15 Shopify Content Marketing Tips for Growing Your Store

Content marketing should be the cornerstone of any company’s digital marketing strategy. Creating content centered around your brand and products is a great way of engaging interest without being explicitly promotional.

Through the use of content marketing, it is possible to build a relationship with your customers. Customers that feel connected with a brand will be more inclined to shop with them.

But how do you go about building that relationship in the first place?

In this guide, we’ll share some top Shopify content marketing tips that are guaranteed to increase engagement with your brand and boost sales.

What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing on Shopify?

There are several core takehomes from investing in a content marketing strategy for your Shopify store. These include:

An increase in organic traffic
Better brand awareness
A more refined brand personality
Improved conversion rates
Increased confidence in the expertise of the brand
A boost in sales

Devising a thorough content marketing strategy for your store will help you unlock all of these benefits.

1. Connect a Blog to Your Shopify Store

The first step in your content strategy should be to link a blog to your Shopify store. It’s quite easy to start blogging with Shopify as the platform already has an integrated blog which is called ‘news’ by default.

To add a blog to your Shopify, follow this simple guide.

If you’re not a fan of the integrated blog, it’s possible to use a WordPress, Blogger, or Tumblr site and have these linked to your store. This may allow you greater freedom to add plugins or create themes for your blog that match your brand aesthetic.

Once your blog is set up, be sure to keep an eye on your Google Analytics to see how it is performing. By studying the metrics, you’ll be able to gauge the success of individual posts and measure the effectiveness of the techniques you use to promote them.

2. Carry Out Keyword Research

If you really want to maximize the reach of your blog, you should ensure you carry out keyword research on every post you create. There are countless keyword research tools available online including SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool.

All too often, content creators overlook the importance of proper keyword research and blindly throw keywords into their posts without ever considering whether they will even rank for them.

When selecting keywords, you need to be sure that there are enough people out there searching for that specific keyword, and that the competition to rank for it is low enough that you actually stand a chance of appearing in the search results.

For this reason, you need to be sure that your keywords have a high volume of monthly searches and a low keyword difficulty score. Ideally, your search volume should be above 100 and your keyword difficulty below 80.

3. Make Sure Your Keywords Are Relevant

Having keywords that are more likely to rank will only get you so far if they are completely irrelevant to your brand and the products you sell. Make sure that all of the keywords are relevant and have user intent in mind.

Think about what people that would buy your products or engage with your brand would be searching for on Google and attempt to find keywords that match this.

In addition to keyword relevance, you should also make sure your keywords are not vague. If you sell cars, you’re never going to rank for the term ‘car.’ Instead, consider using branded keywords such as ‘Toyota car sales’, or geo-locational keywords such as ‘car sales in Los Angeles.’

When adding your keywords into your content, make sure they’re slipped in seamlessly. They shouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb.

You should also include your keywords in titles, headers, image alt tags, and meta descriptions.

4. Understand Your Target Market

If you don’t know your target market, how do you know what type of content you should create? It’s important to carry out some market research to find out who your ideal customers are. That way, you can generate content that speaks to them and their needs.

Build up a profile of the type of people that currently shop with you and that you want to attract. Work out what type of information they need from you and what their interests are. From this, you will be able to brainstorm lots of great ideas for content that is geared toward them.

5. Keep Your Content Fresh

Nobody wants to read the same article they’ve read a thousand times before. When planning new content, look at the growing trends in your section of the market. What is the next big thing that your customers need to know about?

Similarly, play around with your delivery. If you’re always creating the same tried and tested style of blog posts, break things up. Create a listicle one week, and use more of a narrative approach in the next post.

6. Post Content Often and to a Schedule

Posting frequently and to a schedule works on three levels. Firstly, it provides a regular stream of content that followers of your brand can devour. Secondly, it builds up a bigger bank of content on your site which can aid your search engine optimization, and finally, it allows greater opportunity to attract new followers for your brand.

Work out when the best time to drop new content will be. You may not be in the office when this is, so use scheduling tools to ensure you’re posting during the best time for maximum engagement.

