In the ecommerce world, people tend to get really excited when their blog posts get a bunch of likes. While that’s nice, it’s not the point of a business blog, as social media examiner points out. The point of content is to bring in sales. And the way to do that is to create content that specifically solves a problem that online customers have.
If you’re trying to build up your online commerce sites, there are many steps you can take to improve how well your content sells. Here are four ideas to get you started.
1. Make Buying Easy
All the sales techniques in the world won’t help your site sell more until one major issue is addressed: Cart abandonment. According to the BigCommerce website, the greatest challenge facing online vendors is cart abandonment. Basically, this means viable customers went through the entire sales process and abandoned their shopping carts before the purchase could take place.
Various reasons exist for this happening. Some 35% of people got to the cart and abandoned it because they didn’t want to have to create an account. Others thought that the process of checking out was too complicated (about 27%). Still, others left their cart (about 24%) because they couldn’t see their order tally.
In this respect, it’s best for online vendors to look at their website’s shopping cart as a piece of their content and deal with it with that mindset.
Commerce-as-a-service (CaaS) enables the use of a single platform as your sales engine and other platforms as fully integrated sales and marketing channels. This is an especially attractive model to companies that want to achieve success in ecommerce quickly, seeking agility at low risk.
BigCommerce’s new WordPress integration offers CaaS by making it easy for sellers to combine tailored content with a sophisticated ecommerce engine in one multisite control panel. The customer experience is driven by WordPress, while the merchant’s product catalogs, orders and secure checkout experience are managed by BigCommerce. And a separate back end system means that large order volume won’t compromise your front end.
2. Solve a Problem
Do you know who exactly your product can help and what kind of problem they need you to solve? You should, according to CoSchedule, if you want them to buy something from you.
Once you know the answers to these questions, you stand in a better position to create content that actually converts to sales. It just makes sense. If people have undertaken a search of the web in order to solve a problem, they expect to find a solution to their challenge. That sounds overly simplistic. However, it is the truth.
What they want from you (or a vendor like you if your content doesn’t deliver) is to solve their problem. The way that they know a particular business can solve their problem, or one way at least, is by reading your blogs, watching your videos, and generally interacting with your content.
3. Teach First, Then Sell
This step is related to the previous one in that it tells you how to create the content that tells your would-be customer if you can solve their problem. Let’s say that you sell pools and one of the chief objections that you hear is that big pools are difficult to clean and require multiple people to clean them.
Do you spend all of your time explaining to your customers why that isn’t correct, only to find that they don’t buy anyway? Or do you make a video about how easy it is to clean the pool, so easy, in fact, that a six-year-old could clean it by himself? If you picked the latter answer, you win.
That’s the solution that the Social Media Examiner (Michael Stelzner) went with when he created a pool-cleaning demonstration video featuring his six-year-old. By teaching online visitors how easy it was to clean a pool, he automatically assuaged their fears and answered their objections in a subtle, non-threatening way. If you can do this with your content, you’ll have a better chance of getting that conversion.
4. Don’t Write for the Search Engines
Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the great paradoxes of the Internet. On the one hand, when you write content for your website, you use certain keyword phrases (SEO) that help the search engines find you. If you didn’t, you could never get your site indexed by the search engines.
However, it’s easy to forget that the search engines aren’t the ones typing the keyword phrases into the search box: People are. They might be using the same keyword phrases in their search that you did on your website. However, they’re not looking for keyword phrases. They’re looking for a solution to their problem. That’s why Pardot recommends that content marketers write for people and not search engines.
While it’s true that you can stuff a bunch of keywords into each blog post, what you really need to have there is good solid information that web searchers can use. It should solve their problem or at least bring them closer to a solution.
Concluding Thoughts
Creating content that sells is more than just creating a blog post that attracts search engine attention. It’s content that helps your niche audience solve a problem. The better your content solves the problem, the more likely that you are to see an increase in sales. From better performing shopping carts to telling stories, it’s best to take a multifaceted approach to your content creation.
This ensures that your customers’ problems are addressed from the time they enter your site until the time they purchase something from you.