E-commerce is a growing market. The sector has generated $4.9 trillion by 2021 and is projected to reach $5.5 trillion by 2022. This is leading to a greater demand for content. Indeed the latest survey by freelance writer Elna Cain named e-commerce being among three of the most popular industries to write about. A poll conducted by Peak Freelance showed similar results.
The business continues to grow, and this means more content writers for eCommerce. When your content can drive sales and sales, you’ll be even more in demand. Here are a few tips for eCommerce content writers by the worlds leading digital marketing specialists.
Are you ready to begin? Here’s what you should be aware of about eCommerce content writing tips.
Understanding the Buyer Persona
Every great piece of content written for e-commerce has one thing in common: it’s unique and directly addresses the needs of the consumer. In order to achieve this, it is important to think of the customer as a person. The best method to do this is by creating an individual buyer.
Buyer personas are drawn-out characters that represent a company’s intended consumer. It takes the generic concept”buyer” “buyer” and turns it into a fictional flesh-and-blood persona. It provides key details such as:
- Demographics such as gender, age, income as well as family status.
- Character traits: How an individual interacts with others
- Background of professional experience, including job title, education level, and important experiences
- Personal preferences such as interests, hobbies and the brands you love
- Psychographics: Goals, values and frustrations that guide purchasing choices
A lot of companies develop buyer personas as part of their marketing campaigns. Before you begin any online writing project, ask the client if they’ve made personas to target their audience.
If you don’t, you can make one by yourself. If you’ll be performing many tasks for the client, it’s possible to use a more thorough approach using focus groups and interviews with customers.
Do you not have a lot of time? Do not worry, and you can build an impressive persona using the public domain information.
You can use it to look through the existing marketing materials of the client, including any content on their website they’ve previously published. You can also collect information about the demographics of the company’s site using Google Analytics.
Types of Content
In order to increase conversions, companies require high-quality content at each phase within the sales funnel. Think about those three areas.
Top-of-Funnel Content
Top-of-the-funnel content helps you find your brand’s target viewers and let them be conscious of your product. It’s more informative and fun than sales-focused and does not force the brand to sell too much. The content that is at this level includes:
- Social media advertisements
- YouTube explainer videos
Blog content
Blogs are especially useful for optimizing search engines. If they are hosted on a brand’s site, they can drive organic traffic from those who aren’t purchasing. The person visiting the blog is just looking for information regarding an issue or need, and the blog responds to their query with interesting material. When the right time comes, the blog introduces the initiative.
Blogs are excellent SEO content since they focus on specific search terms. For example, if, for instance, you write for an online retailer which sells baby-related products, You could write a post that focuses on the phrase “great gifts for 6-month-olds”, and the other focuses on “safest strollers for your baby.”
Through these two posts, you can reach two buyer segments (parents as well as parents who are not) while introducing two different product categories.
This type of content positions the company to be an expert in the industry in addition to making the brand’s products in a more non-sales-focused setting.
Mid-Funnel Content
This is sometimes referred to as “the consideration phase” of the buyer’s intent. The prospective customer is aware that your company exists and is thinking about:
- Guides to comparison (Brand A. vs Brand B)
- Case studies: Real-life experiences of how a brand assisted customers.
- White papers: In-depth analysis of a product and its advantages
The more expensive brands on the internet, like Tech and B2B brands, feature higher-quality mid-funnel products. Customers need more time to make these types of choices and typically require more details. Engaging content can provide this information without rushing the sale too early.
Bottom of Funnel Content
If the prospective buyer comes up to that point, they’re almost ready to purchase. They’re looking through prices, descriptions of the product reviews of customers and so on.
In this phase, you’re writing for the site of the client. The goal is to showcase their brand and products as the most suitable solution to their requirements. It is important to build confidence and show how their products are distinctive. It is important to highlight the uniqueness of your brand. Crucial.
Consider the fashion industry as an example, the world’s most competitive e-commerce market. If you’re looking to draw attention to your brand’s collection of women’s coats, then you have to demonstrate why your products are superior to the rest.
Buyers are on the verge of purchasing and are eager for more details. Find out with your client and yourself what it is that makes their product stand apart. It could be that they are made of the use of high-quality and sustainable products as well as fair trade manufacturing or an original design. Whatever the case, you can reach out to get those details on the site.
Key Pages for Ecommerce Websites
When it comes to content writing for e-commerce, the site is the primary goal. It’s the main destination for users across the internet, from blog readers to followers on social media. If someone is looking to purchase or is close, they go to the site.
A company’s brand requires high-quality text and images across each of its web pages, including those that help the prospective client through to the sales funnel.
The Home Page
The homepage is the user’s introduction to the website. It should reflect the personality of the brand as well as provide directions to other sections of the site and pages about products.
The home page shouldn’t overburden readers with too many words. Think of it as an introduction, with the focus on showing the reader how they’d like to take them.
Keep text to a couple of important sentences that convey the essence of the brand. For many brands, this is the best spot to put up a value statement. It is also a great place to use the homepage to communicate the mission of the business or the most important thing it can offer that nobody else can offer.
Landing Pages
If a site is an online retailer’s digital storefront and a landing page will be the primary display. It’s a stand-alone page that was created to complement digital marketing assets like paid search advertising, email marketing or blog posts.
Every landing page is tailored specifically toward a particular market. It is typically composed of:
- The items that the campaign is promoting
- Enticing images
- Tone and style geared towards the target audience of the campaign
- A call-to-action encouraging purchase
The CTA is essential to increasing conversion rates. Viewers of landing pages have been enticed by marketing materials and are contemplating purchasing. The CTA should draw them closer by offering the promise of a “can’t-miss” offer, like discounts or a free gift when they purchase.
