Effective Retail Content Marketing: 10 Steps and Examples

Every 2 out of 3 retail stores lack a documented content marketing strategy. It is likely that retail stores that do have a content marketing strategy prove to be more successful. Without a well-designed and well thought of content marketing strategy, you are risking all your content marketing efforts. Success or failure is solely on the basis of luck, then.

How can you work on making an amazing strategy for content marketing for your retail store?

Setting Up An Objective And Specifying Goals
Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Finding and Knowing Your Audience
Deciding On the Types of Content
Creating A Content Marketing Calendar
Assessing Your Current Standing
Measuring Results and Taking Corrective Action

Contents

Retail Stores Content Marketing Strategies

Step 1: Setting Targets and Specifying Your Goals

A great way to kickstart the process of defining goals for your content marketing strategy is to develop a mission statement. This will make it easier to concentrate and focus on what is of utmost importance and what isn’t while creating content so that your strategy is robust and does not go haywire.

A marketing mission statement outlines the following parameters:

Assessing and Finding Your Target Audience
The content you will use to reach your target audience
Advantages that they will conclude from the marketing strategy

The mission statement is briefly an introduction that covers what your audience has to get from your content marketing strategy. You also need to think about what your retail store has to achieve from it. This is where you will require to delve deeper into your retail store’s goals.

Some examples of goals include:

Generating and increasing revenue
Getting more traffic from your strategy
Lead generation and boosting sales
Gain influence and authority by improving the recognition and perception of your brand
Successful SEO campaigns to generate more traffic
The reduction in marketing initiative costs, as your content effectively does work for you.
Engagement and Interaction on Social Media

Step 2: Establishing and Developing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The best way to bring out the optimum levels of the result is to make your goals attainable, specific, and, most importantly, measurable. This process of devising a metric system to measure and evaluate your success with a marketing strategy is known as Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.

These will include what plans you have to achieve in the spectrums of sales, traffic, revenue, SEO, and other aspects of digital content marketing like email/SMS marketing and social media metrics.

For example, you may target:

To get a higher number of signups
To Achieve a Certain Number of Newsletter Subscriptions
To hit a certain profit/revenue target
To improve your search engine ranking
To fetch a certain number of engagements on social media in the form of mentions, shares, likes, and comments.

Also, pay attention to how much cost you incur on your marketing campaigns and keep a tab on the cost of lead acquisition and sales generation.

Step 3: Knowing, evaluating, and Segmenting Your Audience

You need to be clear on which audience you are engaging with. You need to have deeper insights into knowing your audience – their needs and preferences.

This will help you with the process of personalizing content for your specific set of audiences to cater to their ideals. Creating the right content for the right audience increases reach and thus leads to more sales.

Demographic Segmentation

First, you need to collect demographic data on your shoppers vis email subscriptions and social media.

Web analytics tools like social media analytics and email subscription analytics aid in giving you the data you need to segregate your audience on the following parameters:

Age
Gender
Education
Income Levels

You can use Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Analytics, Facebook Analytics, etc., to your advantage.

Getting Feedback From Customers

To have deeper learning of the audience, you need to get feedback from the horses’ mouths. This will get your insights on the following:

Their verdicts on the content you are providing them
Their urgent needs
How can you tackle and find solutions for their problems with your content

Getting adequate feedback from your customers can help you to:

Understand the priorities of your visitors, subscribers, and readers
Decide how you can best reach your customers

Step 4: Evaluating The Best Channels For Your Content

To have a successful online presence, you need to understand and know which channels and platforms are working best for you. Use web analytics tools to your advantage to find out how your content is being shared and viewed. This will give you deeper insights if you are just starting out.

Also, think about what types of content you need to create to engage maximum with your audience.

Step 5: Assessing Your Standing

You might already have some of your content available on the web now. This means that you might have already developed a blog, podcasts, videos, social media content, and so on.

You need to delve a little deeper into the content that already exists and evaluate and assess your position. This means that you have to take the time to find out how well these have worked for you and identify the problems that are stopping you from achieving the desired results.

Observe how the content is performing. For this, you need to make use of SEO metrics to help you get a deeper understanding.

Identify gaps in your communication via the content you are belting out:

Related keywords that you should be using to connect better
Questions asked by your customers that you haven’t addressed.

Step 6: Allocating and Mobilizing Resources

You need to allocate your resources at the right place at the right time to bring out the best of your content marketing strategy.

This will need you to assess and evaluate what physical resources you have to create the type of content you are planning to create and also include content scheduling into your process.

