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Content marketing in e-commerce: steps to success

Content marketing is now considered one of the most effective tools for promoting a brand, products, and services. At the same time, the method is radically different from the usual advertising. We will learn how to use content marketing in e-commerce and what are its features.

As part of a content marketing strategy, the brand regularly posts materials that may be interesting and useful to potential customers: jokes, memes, reference guides, informational articles, and the like. 

Gradually, the site chosen for promotion forms a stable group of loyal audience. Some people begin to broadcast a positive image of the company themselves (they become a brand advocate) and constantly use its products. Several types of content are suitable for promotion.

Blogs post short notes and longer articles on topics related to the company's activities in one way or another. For example, Aviasales, an online ticket search service, posts on its Telegram channel about the cultural characteristics of different countries and peoples, as well as information that may be useful to travelers.

Watching videos requires less effort from the audience than reading texts. Therefore, now a significant part of the world's traffic is accounted for by video content. Brands organize online broadcasts and webinars, where they give lectures and answer audience questions, post news releases, announcements, presentations, instructions, and more. In the video format, it is easier to demonstrate all the features of the product and show how to use it. On the official Cascadeur website (a program for 3D animation), each function of the application is illustrated with short clips.

Visualizes various data in the form of diagrams, graphs, geographical maps, drawings, short tables and lists. This makes the information easier to perceive and assimilate. Infographics are added to videos and presentations, used as illustrations for text materials, and posted as independent publications. In its press release, PRO32 (an antivirus developer) visualized the spread of cyber threats in the fourth quarter of 2024 using diagrams.

In the reviews, users share their impressions of the product and communication with the company. A significant number of potential customers study other people's opinions before placing an order. Reviews are perceived as a more reliable source of information. A blogger can be a bad specialist and hide the objective picture. Cooperation agreements often require that materials be coordinated with the brand before publication. If the author criticizes the product, they will not send him anything else for a review. Obviously, the brands themselves will not talk in detail about the shortcomings of their own products. Clients do not depend on anyone and can write whatever they see fit.

Reviews are most often posted in text format, accompanied by photos, screenshots, and other illustrations. Less often, they record videos. There are special platforms for reviews (Otzovik, iRecommend). Many online stores and marketplaces have the appropriate functionality. Companies on their websites often quote reputable experts and ordinary users who have spoken out about the brand's products. For example, Pallete developers do this.fm is an online service for colorizing black and white photos.

A more detailed review format is a description of one or more cases. This is a narrative (in an article or video) about how the client managed to solve the problem using the company's product.

They describe how to use the product correctly and solve various tasks with it. You should not rely solely on documentation. It does not provide answers to many questions, and the format of the directory is inconvenient and incomprehensible for beginners.

The quality and volume of training materials affect customer retention, the number of calls to customer support, and the number of negative reviews. Instructions and manuals can be posted in the form of articles, videos, presentations, slides with infographics. It is advisable to describe the functionality and capabilities using the example of real scenarios. For example, such materials can be found on the CRM Bitrix24 website.

Product cards and web pages describing product properties. SEO keys are organically added to the text - phrases that are more often entered by users in the corresponding search queries. This makes the products more visible in the search results of Google, Yandex and other services.

In some cases, text descriptions are preferable to video presentations. It is easier for a user to find information in a list or table than to search for the desired fragment in a video. For example, the page describing COMPASS-3D (computer-aided design system, or CAD) provides detailed hardware and software requirements.

Product photos, screenshots, and various illustrations. The text materials help the reader understand what is being discussed. It is difficult to do without illustrations in the reference content. An example of their use can be found in the training articles of the MTS Link service.

Content marketing is more likely to show the desired results if it is promoted consciously and according to a well-thought-out promotion strategy.

Identify in advance the results that need to be achieved through content marketing. They must meet several criteria.

  • Concreteness is to increase sales of product X and reduce the number of calls to technical support for problem N.
  • Measurability — increase the customer base by 5%.
  • There is a deadline to achieve results before December 1, 2025.
  • Realistic — the available resources and the market situation should be taken into account.
  • Meeting the needs of the brand is not advisable to focus on tasks that do not help the business in any way.

This is the part of the people who may be interested in the product and buy it. Create a detailed portrait of the target audience (CA). The more features and characteristics it includes, the better. 

The portrait of a CA can include: region of residence, field of activity, education, gender, age, range of interests, income level, marital status, property ownership, and more. These and other features allow you to determine the types of content and the form of presentation (tone of voice) that are best suited for a specific category of consumers. It will also be easier to find emotional triggers that encourage you to make purchases.

It is a mistake to label a target audience as "all people", "everyone who..." and other general categories. There are no universal products, especially in the e-commerce segment. If you target a marketing campaign at "all people", there is a high risk that no one will be interested at all.

