8 Ways Ecommerce Content Marketing Influences Conversion Rates

Many elements influence ecommerce conversion rates. From seasonal upticks and downturns in sales to market trends to consumer behavior tendencies, ecommerce brands must manage a variety of factors when attempting to surpass the average CR of (approximately) 2%.

Fortunately, however, there are various strategies that can allow your ecommerce business to attract web visitors and turn them into buyers. Content marketing is, without a doubt, one of the best ways to achieve this goal.

So, how do you use content marketing to boost conversions? From curating content to appeal to specific segments of your audience to using it to inspire more purchases, here are the eight ways ecommerce content marketing influences conversion rates. Let’s dive in.

Cater to Your Entire Spectrum of Buyer Personas

When investing in ecommerce content production, one of the main things you must understand is that every post you publish must answer your readers’ questions. 

And the only way to ensure this relevance is to have a strong understanding of your buyer personas.

By knowing what your prospects want and need at various points of their buyer’s journey and understanding their frustrations and emotional states, you can optimize your content to have the highest chance of inspiring conversions. 

Moreover, this knowledge can also help you adjust your brand’s voice and tone, ensuring that your ecommerce brand personality comes off as relatable and professional. This will be essential in convincing buyers to invest in your products.

Imagine a scenario where your business is trying to convert consumers in the bottom stages of the sales funnel. To do this, you’ll have to create content that appeals to an audience of people evaluating potential solutions, comparing several options, and making buying decisions that come with some amount of risk.

When producing content that will support your prospects in achieving these goals, your primary concern should be to create content specifically for these readers. This doesn’t just mean having a complete understanding of their pain points. If you’re aiming to boost conversions, you must also address your future customers’ priorities and potential conversion obstacles.

The best way to do this is to produce highly focused content that caters to a small segment of your audience. Take a look at how they did it in the Asana vs. Monday.com comparison article below. 

Note how easy the resource makes it for readers to comprehend the pros and cons of each option. Moreover, note how the brand doesn’t push its product as the superior choice. Instead, it aims to empower readers with relevant information, making it easier for them to make the best possible choice. Naturally, this will positively impact trust and conversion rates. But on top of that, it also ensures that users who convert don’t walk away with unmet expectations.

Source: monday.com

Boldly Cater for Customers in the Latter Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

The typical way ecommerce businesses utilize content marketing is to employ it as a mechanism for attracting web traffic and building brand awareness. 

And, sure — well-written, curated content works wonderfully in this regard. It provides consumers with value without compromising it with sales pitches. Moreover, it allows businesses to develop a relationship of trust between them and their prospects. And that’s crucial, considering that brand trust lifts conversion rates by 59% and customer loyalty by 67%.

But, content marketers must understand that a segment of their target audience is in the bottom stage of the sales funnel, ready to convert. More importantly, these prospects are likely to seek out and appreciate content that helps them make solid purchasing decisions.

With this in mind, it’s essential for ecommerce businesses trying to influence conversion rates with content to cater to customers in the latter stages of the buyer’s journey.

This doesn’t necessarily mean creating posts filled with aggressive sales pitches. Instead, the same effect can be achieved by producing content similar to the Best Mattress for Spinal Stenosis article on the Eachnight website. Note how it provides readers with a curated set of information that’s relevant to buyers’ goals while still heavily prioritizing the building of brand trust and providing expertise.

Source: eachnight.com

Showcase Your Product Visually

Visuals play a huge role in convincing consumers to convert. In fact, a 2018 survey discovered that 83% of US smartphone users say product images are “very” or “extremely” influential on their purchase decisions.

With this in mind, when using ecommerce content marketing to influence conversion rates, you should explore opportunities to showcase your product visually.

Regardless of the topic of your post, you can find a justification to show a visually stunning image of your product. And that’s not only because these visuals can support the text. More importantly, breaking up written content with images aids understanding, helps maintain reader focus, and boosts the readability score of your articles, making them much more effective at delivering value to web visitors.

When enhancing written content with visuals, there are a couple of ground rules you must adhere to. 

1. Use high-quality photos that showcase your products in a positive light. 
2. Always ensure you’re using relevant imagery that connects to the content of the article. 
3. Keep in mind that behind-the-scenes and user-generated content performs far better than stock photography. So, do your best to choose product images that show your solutions in use. Or, even better, show images that were submitted by happy customers. Check out how the Bobbi Brown Cosmetics site does it in this How To Do A Smokey Eye post:

Source: bobbibrowncosmetics.com 

Encourage Brand Loyalty with Educational Content

Using content marketing to boost conversion rates on your ecommerce website is an excellent use of resources. However, there’s one commonly overlooked way content can influence conversions — inspiring customer loyalty and improving customer lifetime value.

Successful ecommerce brands understand the importance of repeat business. After all, brand loyalists are likely to spend more with your business. Their chances of recommending your brand and products are higher. And it’s also worth noting that customer acquisition can cost up to five times more than customer retention. Investing in loyalty pays off.

The great thing about well-made content is that it can play a significant role in inspiring loyalty. 

Ultimately, by using content to promote a more positive customer experience, you can: 

• help clients get more out of their purchases
• inspire them to see your brand as a dependable business
• increase their likelihood of exploring other items in your inventory

For instance, check out Shop Solar. This brand bases the majority of its content marketing efforts around helping web visitors get the best solar products for their needs. 

