Elijah Masek-Kelly — February 2, 2020 In the 3rd quarter of 2019, e-commerce accounted for 11.2% of all sales. This marks an upward trend from last year. In order to make sure that your company is well-suited to take advantage of that surge in business, it’s key that you use effective content marketing to separate your company from the pack.
Here are ideas that some experts suggest may be key trends to follow in order to develop a content marketing ecosystem around your e-commerce business.
Going International
One key trend, as e-commerce continues to grow, is better adapting your content to appeal to international audiences. Multilingual SEO is a key part of this. Alex Michelle-Parr, the Managing Director of Wolfestone Group, explains: “Traditionally, e-commerce companies operating internationally have been content with simply translating their website and product descriptions, and perhaps the odd blog or video. But for those companies that are serious about driving sales globally, they are beginning to realize that this strategy is no longer enough.”
The way international content marketing works in practice is developing and adapting content to better account for linguistic and cultural nuances in each market. This affects everything in terms of SEO, keyword research, and how you tag your images. If your sales data shows you are having a large international contingent for your sales, consider investing in translation and localization services for your content.
Building Around Data
While some modern trends in e-commerce apply to specific audiences, there are others that just about every content strategy needs to incorporate across the board. Sadi Khan, content marketing manager of RunRepeat, cites data-based stories as the “‘Holy Grail’ of content marketing in 2020. More than 2.5 million posts are published every day on WordPress alone and that’s less than half of the entire web. It means you need something extraordinary to stand out from the crowd.”
Many bloggers may be aware of the classic top 5 or top 10 lists, but a single data-based piece of content can have the return of 10 of these (if optimized properly).
How exactly do you take advantage of this?
The key is having more effective methods not just to search for outside data, but also to create your own. This can be done by customer surveys or more advanced methods like call tracking. In general, the more statistics that you can integrate into your content marketing, the more authority you will garner.
This also allows you to establish more backlinks, a key component for SEO. If you put together some of your own statistics, and people cite them in their content, the more traction your pages will get in terms of Google rankings.
The Ebb And Flow Of Trends
In some cases, you need to look into meta-trends regarding both content and e-commerce. Alexander Kehoe, Co-Founder & Operations Director of Caveni Digital Solutions, explains that an ongoing trend is that “many of the brilliant gimmicks common in the industry have become more ineffective as users fatigue to their novelty.”
In his eyes, this reflects a big shift in e-commerce, outside of content. Rather, this predicted shift will be centered on service and simplicity. “You should expect to see the most successful eCommerce stores of the next few years heavily focused on retaining customers and branding their products beyond just being a company that you buy from once to never buy from again.”
Another driving force of this industry shift is that there are more quality product suppliers online, so stores that try to use cheap prices to entice buyers into getting poor-quality products now have higher competition. Going more consumer-focused is key to retaining long-term success, and content is a good way to be more consumer-focused.
Rather than catering your content to try and provide why your products are the best, provide added educational value. Being able to educate customers on how to best use your products or use them to improve their lives will get better traction than a sales-driven video.
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