The choice of a content marketing platform depends on the tasks set and the portrait of the target audience.

  • Own website for the entire brand or separately for the product. It potentially gives you maximum freedom in choosing the format, visual design, and additional technologies. However, you will have to spend money on developing an online resource, registering a domain name, and paying for hosting. Without SEO, a site may be invisible to search algorithms and attract a minimal number of users.
  • Social network. They allow you to post all kinds of content, but the focus is shifted towards text posts with simple formatting and a few illustrations. With rare exceptions (for example, the purchase of a Premium account in Telegram), registration and the very fact of the existence of a page in social networks do not require any expenses. Most services have recommendation algorithms that simplify promotion. The influx of "external" traffic is limited and you will have to rely only on the coverage of that part of the target audience that is registered on the social network.
  • Video hosting sites. In their current state, they are similar to social networks, but they are intended for posting videos. There are subscriptions, recommendation systems, and functionality for commenting and user reactions. The content can be indexed by search engines. Individual services have specific features. So, a significant part of TikTok's audience is teenagers. Twitch is designed for entertaining online broadcasts, while Vimeo is of interest mainly to creators of author's short films.
  • Email newsletters. Its recipients are people who are initially more interested in receiving any information from the brand. However, you need to get the contact list somehow. If a company is just entering the market, it has no one to send a newsletter to.
  • Third-party resources. Fairly large websites and blogs are ready to publish content from other authors. It is often posted for a fee and can be labeled as "partner material" or "advertising."

The content should be posted regularly. With long downtime, the audience begins to forget about the existence of a channel, community, or website and lose interest in the brand. In addition, at some point, the services decide that the account has been abandoned and stop recommending it to users.

The problem is solved using a content plan (content calendar). This is a schedule that shows the date, time, topic, and platform of each planned publication. As a result, the audience receives new materials in a timely manner, and the brand can plan its activities accordingly. For example, hire one or more specialists who will be responsible for maintaining the website, social networks and other platforms and prepare content for them.

It is advisable to create a content calendar for a relatively short period - from a week to a month. You need to use analytics tools to track audience interest. Based on this data, try new formats and remove those that turned out to be unclaimed.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Literally translated, it means "optimization for search engines," but the more familiar term is "search engine optimization." This is a set of measures aimed at increasing the position of the site, its individual pages and other publications in the search results. The lower the position in the list, the less likely it is that the user will click on the link and view the content.

SEO keys are phrases that users enter when they search for relevant information on the Internet ("how to fix a shower", "buy a garage in Tashkent", "cylinder block repair"). They must correspond to the topic and content of the publication. If the article is about construction calculations, you don't need to use a phrase related to the cultivation of garden plants, just because it is often used as a search query. SEO keys should not be too many in one article. Otherwise, algorithms may mark the page as overoptimized and reduce its position.

The heading hierarchy must be followed. H1 can only be one for the entire web page. H3 is included in H2, not the other way around. And, accordingly, H4 follows H3. Headers can contain keys, which is especially important for H1 and H2.

The meta description is the description of the page. It conveys a summary and is displayed under the links in the search results. There is no clear opinion about the length of the description. Values from 100 to 300 characters are mentioned, but most SEO specialists focus on 150-155 characters.

The presence of links (relinking) can improve the ranking of the page and the entire online resource. Internal linking is adding links to other sections of the same site, and external linking is adding links to third—party sites.

Links are framed with a suitable phrase (anchor). They should be relevant to the context and topic. For example, in an article about writing software code, you can link to web pages about development environments or software testing methods.

It is not recommended to add too many links. Search robots may decide that this is a deliberate overoptimization and reduce their place in the search results.

The effectiveness of content marketing directly depends on how many people view each of the posts. Accordingly, one of the main objectives of the method is to increase coverage and engagement.

The social network is a convenient and well—known platform for users to communicate and distribute content.

  • As mentioned earlier, the services have recommendation mechanisms. Depending on the interests of a particular user (subscriptions, views, reactions, comments), the social network offers them other similar content, including your posts.
  • Social networks have contextual advertising systems. They show banners and small ads to people who meet the specified criteria — gender, age, place of residence, and others.
  • Users can subscribe to pages of interest to them, put reactions and comment on posts. These actions are displayed in the news feed (updates), where they are seen by friends and subscribers. The higher the activity in the community or under a specific post, the more often they get into the recommendations.
  • Users repost publications that they find interesting to their page and forward them via private messages. This increases the reach. In some cases, the content goes viral — it quickly spreads to a huge audience. You can repost any Internet page on almost all sites, not just materials from the same social network.

