoming part of an online community requires earning the trust and respect of influencers within the community. The social media prong of your digital content marketing strategy could include sponsorship of blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels.
Writing guest posts for popular blogs and inviting guest posts on your website generates inbound traffic that is hungry for the latest info.
Involve Your Audience in the Content Creation Process
The internet is at its most powerful when it enables two-way organic communication. Don’t let your Shopify site be just a platform for your message. Give your loyal customers a chance to contribute, and reward them with perks and recognition for every piece of content they share.
From testimonials and product reviews to memes and challenges, your customers can find endless ways to express their enthusiasm for your company and product. Give them reasons to praise your product and spread their voices far and wide.
Grow Your Business With Results-driven Insights From Bear North Digital
You don’t have to craft your Spotify marketing policy on your own. Let Bear North Digital create a custom content marketing strategy to grow your business. Our services range from analytics and SEO to social selling tips and campaign insights. Contact us via our online web form, call 715-319-4822, or email info@bearnorthdigital.com to learn more about digital marketing and discover how our firm can help your business thrive.