Every great content strategy must be based on consumer education. That's not to say that online stores should organize specialized seminars for their clients – it means that a successful e-commerce venture should provide information to help customers make the most informed choice. This should be done at every step in the customer’s journey on the website, from the results search query to the potential purchase.
Expanding content strategy in this way is highly beneficial – it feeds many platforms, from the general customer nurturing to creating more reliable SEO strategies that incorporate link building, keyword research, and, ultimately, content creation and its marketing.
What follows here is a comprehensive guide to building a powerful content strategy that expands and educates four kinds of online shoppers: uneducated, educated, those that require that little final push to buy something and those that are already set on making a purchase.
The First Steps
There are a few things about consumer behavior that you should consider before you enter your quest for an expanded content strategy and revolutionize the layout of your website.
Consider the way consumers search for products. A user who types is 'men sports shoes' won't be expecting the same search results as someone who searched for 'men New Balance shoes' or 'sports shoes New Balance vs. Adidas'. The first customer searches for a general idea and it's clear that he doesn't really have a specific product in mind. The second client already knows what he or she is looking for and is most likely checking the price or availability of the product. The third case is an altogether different one – the customer has a vague idea about what he or she wants, but is still able to narrow it down to two categories and look for information to make a better informed choice. As you can imagine, each of those search queries should generate a completely different result set.
In order to deal with this kind of complexity, you'll need to get well-acquainted with the nature of buying cycles and their various stages – all of which impact consumer behavior. If you're ready to freely discuss consumer behavior, have a look at those ideas and pointers for four kinds of customers, ordered by by challenge they provide to the SEO and marketing specialists:
- those that need this final push in making the purchase,
- those that are still undecided but would like to buy something,
- the educated consumers,
- the uneducated ones, just waiting to be fed some practical information by you.
Customers that Almost Reach the Point of Purchase
Those customers are simply ready to buy. Right now, they're looking for some practical information like your contact info, store locations and opening hours, or shipping rates. What's your job here? Make it as easy as possible to find all the information they need.
Homepage
Homepages shouldn't be underestimated. After all, a homepage is the most important space where you can target words people search for. But that's not all – homepage is also about your brand. If you notice that your website is not at the very top of the search results for your brand name, make sure to review your meta title to see that it features the name. You can also place your brand name somewhere in the content and build more links to show search engines that your website corresponds to the brand name.
FAQ
When preparing an informative FAQ page, it's worth to know what people actually ask about – this can be done with a feature of Google Analytics. Think about why users visit the FAQ page – most probably, when they want to get some practical information about the formalities like shipping and return policy, customer service options, or possible contact methods. You can still make things a bit more interesting by giving fun answers and providing links to useful 'how to' guides. Here, you can also share product and category pages and build some more links.
Store Location Pages
For each real store location (if you have one), you should include a landing page with information on the store's contact data like address and phone number, its opening hours and, if you've got any, reviews about the shop written by customers. Feature some nice photos and several short employee bios to create an engaging experience for your customers. Take the cue from Adidas and their interactive and informative store locator map:
Shoppers Who Are Still Undecided
There are those customers that would like to validate their decision before making a purchase and it's your cue to ensure them that the products they chose are really what they want. Targeting the search results for certain keywords, and creating some convincing coupons, sales and shipping policies might do the trick. You need to make sure that customers won't have to refer to external sources of information – they will find everything directly on your website.
About Page
Who even looks at the About page anymore? Actually, some people do. Especially those that are looking for information that will allow them to trust your services. By foregrounding your employees, the About page can serve your ends – including short worker bios and positive photos, you'll show that your team loves the products.
This might additionally drive some traffic to your website when people search their names on the web. By exposing the team behind the service, your brand becomes transparent and this can be a real catch for those shoppers who are still unsure whether to trust you or not. Check out this amazing about page created by Ola Interactive Agency - it's a real eye candy!
Coupons & Discounts
Everyone loves coupons and discounts. Period. Check what kind of queries bring people to your website – do customers often type 'promotion' or 'coupon' next to your name? If so, you can think about featuring a special deal or a timed sale somewhere on your website, even before the sales season starts. Hide the promotional page a little and reward those who lingered around long enough to spot it.
Educated Shoppers
Now that we've covered the undecided shopper and customers that are ready to buy, it's time to deal with the educated shoppers. The main goal of your strategy? Educate them further and ensure that they make a well-informed purchase. It's safe to say that this kind of are customer is located further in the buying cycle, so the conversion rates from his visit will most likely be higher than in other cases.
Featuring useful content designed specifically to match the requirements of those visitors will grant an additional value to your website and help to boost audience engagement. Here are some strategies to further educate customers that visit your store and long for more information.
Freemiums
Offering a free download in exchange for an e-mail address is a great way to build a customer database, which can later be used for marketing campaigns and targeted newsletters. Everyone likes freemiums – shopping guides, e-books, interactive tools, or games. Whether it's a free guide to the best products in a given category or a coveted interactive tool designed to look for products that fit certain user-derived criteria, freemiums are something that satisfies the needs of visitors who have their minds set on buying the best product out there.
Be aware that freemiums should be designed to attract the right kind of customers – the ones that carry a high chance of making a purchase, especially once they get all the information. Freeminums also help to build brand awareness by sharing content on social media.
