Many Shopify store owners can hesitate to create an effective content strategy simply because they don’t know where to start.
However, it’s very important for the success of your online business to develop and implement an effective content strategy, as it significantly impacts your SEO, and your visibility in search engine results.
We’ve created this guide to help you begin your journey towards creating a successful and engaging content strategy for your Shopify store.
Creating an effective content strategy for your Shopify store involves coming up with a structured, organised and comprehensive plan that outlines how your content will be created, managed, and distributed to achieve specific goals.
In this article, we’ll discuss how you can:
- Define the right target audience, goals and objectives for your content strategy
- Understand what’s involved in successful content planning and creation
- Effectively promote and distribute your content to build your audience
1. Define your audience and goals
Would you drive to a new destination without planning your route? Probably not, because it’s highly unlikely that you’d reach your destination.
Without clearly defining your audience and goals, your content can end up aimless.
Defining your audience and goals acts as a roadmap for your content strategy, your destination being high customer engagement, increased sales, and growth.
Audience segmentation
Start by using audience segmentation to identify your target audience. Who are your ideal customers? What are their demographics, interests, and key pain points?
Audience segmentation is the process of dividing your audience into groups based on shared characteristics, interests, or behaviours. This allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your customers and tailor the content strategy based on the information found.
By segmenting your audience, you can create content that resonates with each specific group, addressing their unique needs and preferences. It can also help you to identify which products, services, or information is most appealing to different customer segments, enabling you to create content that highlights the benefits and features most relevant to each audience. And with 69% of customers expecting personalised content, this is crucial.
Ultimately, audience segmentation empowers you, as a Shopify store owner, to deliver more personalised and relevant content, increasing engagement, conversion rates, and customer loyalty, all of which are essential for the success of your website.
Here's some demographics you can use to effectively segment your audience:
Demographic segmentation
- Age
Different age groups have different interests, behaviours, and expectations. So age-based segmentation helps you to address the unique characteristics, needs, and challenges presented by different generations, making it a key element in creating a successful online presence.
Group your audience based on age ranges such as:
- Gen Z: 11-26
- Millennials: 27-42
- Gen X: 43-58
- Generation Jones: 59-68
- Boomers: 69-77
Content for younger audiences such as Gen Z and Millennials might focus on trends and social aspects, whilst content for older audiences may emphasise readability and value. What appeals to Gen X, might not especially appeal to Gen Z, and what appeals to Gen Z is unlikely to appeal to Generation Jones. This is why it’s important to tailor your content strategy to each specific age segment.
- Gender
By tailoring your content to address the unique needs and interests of different genders, you're showing that you acknowledge the diverse preferences and shopping behaviours of your customers.
For example, a clothing store might create separate content for men and women to provide a more personalised and engaging experience. This is because different product recommendations, special discounts, and information such as style guides, would appeal to male and female customers.
- Location
Tailoring your content to the specific locations of your audience allows you to promote the products and information that’s relevant specifically to them. This enhances the user experience of your website because customers feel a stronger connection to your brand as your offerings are more relatable and engaging.
Behavioural segmentation
Behavioural segmentation is based on your audience’s past actions and interactions with your brand:
- Purchase history
Analysing the purchase history of your audience provides you with valuable insights into their preferences and buying habits. By looking at what products or services a customer has previously purchased, or what content they have engaged with the most, you can create content that promotes similar products to encourage repeat purchases.
- Browsing behaviour
Tracking browsing behaviour provides essential information about customer interests and intentions. By monitoring how your website visitors interact with your Shopify store, such as the pages they visit, the products they view, and the time they spend on each page, you can gain a deeper knowledge of what attracts and engages each of your different audiences.
- Engagement levels
Try to segment your audience based on their level of engagement with your brand. Some key engagement metrics you can track include bounce rate, session time, and social media engagement.
Customers who are actively engaging with your brand or website would benefit from receiving exclusive content or offers, especially through email content if they are subscribed to your newsletter. Whereas re-engagement campaigns such as special discounts, new collection announcements, or personalised messages would appeal to inactive customers.
