When developing your content marketing efforts, it’s essential to understand that you need to customize your efforts for the niche you’re working in. We’ve reached out to some of the foremost experts in the e-commerce industry to see what trends they see making an impact in the world of e-commerce and how they are acting on them to shift their plans for the best results.
1. Multilingual SEO
From our point of view, one major content marketing trend within the e-commerce sector is the rise of the international content marketing strategy with a strong focus on multilingual SEO and video content.
Traditionally, e-commerce companies operating internationally have been content with simply translating their website, product descriptions, and perhaps the odd blog or video. But for those companies that are serious about driving sales globally, they are beginning to realize that this strategy is no longer enough.
International content marketing is a method of creating or adapting content to consider your target market’s linguistic and cultural nuances. Indeed, this is particularly crucial in an international SEO strategy.
To ensure that key phrase research, image tagging, content optimization and building domain authority are truly effective globally, e-commerce companies are beginning to invest in professional translation and localization services to ensure that their content is not only language and region-specific but culturally relevant.
Alex-Michelle Parr, Managing Director, Wolfestone Group
2. Data-Based Stories
Data-based stories will become the holy grail of content marketing in 2023. More than 2.75 million posts are published daily on WordPress alone, less than half of the entire web. It means you need something extraordinary to stand out from the crowd.
Top 5 or Top 10 lists will take you only a short distance, but if you can spend some time and effort creating a data-based story and something newsworthy, that single piece of content will produce more results than ten ordinary pieces combined.
Sadi Khan, Content Marketing Manager, RunRepeat
3. Adapting As Other Trends Die Out
The most significant trend we’ve seen in eCommerce has been that many of the brilliant gimmicks common in the industry have become more ineffective as users fatigue with the novelty. In fact, the trend in eCommerce for the coming decade seems to be a return to simplicity and service that has only really been achieved by Amazon.
You should expect to see the most successful eCommerce stores of the next few years heavily focused on retaining customers and branding their products beyond just being a company that you buy from once to never buy from again.
Quality product suppliers are now more easily available online, which means that the stores selling poor quality at cheap prices have much steeper competition with similar prices and higher quality offerings. We expect to see major industry shakeups and have already started moving towards an entirely consumer-focused strategy for the near future.
Alex Kehoe, Co-Founder & Operations Director, Caveni Digital Solutions
4. Adapting To Voice Search
According to 2022 reports, the monthly amount of voice searches reached 3.1 billion, and it is predicted that the number will keep on rising. As per reports by QuoraCreative, most intelligent devices answer about 60% of queries accurately and correctly. Thus, brands are focusing more on voice searches via smart devices.
A way to follow this trend is to optimize your content to voice search before your competitors. Understand how consumers conduct voice search to create effective & specific long-tail keywords.
Hima Pujara, Digital Marketing Executive, Grupio
5.VR-Style Images
We see more and more VR-type images for products online, which can greatly help the visitor to purchase. But due to being a small business, we don’t have the budget for that capability yet. A new release with the Shopify platform in beta is having your main product images as 3d images or video.
This will be very powerful for us. While it is in beta, we are working it into a future theme we are releasing in the summer. We hope to be one of the first jewelry businesses online to use this new creative way of marketing their products.
Jeff Moriarty, Marketing Manager, Moriarty’s Gem Art
6.YouTube/TikTok
According to Statista, TikTok saw 180% growth among those ages 15-25 during this time frame in 2022. One of the major trends is utilizing video to promote your products on TikTok and YouTube. Creating a presence on TikTok can be challenging because you need to post consistent videos.
I have started a YouTube channel for my store’s blog, but I haven’t started with TikTok yet. Other store owners have used TikTok and speak highly of the platform. A goal in 2022 is to create a strong following on TikTok.
Becky Beach, Founder, Mombeach.com
7. Smarter Formatting Methods
Content marketing is all about digestible, valuable information that is presented colloquially. It’s essential to present information in the format in which people are interested in the format they are already searching. This makes the content feel more like a conversation than an encyclopedia they have to dissect to understand.
We structure our content around search keywords and actual queries so customers can quickly find the information they need. We can also add links, forms and internal links to ensure that navigation around our site is simple and efficient.
Slisha Kankariya, With Clarity
8. Site Flow
People are beginning to pay much more attention to site flow. This isn’t just UX (user experience). Content marketers are beginning to realize that simply generating traffic with content is only half the battle.
The user then has to prompt to perform some activity with marketing value. That activity can be visiting a related post, downloading a white paper, filling out a form, etc. Whatever the activity is, it must make sense within the user’s customer journey.
Brandon Towl, CEO and Head Writer, Words Have Impact
9. Optimizing Title Tags
Title tags decide how search engines read your title. It’s also the first thing searchers see on a search engine result page (SERP) after typing in their query.
Optimizing your title tag will ensure your page populates on a SERP when consumers search for relevant queries. You can optimize your title by utilizing e-commerce tools such as SEMrush and finding the best terms based on search volume and relevance.
Stuart Leung, VP of Marketing, Breazy
10. Developing Social Media
If you want to run an effective e-commerce business, it’s indisputable that your social media content needs to be thriving. Telling people what your business is all about is no longer good enough — you need to show them.
Social media is the perfect tool to do precisely that —showcase your brand with visual effects. While selling your product or service is always your ultimate goal, captivating social media helps embellish the lifestyle that your target audience desires by enticing their emotions, memories, and dreams.