Tools and Resources That You Will Need:

In-house content creators
Freelancers
Professionals in video creation, graphic designing, podcasting, etc.

Workflow Of Content:

To develop a good blog post, you will have to:

Create an approved outline
Write the post
Attach relevant infographics
Send the posts to the editor for approval
Make alterations
Upload
Publish

Step 7: Designing A Content Calendar

Lack of planning is a key content marketing flaw. It is of utmost importance to use a content calendar and schedule all your content activities.

You will best know when exactly you want to publish content on the channels and platforms you want to use.

Make use of Google Calendar to figure out dates and schedule each piece of content and activity list.

If you are managing a company publishing a lot of content, you will need a content team and the workflow that you have decided on.

Also, work on finding the questions that your customers want you to address.

Step 8: Create Quality Content

Prepping adequately for your content marketing strategy is key. This helps you publish good-quality content. You need to thoroughly research the topic and find a plan to make the most impact of every single post.

You need to figure out the following when you are ready to write:

Find out what materials or content is already available in the webspace
Determine how your new content can add value to your audience

Originally research definitely does well, but going to Google and doing a simple search and research goes a long way. This will help you get more points and ideas on how you can further hone the content that you are planning to publish

Also, try and include keyword research to identify the keywords which are better for SEO and increase your search ranking.

Finally, after researching thoroughly, start writing your content. At this point, you will have to think of how you can best reflect your brand’s portfolio and persona in the content you publish.

Step 9: Distribute and Market Your Content

The next story in your route map is figuring out specific distribution marketing techniques to successfully make your posts reach your audience.

Set a schedule to share content on social media immediately
Use email marketing techniques to distribute your content to your subscribers
Notify any influencers you have partners with or mentioned in your content to spread the word further

Step 10: Measuring and Evaluating Results

The last step in the process is to evaluate the success (or failure, if at all, and work on it) of your content marketing strategy. To do this, you need to refer to the KPIs you devised at the start of your content strategy plan. This will help you judge whether you are hitting your targets.

Check Google Analytics, measure social activity, and other analytics tools to evaluate the success of your content.

This will also allow you to successfully assess and tweak your content marketing strategy to bring out the best in your content and improve your reach.

Verdict

In order to develop a killer content marketing strategy, focus on a flow that will focus on the following – Research, Publish, Evaluate, and Take Corrective Action. This will basically bring out the best in your efforts and also improve your reach.

Engagement is the key success measurer for your content. Also, thoroughly use feedback from your customers to achieve the best results and tweak your content, and bridge the gap between you and your audience.

Frequently Asked Questions about Content Marketing Strategies Process:

How does content marketing help without promoting products/services directly?

A. Firstly, sales and lead generation is a dicey game to crack. Your current or future customers are not interested just in your product directly. They are interested in addressing and solving a problem or challenge. By the content you share, you are educating them on how you can help your customers with the products you provide. Here, your product comes into play.

This will help instill trust amongst your customer, which will make them turn to you whenever they need a solution to a relevant problem.

Why would I want to educate customers and not sell directly?

A. Loyalty and trust build your brand’s reputation. If your retail store has long-term goals, you need customers who can rely on you and your products with 100 percent faith. This will lead to increased sales in the long run and help aid sustainability and diversification. Consumers today are oversaturated, with the most retail stores offering them the same products or services.

If you first inform and educate your customers, you are already gaining an edge against your competitors. This will help them make the best decision while buying and also help you refer them to their kith and kin.

How does content marketing help me build my brand’s presence?

A. With content marketing, you have an opportunity to put in your brand when you see an opportunity to push it in. This must be relevant to both your offering and your audience. Identify your opportunities first, and then execute plans and strategies to make fill up those voids in the markets and your customers’ minds. As mentioned earlier, customers are drawn to problem-solving communications and strategies that will help make their lives easier.

It is all about adding value. With a rock-solid foundation and tactics to implement engagement successfully, you can make the best use of content marketing to build your brand’s presence.

How does content marketing generate revenue?

A. It starts by building channels and a strong retail store that does not directly attack people with a sales motive. It helps mostly in educating and driving awareness into the customers’ minds. The impact that a good content marketing strategy can create is of tremendous potential. This means that most of your retail store’s products/services are known to be available in the market.

At the back of customers’ minds, they constantly recall your brand whenever the relevant sphere of thought comes in. This further will drive them further and further toward making the purchase. Some may react and churn almost immediately and some may take some time before they consider making a purchase. However, it finally leads to sales generation and boosts and thus, driving revenue.