Understanding the buyer’s journey is important for any business. For service companies, especially those with larger price tags, they know how long it takes for a person to become a customer. This allows them the ability to craft content and and nurture those folks. For e-commerce businesses that journey can be more difficult to track, and in many cases be much shorter.
So how do you create a content funnel for ecommerce stores that can help you sell more?
The answer is pretty simple, you need to understand the questions that people ask whenever they’re shopping online. The second thing you need to understand is how long does it take to get from initial visit to sale. Once you know these two things you can start crafting content that nurtures folks from awareness to advocacy.
Step 1: Know Your Buyer’s Timeline
It doesn’t matter if your average sale takes 2 months or 2 hours, there’s still a journey in there. Your pages and follow ups should reflect that timeline. If it’s a 2 day window, follow up emails and remarketing campaigns that react quickly will be important in reaching them during their journey.
If the journey is more like a few hours. Using reviews, detailed descriptions can help someone make a more informed decision about their purchase.
Step 2: Know the Questions They Ask
Again comparing services to e-commerce it can sometimes be a lot easier to get an understanding of why someone decided to work with you. Since you can directly interact with them you can ask them why they made the choices they did, and how did they get there.
Customer surveys and follow ups either by staff or through automation can help you learn these important questions. This will help you answer them in content, which will in turn lead to more people finding you and converting.
Step 3: Relate Your Content to Products
Internal linking isn’t just good SEO execution, it’s also good for your readers and buyers. For example, in this blog about the best scrubs for petite nurses, they link to several brands that offer petite sizing.
Because of this, and the way the blog is laid out, they received positions “0” and 1 in Google rankings for this keyword. They answered a question, linked to several products, and were rewarded by search engines for helping their purchasers find what they need quickly.
Conclusion
Like any business, e-commerce requires knowing who your buyers are, what questions they have while purchasing, and answering those questions. The major difference is, that most e-commerce stores have a relatively short sales cycle.
This means that you need to quickly leverage that content and retargeting to get in front of buyers fast. In services like ours we can have workflows and campaigns that take months. In e-commerce we simply compress that timeline into one that meets the buyer where they are and pushes them to where they need to be.