The Comprehensive Guide to Shopify Content Marketing

If you think content marketing is too technical and just the thought of it scares you off, this article is for you. Shopify store owners tend to shy away from a full-blown marketing strategy, but we can tell you now that a little bit of content marketing always goes a long way.

The great thing about Shopify content marketing is that you can start with just a little bit and then progressively commit more to it - there are no hard and fast rules to how much you need to be doing.

Defining content marketing: Content marketing means using different types of content to pull customers to your stores, turn those store visits into sales and turn those buyers into brand loyalists. Yes, content marketing can help you do it all!

How to know if you need content marketing? You know you need content marketing if any of these scenarios ring true for you:

1. You aren’t getting enough traffic to your store
2. Not too many customers come back to purchase more
3. It’s not easy for you to get newer, different types of customers to engage with your store4. A good portion of your new customers come from referrals

How to get started with content marketing

Step 1: Pick the right channels for your brand. Pick the right channels from social media, email marketing, digital ads, blogging and so on. Keep in mind that you don’t need to be on all social media channels - just choose the right ones for you. And you don’t always need to be running digital ads; just run a few ads when you launch new products or have a sale...instead, invest your time in organic content marketing to pull in customers.

Step 2: Plan your content in advance. This is where you’ll take the most time. Once you know what your platforms are, keep in mind the different types of customers you want to be reaching out to. Make sure you’re creating content (social media posts, blog posts, videos, emails) for all of them.

You also need to pay attention to when you’re publishing content. For example, if you know that a lot of your customers buy gifting items during your Black Friday sale, you can send out an email right after Cyber Monday about a fresh Christmas sale - this will help draw in any customers that didn’t do their shopping during BFCM.

Step 3: Distribute your content well. If you look at the Christmas sale email example above, you’ll realise that there are two halves to that strategy - one half is planning & writing the content, the other half is knowing when, how and to whom you should distribute it. Your content marketing strategy is only as good as your distribution strategy!

People don’t come read your content because you’ve written it - they come across it when you push it out on channels that they frequent (such as social media, emails, 3rd party websites).

If you don’t plan your distribution well, you will not see the results of your content marketing.

Step 4: Analysing & tracking. For any marketing strategy, you need to be continually tracking effectiveness. When you’re tracking success numbers in real-time, you’ll see patterns in what is working for which audiences, and what is leading to actual website traffic and sales.

Every content marketing channel has metrics for you to analyse its success:

1. Blog - Number of new visitors and returning visitors, time on page, behaviour reports (where are people spending time on your blog & website).
2. Social media - Number of likes, shares, comments, audience analysis (does it match the profiles of buyers you’ve seen on your store or is it just random traffic?) and time users are spending on your posts.
3. Email marketing - open rate and click rate.

Wondering when to use which channel? Our checklist matches content marketing channels to your different goals:

To increase your Shopify store’s traffic* Social media* Blog posts - including guest blog posts and community publishing* Referral email campaign* YouTube series

To increase sales emails - transactional emails, engagement emails, and newsletters user-Generated Content - show glimpses of satisfied customers to help convert potential customers

To increase the customer lifetime value emails - send personalised emails to customers - based on previously-viewed items, for example.

All you really need to do for successful Shopify content marketing is to understand to whom you’re reaching out (this could be a variety of customer profiles), why and what you hope to achieve. With those 3 goals in mind, you’ll always create and distribute content that is useful, informative and engaging!

About the Author: Vanhishikha Bhargava is a Content Marketer at ModeMagic. As the founder of Contensify and a Shopify partner, she’s always on the lookout for ways to helps brands grow their online business. ModeMagic offers Shopify app labels to increase sales.

Carolina is passionate about writing blogs and articles on Health, Technology, Business and other multiple Niches.