Most ecommerce brands use content marketing to pitch their products. But, content is more effective when it resonates with an audience. In our increasingly crowded digital world, only content your audience finds inherently useful, entertaining, or otherwise valuable will drive better rankings and organic traffic.
Engaging and shareable content will resonate with your customers and generate the signals Google rewards with top results: low bounce rates, high time-on-site and high click-through-rate on search results pages. This is where you should be focusing your SEO resources.
Creating content for engagement simply means creating content your audience would read whether or not they were considering buying something–content the audience finds helpful, meaningful, or otherwise worth their time and worth sharing.
This type of content outperforms “sales pitch” content in generating the engagement signals that give brands top results on Google. It also helps brands connect with influencers and improves conversion.
I’ve collected examples of brands with effective content strategies that aren’t concerned with products.
Honey Pot
Honey Pot is a plant-based feminine care products brand. Instead of blogging about their products, Honey Pot creates web and social media content around their brand purpose of promoting womens empowerment and sex positivity. This content has resonated deeply with Honey Pot’s audience, playing a key role in driving 3396% increase in organic traffic and 2789% ecommerce revenue growth in three years.
Asutra
Asutra is an all-natural wellness and cosmetics brand. Because their audience is serious about self-care, Asutra has created a library of educational content offering tips on everything from yoga to getting good sleep. This content allows Asutra to promote their products in a less sales-y, more clickable way–for example, Asutra’s Yoga Mat Cleaner is presented as a solution in an informative article explaining best practices for sanitizing yoga mats.
Asutra made this purpose-driven pivot in its content marketing two years ago. In the past two years Asutra’s organic traffic has grown over 1300%, according to SEMrush data.
Tiny Tags
Tiny Tags is an ecommerce jewelry brand that makes custom jewelry for moms. In response to unrealistic expectations about what motherhood looks like fostered on social media, Tiny Tags shares unfiltered stories from real moms about their often-difficult motherhood journeys. Motherhood bloggers and small influencers who appreciate this authentic content consistently promote Tiny Tags free of charge.
Final thoughts
In our increasingly crowded digital world, only content that appeals to your audience on their own terms will drive more organic traffic and sales.
This has considerable implications for the typical ecommerce content strategy. There is no point investing in technically over-optimized content and keyword targeted blog articles when these are actually less effective at generating the engagement signals Google rewards. Formulaic content can be a waste of an SEO budget.
Start writing for your audience, not your products.
Interested in developing a content strategy that sells with engagement? Drop us a line to get started.
