If you own a brick-and-mortar business, you have plenty of options for engaging your community. You might chat up potential customers at a neighborhood block party or use clever signage to entice them into your store.
Ecommerce business owners need to think more broadly. An ecommerce business’s community is essentially the entire internet—that’s about 5.56 billion people, representing 67.9% of the global population. While this can mean greater potential for sales, it also means you need to focus on the segment of people on the internet who your brand and product is for, and think strategically about how to catch their attention.
This is where content marketing comes in. By providing customers with niche content that’s actually valuable to them, content marketing can help online businesses stay top of mind with target audiences and generate (not burn) goodwill.
In 2025’s crowded digital environment, strategic content marketing is no longer optional—it’s essential for cutting through the noise. As AI and evolving consumption habits continue to transform how people discover and interact with brands, businesses that deliver valuable, targeted content gain a significant competitive advantage.
Read on to get the latest content marketing tips for your ecommerce business, plus a few essential tips on what to avoid in content marketing.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing useful, relevant, and engaging content to your target audience in order to elevate your brand, generate leads, and build goodwill with current and potential customers.
This strategic approach focuses on consistently delivering valuable information that solves problems and addresses needs, rather than directly pitching products or services. The goal is to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, ultimately driving profitable customer action.
It can include social media marketing, email marketing, blogging, podcasting, video marketing, and leveraging paid channels like social media advertising and sponsored content.
Benefits of content marketing include:
- Building brand awareness and recognition
- Establishing authority and expertise in your industry
- Generating leads and driving conversions
- Nurturing customer relationships and loyalty
- Improving search engine visibility and organic traffic
Why content marketing matters in 2025
In today’s digital landscape, content marketing has evolved from a nice-to-have strategy to an essential business function. According to Content Marketing Institute’s 2024 research, 58% of B2B marketers reported increased sales and revenue thanks to their content marketing strategies.
The digital content ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, with businesses competing for audience attention across multiple platforms and channels. As consumers become more selective about the content they consume, brands must deliver exceptional value to stand out.
Key factors driving content marketing’s importance in 2025 include:
- Content marketing generates more than three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less, making it a cost-effective strategy in challenging economic times.
- Consumer trust in traditional advertising continues to decline, with audiences preferring authentic, valuable content over promotional messages.
- The rise of AI-powered search and recommendation systems rewards comprehensive, high-quality content that thoroughly addresses user needs.
- Shifts in data privacy regulations have made first-party data more valuable, and many content marketing tactics are effective ways to collect this information.
- The customer journey has become increasingly non-linear, with content touchpoints influencing decisions at multiple stages, which creates many opportunities for leveraging content at the right times.
For ecommerce businesses, content marketing provides a powerful way to differentiate from competitors, build customer relationships, and create multiple pathways for discovery and conversion.
15 proven content marketing tips
- Go deep on target audience research
- Identify pain points and drivers
- Use SEO to meet your audience where they are
- Map content to the customer journey
- Write for people
- Play with tone
- Keep it fun
- Create diverse content formats
- Establish a content mix
- Create a content calendar
- Build content clusters for SEO
- Use multiple channels
- Implement a technical SEO strategy
- Track results
- Measure content marketing ROI
If you’ve ever published a Facebook post about your business, you’re already a content marketer. Establishing a successful content marketing strategy, however, is a bit more involved. The following content marketing tips can help you get started.
1. Go deep on target audience research
The better you know your audience, the better your content marketing. Research target audience demographics, interests, buying cycles, and media consumption preferences (including preferred social media platforms). This information can help you create content relevant to your audiences and publish content that reaches the right audience at the right time.
You can use Google Analytics audience reports to identify demographic patterns. Then, support those insights by interviewing customers about their content preferences. With that combination of research, you can develop detailed audience personas that capture not just demographics, but also insights into things like psychographics and preferred content types.
2. Identify pain points and drivers
So what exactly is relevant, useful content? To answer this question, consider your target audience’s pain points and drivers.
- Pain points are your audience’s problems. Consider their day-to-day frustrations, worries, and deepest fears, paying special attention to issues your product can solve.
