Content marketing doesn’t always work for e-commerce businesses. Many believe in “If you build it, they will come.” Many business owners believe that simply creating content will automatically bring traffic and sales. This is not how content marketing works, and this misconception is why you might be doing content wrong.
In this blog, I'll discuss the most typical mistakes that lead e-commerce content to fail. More importantly, I’ll provide actionable solutions to help you fix them ASAP. Don’t let your content efforts go to waste!
Mistake #1: Choosing the Wrong Content Format
There are different content formats you can use: written, video, and audio. Written content is the most popular and common in e-commerce, especially blogs. However, that doesn’t mean you should follow suit if it doesn’t align with your strengths. Your choice depends on you and your target audience.
Here’s how online shoppers often react to different formats:
Solution: Choose What You’re Good At
To determine which content you should start, ask yourself where you excel. What are you good at? What format will you be excited to do? Which do you feel more comfortable doing?
Choosing and doing something you’re good at already makes making good content easier.
If you think you can educate or discuss a topic more eloquently through a video, do a video. If you don’t like showing your face, you can record an audio instead. Even if your audience prefers reading, start with the format that plays to your strengths. Then, you can use the transcript from that video or audio to create a blog post, either with help from your team or even AI.
Mistake #2: No Clear Content Goals
Many e-commerce brands publish random content without a clear purpose. If you’re doing the same, you’re just wasting your time and resources. Any form of content needs to have a clear goal. In e-commerce, your content should drive an action that is beneficial to your business.
What do you want to achieve when your audience consumes the content you publish? Do you want them to visit your product listings? Subscribe to your newsletter? Follow you on your social media accounts?
Without a clear goal and intended action, your content won’t produce meaningful results.
Solution: Align Your Content With Specific Goals
Your main goals can vary between lead generation, driving sales, and brand awareness. Here’s how you can align your content with these goals:
Provide valuable, educational information to encourage your audience, especially readers, to give their information for more content. For example, include in your content a reason why they should join your email list. When they do, you can gain leads, which are valuable to driving engagement and sales to your business.
You can make content discussing your products and why your store is better. In the end, you can add a call to action (CTA) to encourage them to buy something from you. For example, you can link one of your products to a text in the content so they can click on it. When readers gain value and have direct access to your product, conversions become more likely.
Make trending content related to your products or niche. For example, you can post content about reviews of top products in the niche you sell. At the same time, when generating content, make sure to incorporate relevant keywords that will help you appear and rank in search engines.
Mistake #3: Ignoring SEO & Keyword Research
Like I’ve mentioned above, you want to make sure your written content has the right keywords to help it rank in search engines like Google. This is because of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s essential in content marketing because it improves your visibility online and drives organic traffic to your website.
Many brands still publish content without proper search engine optimization. When your target audience searches for a relevant topic, they can’t quickly see your content and website on pages one and two, or even three, of the search results.
Solution: Apply Basic SEO Strategies
The only fix to this is using the right SEO strategies when creating content. Follow these tips when you create your content:
Keywords are common phrases that online users search for on Google, Bing, etc. With the right use and amount of keywords, your content can appear at the top of search results. The key to this is keyword research. It will assist you in determining which keywords are most likely to rank high.
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz to conduct keyword research. For long-tail keywords, try Answer The Public. If you also want to determine the popularity of a certain keyword, you can use Google Trends.
This pertains to the meta title and meta description of your content when you post it on your website. Metadata is the first thing online users see in the search results—it influences whether they click or not on your content. Use keywords in this, too, so Google can easily understand the relevance of your content.
Google pays attention to when content is posted or updated. So, to ensure search rankings, make sure your content isn’t just optimized but it’s also updated. Pay closer attention to content with dates on them. For example, the content of a review for the best surfboards in 2024 needs to be updated to 2025 now. But don’t just slap a newer date on it. Make sure the copy is relevant to the current date.
A well-structured content ranks better because the hierarchy of information makes it easier for search engine crawlers to understand the content. Header tags are the headlines you use when writing: H1, H2, H3, and H4. You use them for each level of information you want to discuss for your topic. For your target audience, it also makes the whole content easier to read, scan, and understand overall.
Mistake #4: No Promotion Strategy
Brands nowadays expect results just by posting their content—that’s not how it works. You need people to see it to achieve your set goals, so you need to actively promote it. Your work continues even after posting the content.
Without promotion, it will be harder for your target audience to find and engage with your content. This can result in lower visibility, fewer views, and many other missed opportunities. Your market will choose a brand that they always see—someone who always promotes their content.
Solution: Follow a Promotion Strategy
Promote every piece of content you put out. After all, you want to generate visitors regularly, boost revenue, and raise brand awareness. Furthermore, it will inspire your followers and consumers to share your material with others.
Use these three ways to actively promote your content:
Social media is a powerful tool in content marketing. You’re missing out if you’re not utilizing it. You can post images and videos related to the content with captivating copy and hashtags to widen its reach. Remember, the ultimate goal for this is for them to check out the whole and actual content page.
You can promote on different platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can even schedule the postings for your existing content or that you plan to publish.
If you have an existing email list, especially a newsletter, you can also promote your content through that. Include a clear link to the content in your email. You can simply mention how you’ve posted new content they might be interested in or interest them with a question that might intrigue them to check out your content. While it’s true that they may not click on all the links, at least they know that your content exists.
For a more targeted approach, you can use pay-per-click (PPC) ads. PPC means you only have to pay when someone clicks the ad. These can be display ads, video ads, etc. You can set them up to show up on the screen of online users who previously engaged with your content or site.
Make sure to use specialized ad copy and visuals when creating these ads. Use keywords relevant to your topic to improve targeting and visibility. Overall, the ad has to be compelling enough for your audience to click on it and go to your content.
Mistake #5: Not Tracking Performance
Lastly, don’t make the mistake of not tracking your content’s performance. When you post your content, you should monitor its analytics. Is your content achieving its intended goals?
You have to know if it's performing well so you can make the necessary adjustments in the content and your future pieces of content. You can use the data to identify what areas to improve and keep doing.
Solution: Performance Analytics and KPIs
Tracking performance is easy with Google Analytics. Just set up your Google Analytics account and link it to your website. The tracking code of the tool will collect data from your site. Then, Google Analytics can visualize and make reports of certain metrics to help you see how well your content is doing.
Among the many metrics, focus on the engagement metrics to help optimize your content:
If the content is on social media, like a YouTube video, you can track other metrics, such as reach, impressions, likes, reactions, comments, and shares. What are your viewers saying about your content?
At the same time, for content on your website, you can check heatmaps. These are graphical representations of data depicted by color to display where users interact the most on a webpage—clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements.
Which part of it are they most engaged or interested in? Do they check the whole page? Are there consistent patterns?
It’s a good tool to use to understand how your audience interacts with your content. Use these insights to refine layout, strengthen CTAs, and improve overall user engagement.
Conclusion
Your content might be failing because you’re overlooking mistakes that need to be corrected. As a recap, here are the common mistakes you need to fix ASAP:
These are easily solvable with the right solutions. Check if you’re making these mistakes today, and start fixing them.
Need more help with your content marketing and store? Join my free webinar and learn the exact strategies and systems we use at Drop Ship Lifestyle to grow profitable online stores!
