Are you looking for a way to grow your eCommerce storefront? If so, you would likely benefit from a company blog. Many businesses start a blog when they first open their store but quickly lose interest and stop adding new content.
You can’t see consistent growth unless you’re regularly publishing high-quality blog posts. Your content gives you a unique opportunity to connect with visitors before they ever buy a product from your online store.
Similarly, your blog is an excellent tool for keeping existing customers engaged. Many consumers are interested in more than a simple shopping experience. People want to learn more about companies, and they do this through their content. In fact, 70% of people prefer to get to know a business through their content instead of advertisements.
Today, our goal is to show you several strategies you can use to get more value from your company blog. Along the way, you’ll learn how you can create content that resonates with your customers and leads to more overall engagement, traffic, and conversions.
Let’s get started!
Publish Content that Covers Specific Pain Points and Goals
The first thing you should keep in mind is the needs and goals of your customers. If your blog content doesn’t address a specific question or problem, you’re missing out on an opportunity to impress readers.
When a user finds your website, they want to read about a specific topic or industry. Imagine you go to a blog that’s supposed to feature cooking content, but the articles on the company blog are all over the place. There are a couple of topics that mention cooking, but there are several about knitting and another about home decor. Suddenly, you wonder why you visited this website and quickly hit the back button.
You never want to put your customers in this situation. We suggest you research your customers and find out precisely what they care about in your industry. The more your content aligns with your audience’s goals and pain points, the longer people will stay on your site.
If your blog posts connect with them and offer a tangible solution, you could quickly turn a casual visitor into a customer. The key is to get to know your audience by creating customer personas, sending out feedback forms, and monitoring your Google Analytics account.
Create Free Online Courses
Next, let’s talk about customer education. One of the most significant barriers business owners and marketers run into when they launch their product is they don’t address customer education. If someone doesn’t know how to maximize their purchase value, there’s a good chance they will not come back to your website again.
You can turn this around for both existing customers and new visitors by creating online courses. When people can read through training material at their own pace, they are more likely to absorb the information that’s being presented.
There are several ways you can implement this strategy on your website. If you have a longer training plan in mind, you may want to use LMS software so you can create a detailed, fully customized lesson plan.
However, you can also create helpful guides and tutorials that show users the benefits of becoming customers. You can even create a checklist at the end and encourage visitors to download it as part of a lead magnet. Using this strategy, you’ll see an influx of direct customers and prospects.
Consumers want to see the value proposition of the product they wish to purchase. Online courses provide the education people need when they are thinking about buying a product from your website. It’s also worth considering that 60% of people want to read a blog post about a product before buying it.
Build Social Proof with User-Generated Content
You can also get more sales from your blog is by showing social proof. Simply put, social proof is a review, testimonial, or otherwise favorable quote from a real customer that inspires someone who is on the fence to make a purchase.
We’ve all experienced this phenomenon before. Believe it or not, 88% of buyers are directly influenced by reviews they read on websites. Think about the last time you went to Amazon to buy a product. Odds are, you read the reviews, and they instilled confidence in you.
What we just described is social proof in action.
The thing is, social proof can look a little different when it’s on your blog. In many cases, your blog will feature user-generated content that shows new visitors that you’re trustworthy. Our favorite way of demonstrating social proof through our blog is to create a “round-up post.” In other words, we ask industry experts relevant questions and publish all of their answers in one article.
We also allow experts to write guest posts for our site. Imagine you found that food website we mentioned earlier, and the first post is a guest article published by Gordon Ramsey. Would you trust the content on the rest of the website? In this case, the answer is likely yes.
You might not have anyone as famous as Gordon in your toolbelt, but you can see how working with experts and other customers to publish user-generated content can keep people engaged with your brand.
Use Keyword Research to Boost SEO
Creating a blog will also help you dramatically improve your SEO ranking. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a foundational part of growing a business, regardless of your size or industry. Studies show that you can see traffic boosts up to 2,000% when you implement the proper SEO strategies!
The extra traction you can get from consumers typing in keywords and phrases can exponentially grow your sales. Despite the sheer number of online stores, 91% of websites receive zero traffic from Google each month.
If you want to avoid becoming a part of this statistic, you should use Google’s Keyword Planner to uncover industry-specific keywords with a high search volume and low competition. These are words that people type in fairly often, but there are not many high-quality results available.
Once you’ve done your research, make sure you use relevant words and phrases throughout your article so Google’s crawlers can determine the intent of your page. Keyword intent is one of the many factors Google uses to decide where to place website listening in the search results.
As more people find your website, you can expect a surge in signups and sales. Work hard at improving your eCommerce site, and you can keep many of these users around after their initial visit.
Final Thoughts
It’s easy to see the benefits of creating a blog for your online store. However, it’s not always easy to build up the steam you need to get results. The thing you need to remember is patience will get you a long way. Spend time writing new content, engaging with your audience, and analyzing your data, and you’ll have no problem using your blog to boost eCommerce sales.