Psychographic segmentation
Psychographic segmentation is where you arrange your audience groups based on their shared physiological characteristics, values, beliefs, and lifestyle preferences:
- Lifestyle and interests
By understanding your audience’s interests, hobbies, beliefs, and lifestyle choices, you can find out more about what drives your customers’ buying decisions. Creating content that aligns with each of these specific aspects of your audience segments, helps build a stronger connection between the customer and the brand.
2. Content planning and creation
Once you’ve defined your strategy in more detail to know who your content is targeting, it’s time to move onto content planning and creation.
Keyword research & SEO
Creating a keyword strategy within your Shopify store’s content strategy is about identifying and optimising for specific search terms and phrases that are relevant to your specific products or services.
This strategy involves conducting thorough keyword research to understand what your target audience is searching for. By incorporating these keywords into your content, including product descriptions, blog posts, pages, and meta tags, you can improve your Shopify store’s visibility in search engine results.
Not only does this drive more organic traffic to your website, but it also ensures that the content you’re creating is specifically targeted and aligned with what your customers are looking for.
To learn more about keyword research and optimisation, and how it can improve your content strategy, check out our Ultimate Guide to Shopify SEO.
Content types
By offering a well-rounded mix of content on your Shopify store, you’ll be able to establish a more dynamic and engaging online presence, as well as improve your Shopfiy store's SEO and rankings in search results.
Different content types cater to a diverse range of audience preferences. Some of your customers may prefer reading informative blog posts or guides, whilst others might engage more with visual content, such as videos, infographics, or product images.
In addition, different content types serve distinct purposes within a website’s content strategy:
- Blog posts
Blog posts are written articles used to inform, engage and educate your online audience. When using them as part of the content strategy for your Shopify store, you also have the opportunity to share valuable information about your products, industry trends, related topics, as well as linking to other pages within your website.
Blogs work to enhance your online store’s SEO, drive organic traffic, and establish your website’s authority as an expert in your business niche. This helps to boost customer trust and loyalty, while helping potential buyers make informed purchasing decisions.
-Product descriptions
Product descriptions are concise, written summaries that provide essential information about the products you offer to customers. They usually include a keyword-optimised description of a product's features, benefits, and specifications.
Not only do product descriptions serve to help customers make purchase decisions, but they also work to increase the search engine rankings of that particular product, collection, or page.
- Visual content
Visual content on a website can include images, videos, and animated/interactive graphics. Its purpose is to enhance user experience, make content more appealing, and provide a better understanding of products, services, promotions, and other areas related to your business.
It’s important to incorporate visual content into your other marketing content such as blogs, newsletters, and product pages because it captures attention, communicates your message quickly, and can showcase your offerings from a different angle.
Your visual content can also be shared across all of your social media channels for increased engagement and brand visibility.
- Email newsletters
Email newsletters allow you to consistently deliver personalised content, promotions, and updates to your subscribers, helping you to nurture leads and retain customers by maintaining good communication.
You can learn more about email marketing and the benefits it will have for your content strategy later on in this article.
- User-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content (UGC) provides first-hand testimonials, reviews, and social proof from your existing, satisfied customers, creating trust and credibility with new customers.
It’s beneficial to use UGC within your Shopify website’s content strategy because it offers authentic examples of how others have benefited from your products, services, or offerings.
Examples of user-generated content include customer reviews, testimonials, social media posts featuring your products, and customer submitted photos or videos showcasing their experience with their purchase.
You can learn more about UGC in the article, The Power of User-Generated Content (UGC) for Shopify Stores.
Content Calendar
Developing a content calendar allows you to more effectively plan when and how often you’ll publish content for your Shopify store, which brings organisation and structure to your content strategy.
When content is planned and scheduled in advance, you ensure a consistent flow of fresh material on your website, blog, and social media platforms. Consistency is key to building an audience and maintaining their interest, which will keep them engaged and returning for more.
Having a content calendar also allows you to align your content with your business goals, objectives, events, and seasonal trends. You can strategically plan to create content based around promotions, product launches, and sales campaigns, maximising their impact.
Creating a content calendar is easy, you just need to find the right tool.
To keep your content plan clear, organised and efficient, take the time to select an online platform to manage your content calendar. Some of the most popular tools include Asana, ClickUp, and CoSchedule.