Similarly, work out when the best time to share your content via social media and email will be and queue up posts to go live at these times.

To work out the best time to post, it’s best to experiment and measure the engagement you get. It’s also worth paying attention to when your competitors are posting their content.

7. Create Content That Engages

It’s essential that your content is engaging. That means you need to be saying something that people want to hear and delivering it in an exciting way.

Use engaging headlines and create a sense of intrigue around your content. Many brands make the mistake of focusing solely on their product in their content creation. Find topical or even humorous subjects that your audience will love.

8. Incorporate Video Content into Your Marketing Strategy

The days of reading everything off a screen are long gone. These days, people devour video content. Whether you’re using YouTube and TikTok or you’re integrating video into your blog posts, having mixed media elements in your strategy can really enhance your proposition.

Did you know that 94% of marketers believe using video helps users better understand their products?

Videos allow you to show your customers the product in action. They can also help put across the same ideas as a long-form article might, but in a way that takes up less of a user’s time.

Whenever you create a new post on your blog, make sure you share it on your social media channels. This will ensure it reaches the widest possible audience.

But your social media channels shouldn’t just be a place to reshare content from your site. Instead, see them as content creation platforms in their own rights.

Understand the reach and the merits of each of the social media platforms that you engage with, and play to their advantage. It’s important that you’re not just repurposing content from one platform and sharing it on the next. What works on Instagram, won’t necessarily work on Facebook.

Before signing up to each of the platforms, work out where your audience is. Facebook is generally more popular with Baby Boomers and Generation X, Instagram is a haven for Millenials, while Generation Z tends to spend more time on TikTok.

10. Tap Into Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing allows you to reach the audiences of some of the biggest content creators on social media. In exchange for money or products, influencers will help shine a light on your brand or your products.

Team up with an influencer whose brand and ethics match up with that of your company. A bad pairing could be detrimental to your reputation.

11. Create In-Depth Product Guides

Creating in-depth content in support of your products will allow you to go into greater depth than a product description page may ever be able to. Don’t just use your product-related posts to sing the praises of the items you sell, you should use them as an opportunity to really add value.

Think about creating posts that help customers get the most out of a product. Generating tips and tricks or dealing with frequently asked questions will be very beneficial to your customers.

12. Boost Your Reach With Email Marketing

Email marketing allows you to reach an audience that has already proven that they want to engage with your brand. Existing customers and site visitors that have signed up for updates from your company have a high likelihood of reading any content that you send to them.

When you post new content, back it up with an email to your mailing list. Use apps such as Privy to help grow your email list and make sure your brand becomes a familiar and welcome face in your customer’s inboxes.

13. Ensure Your Content Is Unique

Any content you create and post on your website or blog should be completely unique. That means that it shouldn’t be available elsewhere on your site, and it certainly shouldn’t be available elsewhere on the internet.

Duplicate content will see your site getting penalized. The issue with posting the same content twice is that confuses search engines and users.

If you’re repurposing someone else’s content, this is plagiarism. Search engines also take a dim view of this. Use tools such as Copyscape to ensure everything you create is completely unique.

14. Turn Content Into Sales

While your content shouldn’t be promotional in nature, you ultimately still need to convert visitors into buyers. There are a few ways you can go about this in your content marketing, the best way is to include strong calls to action at the end of any posts.

Your call to action should instruct your site visitor, telling them what they should do next. You may tell them to “head on over to the online store to check out the full range” while providing them with a link to get there.

Cross-selling is also a great opportunity. For product-related posts, sharing related products can help boost your sales.

15. Create Evergreen Content

Keeping up with the latest trends should be high on your agenda if you want to create fresh content, however, you should also aim to create a good amount of material that is designed to stand the test of time.

Pieces of content that are considered to be evergreen act as amazing resources that keep people coming to your site for a long time to come.

Wherever you identify this type of content on your site, revisit it once in a while to keep it up-to-date. This will help ensure it continues to be a useful page to visitors for many years.