Infographics
Despite the fact that infographics were recently a victim of a severe backlash, they are still a feature that users like – but only if they provide valuable information about the company’s products and represent unique data from an interesting perspective. Have a look at this infographic created by Nike to commemorate their 50thanniversary:
In creating your infographic, try to follow these lines of reasoning: Which items on my website are most popular? What could be the most interesting product on sale right now? Represent this information and design a unique infographic, which is fun to read and inspiring for your customers to make a purchase.
Professionaly Written Content
Special blog posts and articles are a great way to target long-tail keywords and provide a unique experience to an educated shopper, who still has his doubts about which product is the right fit for him. Your specialized posts and articles should aim at answering the potential doubts and question customers might have – detailed articles provide a palatable way of including all that information in one place.
Truth be told, captivating articles can drive additional traffic, capture the customer's attention and easily lead him down the purchasing tunnel by means of linking to categories and product pages, which are featured within the text itself or in sidebars that show some related product feeds.
Specialized Opinions and Interviews
This is a different kind of written content that can work to your advantage. Expert opinions and interviews help to establish a brand awareness, giving it much needed credibility – there are still lots of people that prefer to buy products in brick-and-mortar stores. An expert opinion will additionally bring in the audience of the specialists in question, since they will most likely share all the information about their contributions in their own channels.
All this doesn't necessarily have to be written down. Another great strategy is to invite experts to participate in a live interview, conducted via Youtube or Google Hangouts. This can work very well for all those e-commerce shops that feed on experience rather than products itself, such as cooking. Getting Anthony Bourdain to talk about his favorite cookware can boost your sales and provide a great link building opportunity – such an event has the potential to go viral.
Reviews and Comparisons of Products
The 'sports shoes New Balance vs. Adidas' search keyword I mentioned before is a kind of search query typical for educated customers who already know something, but are eager to learn more. Educated shoppers are looking for an objective source of information that will help them to differentiate between two different products, pointing out their specific features and allowing to make a better informed purchase decision.
When it comes to sports shoes, there's a very wide selection of styles and purposes. The educated shopper will need help in situating his required product by placing it in the correct category – running, lifestyle, tennis, soccer etc. When choosing the best shoes for running, shoppers can really benefit from detailed comparisons and reviews. Including them on your website will leave a great impression and help customers in choosing the best product available – they won't need to refer to other sources of information.
User Generated Content
Even though nowadays everyone pays more attention to the marketing potential of social media, forums are still option for building an audience – American Express, for instance, resorted to this method in their Open Forum, where customers can collaborate, discuss the products, talk about their benefits or disadvantages or provide practical advice to each other. Thanks to this forum, American Express granted a space for its customers to get emotionally invested in their brand and built a community around it.
Uneducated Shoppers
This kind of customer is the toughest one to manage. He is at the first stages of a buying cycle, which means that he's researching for various product options behind the keyword 'sports shoes' and continues to browse product and category pages and search for results that match his requirements.
What those customers need is guidance – you must be the one to provide all the useful information that will help them in making the most informed choice possible. There's no denying that specific user demographics play a crucial role here, but there are several things that work for the general audience that you can try right now.
Category Pages
This might seem obvious, but it's actually a great help to undecided shoppers. Grouping products on the basis of category and featuring some relevant sub-categories will be of great value not only the customer, but to you as well – for link building purposes. When creating your category page, it's best to concentrate on two or three most searched keywords. Have a look at this category page created by New Balance for fitness trainers:
Don't forget to include a short introduction to the category page – provide a short summary of that product kind, just like New Balance does above. This will help shoppers to make sense of what the page is actually about. It can also act as your landing page, which is always a better choice than having it look like a simple navigation section.
Practical Guides
In order to make your category page more presentable, it's not a bad idea to feature shopping guides to help customers in choosing products that best suit their requirements. Have a look at how Asics handled that shopping guide business on their page on how to choose running shoes:
This kind of guide is targeted at those customers who are still in the early phases of their buying cycle. After reading a set of practical tips like those, all undecided shoppers will feel more secure about their purchase decision. What more can you do? If it's applicable, you can include related product feeds in sidebars or between text paragraphs to ensure a better conversion rate.
Visuals and Galleries
This is especially relevant for all those that cherish visual aesthetics – fashion and art enthusiasts, for whom the right visuals can be a true deal-breaker. The rising popularity of services like Tumblr (http://tumblr.com) or Pinterest (http://pinterest.com) speaks for itself – as shoppers, we are increasingly prone to base our purchase decision on the visual presentation, not a long list of practical features.
We will be inspired to buy only if we see products photographed in the right way. Fashion lovers get more and more visual in their the ways they search as well – in their product hunting, they often use Google Images or LOOKBOOK. (http://lookbook.nu) Image galleries provide a great way to improve shopping experience.
Contests
Our final point is contests – something all kinds of shoppers love. They help to build social followers base, acquire e-mails and increase brand visibility. Customers who'd like to participate in a contest should be asked to fill out a form and leave their e-mail address, agreeing to be added into your newsletter base.
Check out Nike's Free Your Run contest (http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/running/run-free), where users were asked to create a run route, then follow it using the Nike+ kilometers that were measured and added up, only to finally vote for the runs they liked best. The creator of the winning run, as well as most active contributors were all asked by Nike to join their #RUNVIKING free run.
In order for your contests to be even more efficient, promote them via social media and specialized websites like I Love Givaways (http://www.ilovegivaways.com/) – all provide great opportunities for link building.