As an ecommerce store owner, your primary goal should be to drive as much traffic as possible to your store, in an effort to convert that traffic into paying customers. Knowing that should be your goal, and there are two strategies you can use.
The first is to rely entirely on paid advertising and the random organic traffic you receive. The second is to start blogging and combine your blogging efforts with your paid advertising strategies to double down and drive even more organic traffic to your store.
Smart ecommerce store owners are evolving into using the second strategy to build their business, and it’s paying off for them. In case you’re on the fence, here are 5 different reasons why you need to start a blog for your ecommerce store:
To Improve SEO Ranking
SEO matters significantly when it comes to driving traffic to your online store. Strategically setting up keywords through an elegantly written blog, can help your site in terms of SEO. When you create blogs with content, that readers can relate to the products you are selling, you get more visitors diverted to your ecommerce site. But how does it work? When you publish important blogs, you get to include internal links within the blog which transfers the potential purchaser to your online store. Other than the internal links within the articles, you get visitors when the blogs are shares on social media platforms as external links. People tend to open fascinating reads rather than product links. When the blog posts take the viewer to the product page, your job is complete. Blogs increase the chances of engagement with the users on both traditional media and social media.
Blogging improves SEO as you can include more keywords into a blog than you can do on a product page. Your product page SEO drives only customers who are searching for a particular product, however, blogs focus on potential customers, who may search for anything related to what you have written in your blogs.
Blogs Build trust
Ever been to a website that’s selling products or services but has no trace of real people anywhere? A generic presence can be especially detrimental to ecommerce websites since it strips the buyer experience down to bare bones. Blogs are an incredible way to reestablish that consumer trust and interest since it provides you a place to add a personal, relatable flair on your website. Let’s take an example of, Birchbox.
Birchbox is a well-known brand that sends magnificence beauty products to try with a monthly subscription. What attracts women to this brand over heading off to the shopping mall and purchasing their own excellence beauty products isn’t only the appeal of getting a monthly package via the mail, but instead a trust in the specialist Birchbox has. Their blog is a carefully written display of tutorials, beauty tips, brands to watch and more than declares an incredible message: you can trust Birchbox to send you your beauty products since they know what they’re saying. The blog is relatable, fun, and upholds the message of their products.
You can do the same for your brand by populating a blog with tips, tricks, and news relevant to your products or services. In doing so you’ll demonstrate to users that you’re an authority worth trusting and investing in.
For Marketing Your Products
Small entrepreneurs often think that blogs don’t worth the small market they have. However, that’s not true. In fact, blogs allow you to expand your business by contacting more people who can be potential customers. Blogs let you build audiences who aren’t simply active readers but also returning customers. While social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest are preferred for reaching out to customers, they give a next to no space to tell the stories which your customers may be keen on knowing.
When you tell stories that people like, they will return for more. You can utilize that platform to showcase your products and push deals for those products. It need not beads but informative articles about the products or stories on how they were invented, discovered, made, and more. Thus, Blog encourages you promoting your products without directly advertising them.
To Address Readers’ Issues
Blogs can also be employed for customer service by addressing their issues on the platform. Address customer issues and weave your piece of the article around it. Share possible experiences and solutions to the problem. People are increasingly depending on the web for finding solutions to their issues. Even if there is no formulaic solution to the problem, psychologically they find it satisfying when someone else can also relate to the problem. Sharing experiences counts here.
You can execute this to create blogs where issues linked with your products are shared. While you may accept that it very well may be done on product pages too, the freedom and space a blog offers is surely not a match for product content.
Open New Doors Into Your Sales Funnel
Stop and think about each of the different ways you’re trying to get people to enter into your sales funnel right now. Email marketing should be at the top of your list if you own an ecommerce store. You want your email list to be filled with both current customers, as well as loyal subscribers that can eventually be convinced and converted into a paying customer. If you sprinkle incentives to join your mailing list throughout your blog content, your email list is going to grow. Then, implementing a follow-up strategy (that usually includes links to the blog content you’ve created) helps build your brand with those subscribers, and keeps you at the front of their mind. Whenever they’re ready to buy a product, they know where they have to go.
Wrap up
Use blogs as a tool to provide additional information about the products you are selling. Information that your customers actively searches for in the first stage of their purchase journey. Your blog, if handled well, can act as a source of new product discovery for prospective customers.