- Decision drivers are the factors that influence a purchasing decision. Common factors include cost, perceived benefits, ease of access, and social proof.
Use pain points to identify key decision drivers for your target audience, and publish content that provides a solution. For example, if your target audience worries about spending too little time with family, time-saving benefits will be a key decision driver. A successful content marketing strategy might emphasize how your products or services save time.
3. Use SEO to meet your audience where they are
When people engage with content online, more than half are using search engines to find that content. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of trying to get your website to not only show up in search results, but to rank highly on the search results pages that are relevant to your audience’s search intent.
Applying SEO principles to your content strategy means answering the question: What might my target audience be trying to solve by searching a specific keyword on Google? You then use SEO tactics to create content that is optimized to show up in their search results. This organic SEO-driven content is an opportunity to expose those potential customers to your brand and products by serving them valuable content that provides an answer to their question.
Here’s an example: Imagine an avid hiker is planning a trip to a destination with volatile weather. They might go to a search engine to research their options for waterproofing their hiking boots. If you sell waterproofing spray (or waterproof hiking boots), you might want to create content that explains how your product works and why it’s effective, in hopes of ranking for the keyword “waterproof hiking boots.” To expand your reach, you might also create articles that offer tips for hiking in the rain, packing guides for long distance hikes with volatile weather, and other relevant topics.
SEO is all about giving the reader what they want: useful information that speaks to their problem in fresh ways. So while you should mention your products when they are directly relevant to solving a pain point, don’t overdo it. Too many hard sells can erode a reader’s trust.
In 2025, signals of quality content and user experience metrics like Core Web Vitals have become increasingly important ranking factors. Familiarize yourself with Google’s tips on creating helpful content that ranks, including its E-E-A-T guidelines: its prioritization of content that shows experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
📚Learn more: What Is Black Hat SEO? 9 SEO Tactics To Avoid
4. Map content to the customer journey
Understanding how your content supports different stages of the customer journey is crucial. These insights help you connect with your audience at the right time with the right information. Different types of content serve different purposes as prospects move from awareness to consideration to decision to, finally, loyalty.
Customer journey mapping involves:
- Identifying the key stages your customers go through before, during, and after purchase
- Understanding the questions and needs they have at each stage
- Creating content specifically designed to address those needs
- Measuring how effectively your content moves people from one stage to the next
For example, blog posts and social media content typically build awareness, detailed guides and comparison content support consideration, while testimonials and product demos help with decision-making. Post-purchase content like tutorials and community forums build loyalty and encourage advocacy.
By aligning your content with the customer journey, you ensure that you’re not just creating random pieces of content; you’re building a strategic pathway that guides prospects toward conversion and beyond.
5. Write for people
Writing is for readers, and readers are people. Good content marketing strategy puts the human first, even while balancing SEO needs and business goals.
To create user-friendly content, try creating content by imagining the reader as one specific person. Content marketers call these imaginary people buyer personas—characters who represent a segment of your target audiences. Create a buyer persona (or a few, one for each audience segment) and write specifically for them.
6. Play with tone
Brand voice remains consistent across channels, but brand tone can change depending on context. You might embrace a conversational style in blog posts, use humor on social media platforms, or even let yourself get fired up about a change in your industry to your email list.
You can also consider adjusting your point of view. You might write most content in your company’s voice but occasionally drop in a first-person blog post from your founder or a subject-matter expert on your marketing team.
7. Keep it fun
Content marketing should provide value to your targeted audiences—but entertainment value counts.
Here’s an example: If you sell upscale orthotic footwear for professional women who wear knock-out heels to the office, your audience research might tell you that your target audience also enjoys cocktail recipes, productivity hacks, and photos of dreamy vacation destinations. Pepper your feeds with a few choice images of high-power women relaxing in the tropics and throw in a few trending cocktail recipes for good measure. That approach helps to capture the attention of your target audience without directly selling to them.
8. Create diverse content formats
Today’s audiences consume content in many different ways, making format diversity essential for maximum engagement.
