When creating a content marketing strategy, it’s essential to understand the customer and their buying lifecycle. Only then you can create a content calendar and generate ideas that speak your audience’s language.

Here, we share how you can produce content that converts in 5 steps. Find more information in our 5 Steps to Content that Converts guide.

1. Create your customer personas

Creating customer personas is the key to your content strategy. From your best customers now to those who will be interested in your products and services in the future.

This is different from segmentation as you look deeper into specific traits and behaviours rather than top-level data. The number of customer personas you create is specific to your eCommerce company and what you sell. Businesses selling a wide range of products will typically have more customer personas than those with a niche offering.

You can collect data for your customer personas from a variety of sources. Examples include social media, feedback, interviews, keyword research, and surveys.

2. Understand client lifecycle

The client lifecycle refers to the different stages someone goes through from discovery to becoming a repeat customer. This cycle usually has five stages: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty.

Reach

During the reach stage, a potential customer is searching for a product or service. They’ll be researching different options, and this is your opportunity to ‘reach’ them with your marketing. They might find you through social media, search results, adverts, or one of many other channels.

Acquisition

A potential customer enters the acquisition stage once they’re on your website or have contacted you. In this stage, present useful information that leads to purchase. This could be through fantastic customer service, excellent product descriptions, great reviews, imagery, or useful blog posts and articles.

Conversion

Customer conversion might look different depending on what your eCommerce company sells. It could be when a customer buys a product or books a service.

Retention

After the first sale, we enter the retention stage. At this stage, you could send your customers a feedback survey or offer them a discount on their next purchase.

Loyalty

The final stage of the client lifecycle is loyalty. This is where your customer becomes an advocate. This could be through making further purchases, leaving reviews, or sharing their product or experience with others.

3. Create content guidelines and a calendar

Planning is key to successful content marketing, and creating content guidelines and a calendar will help with this. Content guidelines should outline what your content will look and sound like. This is key to ensuring consistency and alignment across everything you create.

When deciding on your guidelines, consider branding, tone of voice, target audience, language, and customer personas. By implementing content guidelines, you can ensure content will meet your brand’s specific requirements every time.

A content calendar will help you plan the content you want to create, when to share it, and which channels you’d like to use. This will ensure consistency in the content you share and avoid creating too much or too little. When creating your content calendar, consider who each piece is for. Make sure there’s something for each of your customer personas and lifecycle stages.

4. Generate content ideas

Get creative and use the data to help decide what content to create for your audience.

Complete keyword research to discover what your audience is searching for. Ask for feedback and ideas through surveys. Look at the content that has performed well for you in the past. Explore what competitors are doing.

Content ideas should align with your brand values and be highly relevant to your company and customers. Content is only worth your time and resources if it provides value to your audience.

5. Choose types of content

The content types you choose should work on the marketing channels your customers use. This will ensure they see what you create.

You don’t need to cover every content type and every marketing channel. Rather concentrate on what performs well for your brand. Find what works by analysing the data of your previously published content.

Content types for a marketing campaign can include social media posts, email marketing, blogs and articles, videos, and podcasts. You can share many of them across multiple marketing channels which will help you get the most from your content. For example, you can share a blog you wrote in a post on your social media channels and an email newsletter. The blog is also valuable for SEO.

We hope we’ve helped you understand how to create content marketing that helps to increase conversions. Find more about how to action it in our comprehensive creating content that converts guide.

For information about how we can support you and your eCommerce content strategy, contact us here.

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