Whether you’ve fallen out of love with your company blog, or are struggling to find material to keep your social media output fresh, a content marketing strategy is a crucial element of your broader marketing efforts. It should form the bedrock of your future success in the Shopify world.
Read on to see if any of the following rings true when it comes to your Shopify business...
1. Your ideas never make it out of the spreadsheet
“That’s a great idea for an article, write it down.” Sound familiar? Chances are, like many Shopify businesses, you’re buzzing with helpful ideas and smart takes, but they never make it beyond a spreadsheet.
It’s a vicious cycle of overwhelm. You struggle to make yourself sit down and finish a piece of content — the mind is willing, but the body is weak! The more you put off dealing with the backlog of titles you’ve jotted down, the less relevant and appealing they feel.
We get it. It’s hard to motivate yourself to get started, and you always end up finding another prominent task to distract you. A content marketing strategy wraps parameters around your imagination. As soon as you have a plan, you have direction! A clear path emerges, and you can hold yourself accountable, feeling good, as opposed to guilty, every time you open up that spreadsheet.
2. Your blog is gathering dust
Is your site covered in blogwebs? Don’t be (too) embarrassed. It’s not uncommon to see companies going months — or even years — between blog posts, articles, reports and ebooks. Given the creative, innovative nature of the people that make up the Shopify space, it’s a shame to see missed opportunities to offer valuable resources and bring you some loyal fans.
As well as squandering the chance to engage, inform and inspire your audience, Shopify businesses that leave their content untended risk damaging their reputation and the way they’re perceived.
No news, no opinions, no aspirations? That doesn’t look great for any business, but especially those in the fast-paced and well-connected Shopify space.
A solid content marketing strategy is about much more than a stream of blog posts, but it will help you to achieve a maintainable cadence of output when it comes to this area of your site.
Once you gain the momentum that this brings, things start to feel a lot more manageable (promise).
3. No one shares your content
Maybe you did decide to pour that coffee, switch off notifications, get your head down and write. The sense of achievement! The adrenaline rush as you set your post live! And then… crickets?
If producing content doesn’t feel worth the time and effort, it’s most likely because you’ve skipped the first and most important step. You’re writing what you think your audience wants — you never actually asked them.
Like a waiter turning up with a tray of food before anyone’s placed an order, don’t be surprised if you’re met with blank faces. A meticulously-researched content marketing strategy will ensure that you’re delivering helpful, practical, enlightening information that your ideal customers get real value from, and actively want to share within their community.
4. Content creation feels like hard work
If you’re producing content on a semi-regular basis, but getting it written feels like pulling teeth, you need a content marketing strategy. Once you develop a clear progression in the way your chosen topics attract, convert and retain your audience, you’ll find things start to flow.
When you know exactly what you’re writing, with clear goals and an audience for each piece, it becomes a much more focused and less fluffy process. You’ll find it takes less time, less research and minimal brain power. As themes build naturally, you don’t have to start each session grasping blindly for inspiration.
Of course, after setting a clear direction through your content strategy, you might find you just don’t have the bandwidth to write as much as you’d like to. In these cases, Kollectify’s ongoing content creation service can provide you with expert content from specialist writers, ensuring your strategy is delivered month in, month out — like clockwork.
5. You don’t see the point in creating content
We get it. Content isn’t a quick win. If you’ve never had a plan in place before, it probably feels like a lot of effort for, at best, intangible results. Without a strategy in place to make targeted content work hard for you, you’ll most likely never see a payback. That can feel disheartening.
But don’t give up on the power of content. Content marketing can and does work. From enhanced reputation to boosted SEO, better customer relationships to lead generation, there are so many benefits to investing here.
In a crowded space like the Shopify scene, this is an area where you can really stand out and differentiate. Tell your story and secure the solid expert reputation required in your niche. Without a carefully researched and reliably tracked content strategy, you’ll write off a powerful addition to your overall marketing efforts.
Kollectify offers a full service. By working with us, you’ll feel inspired, informed and ready to start telling your story, growing your audience and boosting your sales, through the power of content marketing.
Interested in learning more about how to shape your content strategy? We have built a program specifically for you! For more details on the program lessons and 1-1 support, click here.