In addition to a dedicated basics course aiming to introduce prospects to the idea of solar power, Shop Solar also produces a host of insightful educational content. The content is distributed on social channels like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Source: shopsolarkits.com

Generate Confidence in Your Brand with Authoritative Content

Proving expertise and authority is crucial for ecommerce brands trying to improve conversion rates.

In 2022, Edelman found that more than 50% of young consumers want to take shopping advice from experts. Moreover, 37% of Gen Zers said they trusted influencers who taught them new skills and made experience-based recommendations, proving that generating brand confidence could be one of the prime uses of content marketing for ecommerce businesses.

With this in mind, you can use your company blog to prove your authority in a specific field in several ways.

On the one hand, illustrating broad topical knowledge across several posts is a superb strategy for establishing authority. 

This is what brands like HubSpot regularly do. They create extensive knowledge bases, cover all aspects of marketing, and use original research to prove the effectiveness of their prescribed advice.

Source: hubspot.com

On the other hand, you can achieve the same effect by going into immense detail in several pillar posts, using real-life situations to support your claims, and collaborating with recognized subject experts. 

This is what businesses like Nike do. This brand collaborated with recognized fitness influencers to create content for the NTC app, ensuring that users recognize the value of signing up for the service, knowing they’ll be getting training advice from some of the world’s leading fitness experts.

Source: nike.com

Align Products with Very Specific Customer Pain Points

Leading your conversion-boosting efforts with sales messages can work. However, aggressive sales techniques don’t always positively influence conversion rates.

With this in mind, it’s not a bad idea to utilize content marketing to present prospects with the value they seek while drawing logical connections between your audience’s niche pain points and your products.

In other words, by treating your blog posts as an extension of your ads and landing pages, you can effectively create contexts in which it’s super easy for you to show your products to potential buyers without it coming off as an attempt to make a sale.

For instance, if you check out FOCL’s Wake Up With CBD article, you’ll see that its primary purpose is to advise readers on how to use CBD to upgrade their morning routines. 

However, the article doesn’t just say something along the lines of “our CBD products help you sleep better at night and improve focus during the day.” Instead, FOCL’s writers take the time to cover their bases.

They describe the benefits of cannabidiol, point out the benefits of having a focused morning routine, and provide tips on ensuring better cognitive performance during the day by paying attention to sleep hygiene at night. And, of course, there are several mentions of specific FOCL products (along with one-click purchase buttons). 

However, they don’t come off as sales-y but rather as a logical continuation of the contents of the article.

Source: focl.com

Establish the Market for Your Product

Imagine a scenario where your typical buyer persona isn’t aware of the existence of products such as yours. They may be experiencing severe frustration when trying to meet their needs. Or they may even be forced to explore DIY solutions to solve those frustrations.

The great thing about content marketing is that it can effectively help overcome these obstacles and introduce your audience to the concept of your solutions.

Create content around your audience’s key pain points and subtly position your products as an effective solution to their needs. That way, you can automatically influence future customers to perceive your products as the answers they’ve been searching for. And that’s how you’ll inspire them to convert.

For instance, if you check out this blog post about the potential of empty gelatin capsule supplements from Vivion, you’ll see how successfully the brand uses content to create a market for a niche product. 

Pointing out the various uses of gelatin capsules, Vivion shows that these solutions can be used to create a variety of supplements, both in small-scale and large-scale production conditions. By doing this, the brand effectively creates a market where there was none before — showing businesses from the health and wellness industry that there’s a way they can expand their operations by using hard shell gelatin capsules to create proprietary blends they can fill using manual processes or semi-automatic and automatic machines.

Source: vivion.com

Enable Impulse Purchases with Subtle Contextual Product Links

Lastly, as you explore methods to employ content marketing to boost conversion rates in your ecommerce store, remember that 1 in 3 purchases are made on impulse.

So, even if your blog posts don’t lend themselves to product promotion or sales, keep in mind that some of your readers might get a strong urge to convert while reading. 

By including contextual product links within informative articles, you can allow impulse shopper web visitors to complete their desired actions without these conversion elements overpowering the value of the content. 

Moreover, subtle links can also be a logical way to nudge consumers toward the lower stages of the sales funnel. That’s an opportunity you should take when investing in content for your ecommerce brand.

To see this conversion-inspiring technique in action, check out Mannequin Mall’s Ultimate Mannequin Buyer’s Guide article. The resource is almost entirely focused on giving readers information about how to choose the best dress forms for their needs. However, when describing different types of mannequins, the brand includes subtle and logical product page links, allowing conversion-ready consumers to purchase without having to waste time looking for the ideal product for their needs.

Source: mannequinmall.com

Final Thoughts

Using content marketing to boost ecommerce conversion rates may not be the most effective way to maximize sales on your website.

In fact, impressive results in terms of CRs require extensive product and landing page optimization, along with a heavy emphasis on perfecting USPs and CTA buttons. However, that doesn’t mean that well-made content doesn’t play a role in inspiring conversions.

So, if you’ve covered your bases and want to get the absolute most out of your content strategy, the tactics above can be a great way to improve conversions. Plus, they’ll help you reach multiple goals: increasing sales, reaching your target audience, and building brand credibility.

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