Want to drive traffic and conversions with content?

You’ve come to the right place! Content is a huge part of your online store’s success as it helps it appear higher in search results and attracts potential customers.

Content requires extensive planning and strategy. To maximize the chance of getting optimal conversions and traffic, you need to research your audience’s interests, choose content types that align with those interests and ultimately, create that content.

This article will contain five common content types eCommerce websites use to engage customers and drive the desired conversions. This will hopefully give you some ideas for your marketing strategy as well as helpful tips to create quality content.

1. Product Usage Guides

A product usage guide describes ways to extract the maximum benefits from a product. An effective guide contains tips, guidelines, examples, and other helpful information for your customers.

A well-executed product guide can…

• Drive quality traffic to your store
• Educate customers and build a reputation of a reliable source of information
• Get opportunities to introduce and raise awareness of your brand, products, and encourage website browsing
• Promote your products in an organic way by adding links to product pages inside the guide

Many eCommerce businesses create product usage guides to achieve these goals and many more. For B2C online stores, it’s a great opportunity to save on advertising and promote products organically.

For example, Beardbrand, a company selling beard grooming products, promotes a product—a utility balm—by showing how to use it to take care of the “dry beard” problem. The guide describes 11 specific ways to utilize the product, including daily beard care, scalp care, and hair styling.

Besides attracting organic visitors, Beardbrand also drives traffic to its online store with email newsletters containing such content. The brand’s subscribers directly benefit from these helpful tips, which helps with customer retention.

2. Product Ideas

“What are some healthy snacks on the go?”

That’s one of the most popular questions that Google gets from people looking for tasty treats to enjoy during their busy days or road trips. They want simple, healthy, non-perishable snacks, and many eCommerce stores have an opportunity to let their content drive traffic.

Creating content that helps research product ideas can be a great source of traffic and conversions. In fact, 48% of customers begin product searches with search engines, so the potential is promising!

Creating a product idea guide can help your business:

• Increase the amount of organic traffic from search engines
• Showcase your products in an organic, non-pushy way
• Get sales by driving traffic to product pages

No surprise that many successful eCommerce stores create guides with product ideas.

For example, Partake Foods, an online seller of healthy snacks, promotes many healthy non-perishable snacks in this blog post. The brand describes how the products are made, by whom, and why they’re a great choice for an on-the-go snack.

People looking for product ideas find this kind of content useful. However, snack companies aren’t the only businesses that can benefit from product idea guides: this applies pretty much to any B2C business.

Clothing stores are another good example. Shopify entrepreneurs using print on demand apps often create themed gift guides featuring t-shirts and hoodies with heavily searched comic book heroes and other popular characters to drive those tangential sales.

3. Gift Guides

Millions of people look to Google for gift ideas every month. If your business sells products that make good gifts, you need to consider creating written gift guides to get your fair share of that traffic from Google.

A gift guide is a list with gift ideas that shoppers can use for inspiration. These can be built around specific timely holidays like Mother’s and Father’s Day to increase search and sales around those trending moments. To make this content work, you need to describe your products in a way that showcases why they would be the perfect gift. Achieving this goal doesn’t require you to be the best writer in the world as a gift guide can be simple yet still compelling.

Here’s an example:

Highway Robery, a Texas-based seller of unique robes, made a simple gift guide to share product ideas from multiple brands. Here’s how they described their own product as a gift idea.

That’s it! The description is simple, playful, and attractive. You can always add more assets and ideas of who might benefit from receiving your products as gifts.  This way, you can promote your products in an effective, organic way, and score some sales.

4. Product Reviews

As we already know, many customers turn to Google for product research. We reviewed the example with healthy snacks – a search where customers might not be looking for a specific product.

But product reviews include those where shoppers have a good idea of what they’re looking for, and need some specific details about the products. Because product reviews contain these details, they’re extremely helpful for other consumers looking to make the right product choice for their specific needs.

For example, this blog article is about the best squat-proof leggings that can withstand any workout. This content is positioned to address a very specific need of customers, answers an important question, and establishes a value that sets this product apart from others.

To make such content work, you should be able to address most of the questions that customers can have about the product and assure them that this product will fit their needs without any issues.

5. Content for Educating Customers

One important feature of the best eCommerce blogs is content that educates. By creating content designed to teach potential customers something, a business can establish a reputation as a thought leader in its market niche.

Another huge benefit of this content is getting involved in shoppers’ product research. As people find your educational content on Google, your traffic will grow along with conversions. With time, your blog can become a popular source for product research and put you into the spotlight.

Experienced eCommerce content producers make content that’s both directly and indirectly related to products. The first kind is obvious, but let’s see an example of a great content piece that advertises products without direct promotion. 

Whisker Bag, a seller of cat bags, has this nice article about raising a friendly cat. The piece has great tips for cat owners and also mentions products that help with following those tips. In the example below, the paragraph says that a cat bag is a great find for those who like to take their cats on a nature trip.

Similar content related to questions your customers have could do wonders for your Google rankings, website traffic, and overall sales. And the best thing is that you can write such content yourself because you know both your customers and products very well.

Popular Content Types for Ecommerce Businesses: Summary

Creating quality, strategic content is imperative for eCommerce stores wanting to grow traffic and sales. A well-made piece of content that provides value for customers can make a significant difference in the success of your marketing (and the more quality content you have, the more impactful this strategy will be).

Consider the five popular content types above for your online store. Many successful businesses effectively engage customers with them because they help with many marketing goals. 

The most important insight here is to have detailed knowledge of customers’ needs because it helps direct your entire marketing strategy. Start there, brainstorm some topics, see how others performed, and create quality content.

For more helpful tips, check out these three extra content formats to maximize audience engagement.