These platforms allow you to categorise your content based on topics, audience segmentation, themes, or product categories. This helps to maintain a variety of content types and ensures that you are planning to cover all of the relevant aspects of your business.
Content calendar tools help you to stay super organised with little effort. Most platforms provide fields and columns for important information such as:
- Dates, such as start date and due by date
- Content titles
- Formats (e.g. blog post, video, social post, newsletter)
- Keywords to use
- Publication channels
- Responsible or assigned team members
- Status (e.g. planned, in progress, published)
Over time, when your content starts to go live, you can begin to review its performance, and update your content calendar accordingly. Make these adjustments based on audience feedback, analytics & data, and changing business priorities.
For instance, if you see that one form of content is receiving much more engagement than another, then you may decide to update your calendar to remind you to create more of that specific content.
Prioritise Quality Content
Focus on creating high-quality, valuable, and engaging content. Quality content should not only engage your audience, but should provide solutions to their problems, answer their questions, and entertain them.
When you constantly deliver valuable, informative, and well-researched content, you’re automatically positioning your Shopify store as an authority in your niche.
This is where ‘quality over quantity’ really comes into play.
Consider a scenario where two Shopify stores are selling similar products, with one prioritising high-quality content, and the other focusing on quantity, ending up with rushed, poorly written content.
The store that invests in quality content for their website, such as in-depth product guides, expert reviews, and informative blog posts is way more likely to earn trust from their customers. Your visitors will appreciate these valuable insights, making them feel more confident in making a purchase.
Whereas the store that churns out low-quality, hastily produced content may struggle to engage their audience, which could even drive customers away due to a lack of professionalism and credibility.
In the long run, prioritising quality content consistently pays off by not only helping a business to attract new customers, but to also retain them and create a positive brand image.
3. Promotion and distribution
The promotion and distribution of your content is important because it ensures your valuable and high-quality content reaches the right audience.
It’s not enough to just create great content: you need to actively share it in order to generate views.
Just as a signpost would guide customers to a physical shop, effective promotion and distribution leads them to your website, making your content more visible, accessible and enticing.
Social Media
Your social media platforms provide an excellent avenue for reaching a wider audience, enhancing brand awareness, and driving traffic to your Shopify store.
By sharing your high-quality content, promotions, product updates, new blogs/information guides, and engaging with your audience on social media, you create a sense of community and build relationships with customers.
Social media platforms also give you the opportunity to gather valuable insights into your audience’s preferences and behaviours. Engagement metrics can help you to better plan your content strategy for increased results and engagement:
- Likes and reactions: You can measure the number of likes, hearts, or other reactions to your social media posts as an indicator of your audience’s interest and engagement with that particular topic.
- Comments: Monitor the quantity and quality of comments on your posts to get a better idea of people’s opinions, thoughts and reviews of what you’re offering, as well as how good your content is at sparking conversations or interactions.
- Shares or reposts: The analytics dashboard on your social media accounts will allow you to track how frequently your content is being shared or reposted. If you see this metric is quite high, it shows that your audience finds your content valuable enough to share with their own networks.
- Click-through rate (CTR): Analytics also provide you with the percentage of users who click on links to your website included on your social media pages, such as in your posts. This shows how willing your audience is to explore more of your content or purchase a product from your Shopify store.
- Follower growth: Keep an eye out on the growth of your follower count over time, as this is a key indicator into the appeal your content has to both new and existing audiences.