Different content formats serve different purposes:
- Blog posts and articles establish expertise and improve SEO.
- Videos demonstrate products and processes visually.
- Infographics simplify complex information.
- Podcasts reach audiences during commutes or workouts.
- Interactive tools (e.g., calculators, quizzes, assessments) drive engagement.
- Case studies build credibility and showcase real-world results.
- Webinars educate prospects and generate leads.
When deciding which content formats to prioritize, consider both your audience preferences and your team’s capabilities. Start with two to three formats you can execute well, then expand as resources allow. Remember that content can be repurposed across formats. For example, a blog post can become a video script, podcast episode, or infographic, maximizing your content investment.
💡Video is an increasingly crucial content format to include in your mix. In fact, HubSpot reports that short-form video content has the highest return on investment (ROI) compared to other popular content types. If you don’t usually make videos, this is your sign: It’s time to start experimenting.
9. Establish a content mix
Decide what types of content you will publish. You might decide to publish blogs, social media posts, and email newsletters, for example. Then get more specific within each channel. For example, maybe your newsletters will contain 40% entertaining content, 30% educational content, and 30% promotional content.
10. Create a content calendar
A content calendar (or editorial calendar) can organize the content planning and content creation process. Decide how frequently you will publish content for each channel and sort your ideas into a content calendar.
Make sure to note evergreen content, or content that doesn’t easily go out of date: Continually promoting your content pieces can increase ROI on your content marketing efforts.
11. Build content clusters for SEO
Content clusters are a strategic approach to organizing your content around key topics, helping search engines understand your site architecture and expertise.
This approach involves creating:
- Pillar content: Comprehensive guides that broadly cover a main topic.
- Cluster content: More focused articles that explore specific aspects of the main topic.
- Internal linking: A network of links connecting the cluster content to the pillar and to each other.
For example, if you sell camping gear, you might create a pillar page about Essential Camping Equipment that links to cluster content about tents, sleeping bags, cooking gear, and campsite selection. Each piece of cluster content then links back to the pillar page and to related cluster content.
Benefits of content clustering include:
- Establishing topical authority with search engines
- Improving internal linking structure
- Creating logical content pathways for users
- Identifying content gaps in your strategy
- Organizing your content creation roadmap
When implementing this approach, conduct keyword research to identify your main topics, audit existing content to see what can be repurposed, and develop a linking strategy that creates clear relationships between content pieces.
12. Use multiple channels
Successful content marketing strategies leverage multiple channels. If you dump all of your efforts into blog posts and neglect social media and email, you’ll miss out on audience segments who prefer those channels.
Repurposing content for multiple channels can also save time. For example, it might take you six hours to write a blog post, but only 15 minutes to adapt your blog post’s title and introduction for social media posts.
13. Implement a technical SEO strategy
Don’t neglect the technical arm of your SEO strategy. Technical SEO improves the back-end structure of your website. With technical SEO, you can find and repair broken images or links, improve your site’s loading speed, and boost performance through strategic internal linking.
14. Track results
Use a social media analytics tool and a web analytics tool (like Google Analytics) to track content marketing metrics, including site traffic and conversions. This process will help you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. You can also use it to identify top-performing content and repeat successful tactics.
Go beyond basic page views and social media metrics to understand the true impact of your content. Consider implementing:
- Attribution models that track how content contributes to conversions.
- Content-specific KPIs aligned with different business goals.
- Privacy-focused analytics that comply with evolving regulations.
- Engagement metrics that measure active interaction, not just passive consumption.
- Conversion path analysis to understand how content pieces work together to drive your goals.
By setting up proper tracking before launching content campaigns, you can gather data that informs future content decisions and proves ROI to stakeholders.
15. Measure content marketing ROI
Demonstrating the return on investment for content marketing efforts is essential for securing continued resources and refining your strategy. Effective ROI measurement connects content activities to business outcomes.