Pages for landing may also contain customer testimonials and reviews to provide social evidence. Every piece of content should lead readers to the CTA.
About Pages
Nowadays, customers are concerned about the kind of businesses they trust. A majority of consumers look up to a brand’s values prior to making a purchase online, and 60% of them have bought due to their belief in the values a brand is known for. It’s the About Us page–sometimes called the Our Story page–is where you convey your brand’s values.
The About Us page is where the brand’s personality is revealed. It is a story about why the business exists and what it hopes to accomplish for the world. In addition, it explains what it can do for customers and the reasons behind it.
We are conscious of the value of storytelling in your business. We believe that every company has a compelling story to share. However, many companies struggle to tell their stories in a way that generates the desired results.
The first thing it does is establish the reason for its existence and what it offers its customers. This is done in a manner that tells a story.
Category Pages
Also known as Product listing pages, these are the places where you present products from a particular brand. A category page is a collection of types of products, like a smartwatch from a technology company, for instance, or a shoe store’s winter boots.
The category pages target customers who are interested in buying but aren’t sure what they want. Each page provides the essentials about the product as well as a CTA to find out more.
The most successful category pages will highlight the most crucial information about the product, as well as what makes them different from the rest. For instance, if you’re writing a category page about laptops, it’s important to include information about memory and storage. Make sure you include images to attract the attention of readers.
Product Pages
Product pages allow you to describe each product more in-depth. There is usually one page for each product. They contain specifications as well as shipping and price details.
If you can, the product pages of your website should include customer reviews as well as testimonials. The majority of users read them, and they can boost conversion rates by as much as 52 percent.
However, as a content creator, it is the description that will be your main focus.
Creating Effective Product Descriptions
Every company that sells online shares the same objective: to sell items that potential buyers can’t grasp or feel. Your task is to describe the products in a way that they are enthralling to the customer.
Keywords
The inclusion of keywords is an intricate process in creating content for commerce. SEO requires you to use keywords that users will type into looking for information, but you shouldn’t wish for Google to punish your site for keyword overuse. When choosing keywords, be aware of the following factors:
Search Engine Rankings: What are the most popular pages? What’s their content? What can you do to improve it?
Search Volume: Each search term has an annual volume. Try to locate keywords that have low competition and large search volumes for the best outcomes.
Long-tail Keywords: Keywords with long-tail have more precise terms and are typically easier to find. If you’re planning to launch your own website, you should target long-tail keywords to achieve greater outcomes.
Shopify is an online marketplace. Shopify suggests that you use the targeted keyword a minimum of twice inside the copy of the body. This is in addition to the time on the URL as well as the description of the product title and the image tag.
These guidelines are intended for descriptions of less than 300 words. If your client wants to include more descriptions of the product, you could include a few additional keywords.
Structure
When customers come across the product description, they begin with a quick glance. This is how they read the web in general and e-commerce isn’t an exception.
If your description of the product contains more than one paragraph or two, you must separate the text. The dense paragraphs can be difficult to read and easy to drop. The addition of white space assists the reader’s eye and draws focus on the important aspects.
Improve the quality of your descriptions for products by making them understandable by:
- Brief paragraphs (20 words maximum as per Semrush)
- Simple sentences
- Bulleted lists
Headings
If the style of your client allows you to do so, you may highlight certain words using bold font. This can help important information pop out when the reader reads the content. For instance:
- Our 3-year guarantee protects you against any damage beyond normal wear and wears.
- The HD screen has blue light filtering to make it more comfortable reading at night.
Bolding can be helpful for longer descriptions of products, but you should be careful with it. The majority of bolded words could be the printed version of a salesman who is pushing.
Style
Descriptions of products can quickly turn into boring lists of specifications, especially when the product is technically complex or specialized. But consumers don’t make purchases because of facts. They make emotional choices and justify their decisions in a rational manner.
For a long time, marketers have been using quotes from Harvard faculty members at the business school Gerald Zaltman. Zaltman is famous for pointing out the fact that 95 per cent of consumers’ choices are subconscious and occur in the brain’s emotions. If your product descriptions don’t engage the buyer emotionally, it’s likely that you’ll be missing numerous sales opportunities.
Emotional selling is about engaging with the brand’s personality. It’s about communicating, “I get you; I know what you need, and this can help.”
Add character to your product descriptions by using the voice of your brand. What is their personality in their marketing material? Include that character in the description of your product.
Benefits, Not Features
Consumers will have one concern when considering purchasing a product:
- What’s the point of it?
- To answer this query, you have to define the advantages of a product rather than its attributes.
- Product Features include information on the item: 16GB of RAM in laptop and waterproof boot soles
- Product Benefits outline how the product will enhance the user’s experience: Speedier downloads, dry feet
Benefits help the consumer imagine the use of the product. They can envision the way that the product can simplify their lives, and this is what influences the purchase decision.
Developing Content Ideas
Descriptions of products are the simple part. You already know what you’ll need to write about and the audience you’re writing to. It’s not easy to come up with ideas that are unique for those who are higher up the funnel. They’re not yet interested in hearing about specs yet, so how can your content marketing lure readers into the fold?
Keyword research is a good way to begin. It is the best part of eCommerce content writing tips. Once you’ve identified the most searched-for terms within your field and you are able to create articles around these terms. For instance, if you’re writing for a group of buyers of home goods as well as “snow removal” is trending in winter, you could begin with a blog post about the best ways to shovel snow, linking to your latest range of shovels, of course.
After you’ve begun writing content, you should be aware of the best-performing content. Keep in mind that content writing for e-commerce is about generating sales. Make sure you are doing more of what is effective, and your content marketing plan will be successful.