Right now, you’re reading content.
A content piece we’ve developed to help support our e-commerce audience with common challenges they encounter in their businesses. Our content goal? To add value to the e-retail sector and help existing and potential customers. How do we do it? By putting e-Arabization in the context of a customer’s quest for information and serving them insights and education related to our area of expertise. The outcome? An educated customer who knows that we understand e-commerce and the content challenges associated with creating a world-class shopping platform.
Here’s our favourite definition as explained by the Content Marketing Insitute:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Today, we’re sharing the importance of having a goal-driven content strategy that supports your e-commerce platform and how you can implement small changes today that will increase your traffic, conversions and sales over time.
1. Research
Step one of any successful business plan is good old fashioned research. Creating a content strategy that works for your e-commerce platform is really an investigation into the target audiences you serve in your business and how you can turn their interests and challenges into original content that makes them feel seen, heard and understood.
Top questions to answer during the research phase include:
- How big is your potential market?
- What products and services are similar to ours?
- Who are our top competitors?
- Who are our ideal customers? (more on this in the next section)
- What are our customers most significant challenges?
- What are our primary goals?
- Where do our customers go for information?
- How do they like to make purchases?
Check out Alexa for a complete list of market research questions that will help guide your content strategy, and uncover content opportunities for your platform.
2. Segment your customers and target them at the right time
Understanding how your customer shows up in the wild (online and in real life) is an essential part of creating e-commerce content that meets customer needs. Detailed personas target individual customer types at key moments in their buyer journey. Developing personas is a strategic win that’ll help you focus your energy on creating the right content, and serving it at the right time; when your customer needs it most. Points to consider when you develop segments for your customers:
- Demographics - age, gender, education, location, profession, income
- What are their goals and motivations?
- What are their preferred content channels?
- What type of content do they prefer?
- How long does your target audience spend consuming content?
3. Create a blog
Once you know who your customer is, you should start talking to them. A blog is an authority-building space to share what you offer, how you help your customer and other information that will enrich your customer’s brand experience. For example, as e-Arabization is a B2B language services platform, we focus on answering common questions and challenges we pick up from interactions with our business customers.
E-commerce and website localization is our top-selling service, and that’s why it’s a content theme that frequently presents itself on our blog, with informative guides like this and this.
Every value-adding piece of content we write is then posted to our LinkedIn channel, as this is where our target audience hangs out, and this is where we can connect, build relationships, and invite them to our website to learn more about what we do.
Keeping track of your blog success is as important as the content you create, so we recommend analyzing your data often. Check out if your blog posts are getting website traffic and page views, and which countries your top visitors come from.
4. Translate your content
We’ve already shown you how to boost your website traffic with translation. The next step to consider once you’ve localized your e-commerce platform? Translate the rest of your content into a second, popular language that talks to your audience in the language they’re most comfortable in. Translating content (like a blog) is an ROI-yielding, performance-enhancing activity you can carry out to enhance your target audiences’ experience of your brand. Translated content online is proven to increase conversion and increase international traffic. At e-Arabization, developing multilingual content is one of our favourite ways to support e-commerce brands looking to expand their global footprint. You can find out more about how we help via our form.
5. Customer feedback, reviews and ratings
Only by recording and reading customer feedback, reviews, and ratings can we improve the services and products we create and deliver. And that’s why when we translated Amazon.ae into Arabic, we even had to localize the customer reviews. For over 93% of customers, online reviews impact purchase decisions. They present e-commerce platforms with golden insights into how well/badly their products perform and present consumers with vital assurances and confidence-boosting support to help them buy online.
Followed our tips? Ready to pour even more value into your e-commerce presence online? Chat to us about how we can take your content strategy to the next level in another language, so you can focus your energy on building up your business on a global stage.