First and foremost, you’re running an online store. But expand your thinking for just a minute and consider what the internet provides: loads and loads of content. To drive your marketing forward, you need start thinking like a publisher, too.
Content is king for a reason. And you have your own website—a venue with plenty of room for content. Loading up on tons of great content around your market niche can have a huge impact on your bottom line, creating a foundation upon which to build your entire marketing strategy.
Content comes in many forms, like articles, pictures, videos and infographics. Parsed even further, content ranges from a blog post to a how-to video illustrating how to use one of your products. Whichever shape the content takes, it can offer your business plenty of benefits.
Visibility on Search Engines: From a purely scientific perspective, content helps enhance your standing in search engines. The more you post about specific topics and keywords, the more attention you’ll get from Google’s robots.
Brand Credibility & Thought Leadership: Building content around your topic helps establish your brand as a leader in the field. As a result, shoppers take your store more seriously, repaying you with more purchases.
Fodder for Social Media: If you’re hurting for things to share via Facebook and Twitter, you probably aren’t producing enough original content. Sharing other people’s work only gets you so far when you’re trying to shine a spotlight on your retail store.
Audience Interaction: When you produce content on a blog, you have a unique opportunity to open a conversation with your audience. Whether you plan to use comments sections to host the conversation or plan to up the ante with forums, you’ve skipped steps in the sales process once you open a dialogue with a potential customer.
Consistent Relevance: With any good marketing strategy, you want to continue to expose customers to your brand in the hopes that they will return. You shouldn’t have to continually build newsletters from scratch; instead, you should be able to fall back on a bank of content that points potential customers to your site.
Start thinking about your site as a publisher, and you’ll open your store up to a whole new world of potential customers.