This is a personalized email newsletter. This is how digests, news, announcements, collections of useful materials, individual offers, and more are sent.

The mailing list can only include those people who have given their explicit consent and provided their contact information themselves. The relevant information is usually requested when registering accounts and signing contracts. Violation of the requirement can be interpreted as spam, invasion of privacy and improper handling of personal data. The legislation of many countries provides for different measures of responsibility for this.

Email marketing can be effective because it is primarily aimed at motivated and interested people. However, there are a number of customers in the contact list who have agreed to the newsletter by mistake or have already lost interest in the information from the brand.

For many modern people, e-mail is not the main communication tool, unlike social networks and instant messengers. It is used for more important reasons. For example, to receive notifications from government agencies or other services. Therefore, it is undesirable to send emails too often. You can send them once every one to two weeks and make them more meaningful.

In this case, you are presenting a brand, product, or content to an audience that is already quite popular. There are several formats of cooperation.

  • Repost. The blogger posts your material on his page with a link to the original source.
  • Collaboration. Interviews, joint streams, video blog releases, contests, sweepstakes, and other activities.
  • Review. The brand sends its product to another author for detailed analysis.
  • The ambassadorship. A blogger becomes the face of a brand by using its products and publicly demonstrating it.

Content marketing has measurable performance indicators. They demonstrate how successfully the tasks are being solved.

The main metrics include the number of subscriptions, views, comments, reactions, reposts, link clicks, and place in search results. The content of the feedback is important. The material can elicit both positive and negative responses from the audience, collecting more negative reactions and comments.

KPIs are key performance indicators. They reflect how useful the content is for the business. KPIs are indicated at the initial task setting. For example, to ensure a minimum of X orders of N products each month.

Metrics are not always related to KPIs. The video will go viral, but it won't boost sales. This can happen if the price and characteristics of the product do not meet the expectations of potential customers.

Social networks, video services, and hosting providers have their own analytics functionality. It can show the number of views and subscriptions, geolocation, audience division by gender, and other information. Link clicks are tracked through tracking systems.

When the built-in tools are not enough, you can resort to third-party analytics services. For example, for Telegram, these are TSStat and Telemetr.

Viewing metrics and analyzing KPIs allows you to assess how effective the promotion strategy is. Indicators need to be studied in dynamics and over fairly long periods of time. Data on one or more days is informative only for promoted resources with frequent posting. In all other cases, you need to look at statistics by month.

Abnormal spikes and falls can be caused by a random combination of circumstances. For example, a post echoes a sudden trend or the audience's attention was focused on an incident.

With stagnation and steady decline, you can try out new formats, themes, and platforms. Try to find out the reasons beforehand. Sometimes they are related to technical problems, such as long loading times, poor website layout, and poor adaptability to different platforms.

Special applications and online services are needed to prepare content and promote it. Let's analyze the most interesting and useful ones.

They are offered by the search engines themselves.

Yandex Wordstat shows statistics on specific queries linked to the platform (desktop, phones, tablets) and regions. A separate section shows the dynamics linked by month.

Google Trends allows you to compare data for multiple queries. The service can display metrics by thematic categories and search sections (by pictures, news, products, YouTube, web search).

The simplest and most minimalistic option is a spreadsheet. It is suitable if the company is present on a small number of resources and posts relatively few materials (one or two per day or less). Google Sheets supports simple formatting and allows you to open access to documents to other users.

Specialized software is more convenient and provides additional features. SmmBox, Planable, and SMMplanner support teamwork. They can be used to create publication schedules, automatically upload materials at a given time to different platforms, and monitor statistics.

Topvisor tracks the positions of an online resource in several search engines and automatically finds competitors. There is an SEO audit function that identifies errors with keys, tags and markup and suggests ways to solve the problem. The service is also able to form a semantic core.

The Screaming Frog app is designed for SEO auditing. It identifies technical problems with the site and issues detailed reports.

You can quickly remove or change the background of an image in the Photomaster program. It also allows you to apply labels, create collages, and automatically and manually adjust image parameters (color balance, brightness, contrast, and others).

Krita is useful for creating complex illustrations. The program has a set of brushes, filters, tools for vector drawings and various filling methods.

I talked about the basic principles of content marketing. Its essence is to post interesting and useful publications. You can blog, create videos, infographics, use illustrations, post reviews, detailed product descriptions, instructions, and step-by-step guides. These techniques are also suitable for e-commerce.

Before proceeding with the promotion, you need to formulate tasks and identify indicators by which you can evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy. Publications will become more visible to search services thanks to SEO techniques. In order for the audience not to get bored from long downtime, it is necessary to post materials according to a schedule — a content plan.

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Алина Быстрова

April 30, 2025 10:36

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