Key approaches to measuring content marketing ROI include:
- Setting clear, measurable objectives for each content piece or campaign
- Tracking both leading indicators (engagement, traffic) and lagging indicators (conversions, revenue)
- Calculating the cost of content production, including time, tools, and distribution
- Using proper UTM parameters to track content performance across channels
- Implementing closed-loop reporting to connect marketing activities to sales results
For ecommerce businesses, specific metrics to track include:
- Conversion rate by content piece
- Average order value from content-driven purchases
- Customer acquisition cost for content-generated customers
- Lifetime value of customers acquired through content
How to use AI in your content marketing strategy
Content-influenced revenue (when content assists but doesn’t directly convert).
Generative AI has transformed content marketing, offering tools that can enhance creativity, efficiency, and personalization. When used strategically, AI can help complement human expertise, rather than replacing it.
Key applications of AI in content marketing include the following.
Content research and ideation:
- Analyzing search trends and user intent at scale
- Identifying content gaps and opportunities
- Generating content briefs and outlines
- Suggesting related topics to cover
Content creation and optimization:
- Drafting initial content versions for human editors to refine
- Improving readability and clarity
- Enhancing SEO through keyword suggestions
- Creating variations for A/B testing
Content personalization:
- Tailoring content recommendations based on user behavior
- Dynamically adjusting content for different audience segments
- Predicting content preferences for individual users
- Personalizing email marketing content
Content distribution and performance:
- Determining optimal publishing times
- Recommending distribution channels
- Forecasting content performance
- Analyzing performance data to inform strategy
Best practices for AI implementation
As AI tools continue to evolve, the most successful content marketers will be those who leverage these technologies while maintaining the human touch that resonates with audiences.
Keep in mind these best practices when using AI in your content strategy:
- Start with specific use cases where AI can solve real problems.
- Maintain human oversight and editorial standards.
- Use AI to augment creativity, not replace it.
- A/B test AI-assisted content against human-only content.
3 content marketing mistakes to avoid
Develop processes that combine AI efficiency with human expertise.
1. Don’t be a copycat
Looking to competitors can help you generate content ideas, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you need to sound like the biggest player in your industry. A good content marketing strategy differentiates you from your peers, so emphasize what’s unique to you.
2. Don’t navel-gaze
Business owners spend a lot of time thinking about their products and services, but valuable content puts your audience first.
Consider the difference in these two statements:
- Twenty engineers worked tirelessly for a decade to develop a melon baller using high-performance steel and an in-depth analysis of the anatomy and mechanics of the human hand.
- Professional chefs need both efficiency and precision. Our best-in-class melon baller delivers gorgeous melon balls 30% faster than traditional models.
The first statement focuses inward, while the second focuses on the customer. Your company’s extensive research is a strong selling point, but it shouldn’t come before an appeal to your customer’s needs—and the promise that you can solve them.
3. Don’t write (only) for search engines
SEO is a powerful tool, but writing that prioritizes search engines over reader experience can sound like somebody dropped a bag of keywords on the ground. Search engines are also getting better at prioritizing valuable content, so simply packing a blog post with target keywords might not be enough to help you rank.
Instead, look for writers—either people inside your company or freelancers for hire—who have experience and expertise to share, and encourage them to write for people rather than algorithms.
Content marketing tips FAQ
How do I identify my target audience for content marketing?
There are a number of ways to identify the target audience for your content marketing efforts:
- Analyze your current customer base.
- Analyze competitor audiences.
- Review traffic to your website.
- Conduct market research.
How do I measure the success of my content marketing efforts?
You can use direct and indirect methods to measure the success of your content marketing efforts.
Indirect measurement: Evaluate your business KPIs. If you experience a 20% jump in sales after implementing a content marketing strategy, you can attribute at least some of this success to your content marketing efforts. Be sure to factor in any other changes in your business model or external factors—like when a global pandemic drove up the need for sweatpants.
Direct measurement: Direct methods use analytics tools like Google Analytics to track clicks, engagement, and organic traffic to your website. Some tools can even attribute individual sales to specific pieces of content.
How often should I create and publish new content?
Your content marketing budget, distribution channels, and audience preferences determine how frequently you should publish content. Quality matters, so if your budget is limited, publish valuable content at a low frequency instead of aiming for frequent, hastily compiled posts.