However, the content you share also needs to be engagement worthy. Consumers today want to engage with their brands. Even if you’re sharing an adequate amount of content, it won’t matter if no one is interested in it.
At Maniology, we make it our all to post as much as we can on our social media so that we can not only show our audience our products and latest features but to engage with them as well.
As mentioned earlier, consumers today want to engage with their brands, but they also want their brands to react and engage with them back. Knowing how much social media has evolved and become important for many over the past decade, this trend will surely be a vital tactic for e-commerce businesses moving forward.
Kara Crail, Marketing Copywriter and Social Media Coordinator , Maniology
11. Building Around Long-Tail Keywords
I think that voice search may become huge in the future, but we don’t know yet. Marketers and SEOs are all making their bets on voice search without knowing the impact it will have. However, one thing that does stem from voice search is long-tail keywords. Optimizing your content for your specific target market will be the key to winning many customers through SEO and content.
Many businesses don’t optimize for these keywords because they don’t see the potential – long-tail keywords have fewer searches and won’t reach a large audience. At the same time, they are easier to rank for, and there is a stronger search intent behind them. This is the right way to make a significant impact with little effort.
For several of our companies, we started implementing this tactic by using long-tail keywords as the basis for our content efforts. For example, “best time to visit Scotland” is a keyword that doesn’t get many monthly searches, but those who search for it have a high chance of booking a hotel room.
On the other hand, “things to do in Scotland” has 3x the search volume but it’s also three times more difficult to rank for. So the recipe is, low search volume, high intent, low difficulty.
Adam Hempenstall, CEO and Founder, Better Proposals
12. Blogging
The major trends I’ve started seeing E-Commerce companies adopt is the creation of their own websites and blogging. While these two aspects are content marketing basics and are used by businesses in many industries, E-Commerce has generally been focused on selling products on well-known sites like Amazon since name recognition is often non-existent.
These platforms give smaller companies a chance to compete in the competitive marketplace. However, if you wish to grow, you need to think outside the box and use different online marketing methods to set yourself apart from your competitors.
We realized that we needed to start adopting these two trends to grow the company. We began working with an online marketing company to build our brand online through our website, social media, and blogging.
High-quality content on our website combined with SEO has helped our company rank on the first few pages for several keywords, which has been amazing for our brand. Additionally, we started creating relevant blogs, which might seem odd for a battery company.
However, you’d be surprised how we’ve been able to answer important questions for users through our blogs, not to mention it dramatically helps with content marketing. Our blog is our second most popular page on our site, next to our home page! Though we’ve just started content marketing through our website this past year, we’ve already seen an increase in organic traffic in 2019. This year we hope to get more aggressive with our content marketing strategies since we’ve seen such good results.
Leo Chen, Director of Operations, Voniko Batteries
13. Relevant Content
Content marketers are no longer just stuffing associated keywords into their content and calling it a day. With so much content on the internet today, your content must be relevant to the problem consumers are looking to fix. This means finding out what questions consumers are asking in your industry, and answering those questions with relevant and useful content.
At RushOrderTees, we implement these strategies by figuring out what questions people have about the custom apparel industry, and answer these questions with demonstration videos on social media and how-to guides on our website.
The keywords you want to be associated with will naturally occur with this type of content, and the content will provide value to the person reading/watching.
Michael Nemeroff, Founder, RushOrderTees
14. Personalization
One of the major trends that are impacting how we move forward with e-commerce content marketing is personalization. Personalization leads to engagement and loyalty.
There is too much information out there, so to differentiate ourselves from the rest, we base our content on various factors such as demographics, geography, lifestyles, etc. We are also honing in on search intent. With voice search and the customer buying journey becoming a very important part of eCommerce, adhering to your audience by showing them you are a trustworthy brand through your content is vital.
We have been acting on these trends and continue to adapt to the changing nature of content marketing. Regarding personalization, we are watching out for the latest trends in beard grooming using various tools such as Google Trends and search intent using Google Search Console.
We can see what our audience is looking for and provide content based on their needs. An example could be how seasons can affect your beard grooming and how to apply those grooming techniques based on the seasons.
Raphael Munir, CMO, GroomingHut
15. Backlinking
We focus heavily on the backlinking strategy. We want to round up a list of very highly acclaimed and successful resources, provide value to them and thus get featured on their website. This would help us raise our Domain Authority and get more traffic.
We can implement keyword strategy on our own. Similarly, we can manage on-page SEO also on our own. But if we have a high DA and are supported by quality backlinks from high authority websites, we look important to the Google crawlers. This automatically and organically ensures higher rankings for us in the search results. It is a slow strategy but with a long-term perspective and something which will yield long-term results.
Saurabh Jindal, Founder, Talk Travel
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many factors that will impact e-commerce content marketing in the coming years. Staying ahead of the curve is essential to ensuring that your business remains relevant and successful. Fortunately, we can help you stay on top of all the latest trends.
Our team of experts are always up-to-date on the latest industry news and can help you adapt your content strategy accordingly. Ready to take your e-commerce business to a new level? Contact us today, and let us show you what we can do!
David is the Founder and Director of article-writing.co, the fastest-growing content creation agency in North America. He has transformed companies by offering high-quality content that has impacted their SEO ranking, revitalized websites with engaging and industry-relevant blogs and website copy, and championed successful email campaign copy.