Here are some of the most popular social media platforms, and how can you use them for the promotion and distribution of your Shopify store’s content strategy:
- Share a variety of content types, including blogs, articles, videos, and images
- Use paid advertising and boosted posts to reach a wider audience
- Join and engage with relevant Facebook groups to share your content with users asking questions related to your niche or that your content can provide answers for
- Post visually appealing images and short videos
- Utilise Instagram stories and reels for engaging content
- Collaborate with influencers or run sponsored posts to reach a wider audience
- Use relevant hashtags and geotags to reach specific target audiences and enhance your discoverability
- Share valuable content that you’ve created, including articles, whitepapers, and industry insights
- Connect with other professionals in your business niche and join relevant groups
- Consider running targeted ads for B2B promotions
- Youtube
- Create high-quality video content, such as tutorials, vlogs, client testimonials, and product demonstrations
- Optimise video titles, descriptions, and tags for search engine visibility
- Encourage viewers to subscribe, and like and comment on your videos
- Participate in relevant subreddits by sharing valuable content and engaging in discussions
- Focus on providing helpful insights, such as answering questions and providing solutions to people’s problems
- Use Reddit Ads for targeted advertising campaigns
- TikTok
- Create short, engaging videos focused on being creative and entertaining
- Use popular music, trends, and challenges to connect with specific audiences
- Include relevant hashtags in your video descriptions
- Repost and repurpose your TikTok content across Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc for a wider reach
To learn more about how you can use social media to boost the success of your Shopify store’s content strategy, discover our article, What is Organic Social? This guide will give you insights into:
You can find the full article here.
Email marketing
Email marketing allows you to maintain a direct line of communication with your customers. Platforms like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, HubSpot, or Shopify’s built-in email marketing tools make it easier than ever to create and send engaging emails.
One of the key benefits of email marketing is that it can be a very versatile tool when looking to promote specific content. For example, if you’ve written a blog post that you want to promote or highlight, you can send out a newsletter to your subscribers highlighting that article.
Include information from the key points or topics in your blog post, as well as a summary or a teaser of what to expect. This will compel readers to click through to your Shopify store to read the full article.
Remember, though, when highlighting blogs or articles within your newsletter, to choose ones that cover interesting, trending, engaging topics, and that provide real value to the reader.
Email marketing also provides you with the opportunity to use audience segmentation - getting the right content to the right audience at the right time.
You can do this by segmenting your email list to target specific customer groups based on their interests. If you run a Shopify clothing store and have a new line of ‘Autumnal Knit Jumpers’, you can send tailored emails promoting this product range to customers who’ve previously shown interest in your Autumnal fashion ranges.
4. Goals and objectives
One of the most important steps to creating a successful content strategy for your Shopify store is to determine what you’re aiming to achieve.
Common goals and objectives include:
- Boosting online sales and conversion rates
- Increasing website traffic
- Improving brand awareness
- Providing valuable information to customers
As mentioned, goals serve as a roadmap, guiding your content creation and distribution efforts so that it reaches the right audience at the right time. They help to prioritise which types of content to create, such as blogs, newsletters, and social media posts, where to promote it, and how to measure its success.
Overall, setting goals is vital for your content strategy as it ensures that you’re heading in the right direction. To keep your Shopify store’s content strategy remaining focused and aligned with your business objectives, you can follow the SMART technique:
Specific - Goals should be well-defined, specific, and narrow for more effective planning and a clear direction.
Measurable - Make sure your goals and progress are quantifiable and measurable so that they can be tracked. This makes it easier to determine when the goal has been achieved.
Achievable - Your goals should be realistic and attainable, and should be set within a reasonable timeframe. It’s great to set goals that challenge you, but that are still achievable.
Relevant - Choose goals that align with your company values and objectives, as this will contribute to long-term success.
Time-based - Set a realistic but ambitious timeframe or deadline by which your goals should be achieved. This promotes task prioritisation, efficiency, and increases motivation.
Final Thoughts
Looking to take the next steps toward boosting your Shopify sales?
Have you considered using a Shopify mobile app builder?
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Find out more about the benefits of mobile apps vs. mobile websites or book a call with one of StoreLab's Shopify growth experts today.
FAQ
What is the difference between content marketing and content strategy?
Content strategy is the ideas, analytics, and processes whereas content marketing is the result.
For example, you may spend weeks analysing all your customer data and mapping out a content plan (your strategy), then content marketing is the content you end up creating from that.
How do you create a content strategy?
These are the 7 steps to creating an effective content strategy:
- Define your goal.
- Analyse your target audience
- Audit your current content
- Strategise the content you want to create
- Brainstorm content titles and ideas
- Write and review
- Publish
What is a good content strategy in 2024?
A good content strategy in 2024 is to service your customers' needs. Adopt a 'they ask, you answer' framework where you try to answer all of your key customer questions, worries, and struggles through your content.
Naturally, more customers will then find you as they search for answers.
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