The faceless e-commerce store is dying. You can no longer list products for sale. You need to create a brand around your business and add some kind of value to it beyond the products you list in your store. This is the missing piece of the eCommerce puzzle.
Most website owners understand they need traffic and conversion. But they stop there. They keep going after more traffic but skip this third piece of the eCommerce puzzle, which is called repeat business.
If you can create a relationship with your customers and provide an enjoyable experience, they’ll return to do business with you and tell their friends about you. This is the biggest opportunity for growth for most e-commerce businesses.
I want to discuss how to create this relationship and how to do it best through video, text, and audio content. As I’ve said, people often prefer to purchase from companies they know, like, and trust. Establishing yourself as more than just a company peddling a product gives consumers more reason to purchase from you than your faceless competitors. This is the basic principle behind e-commerce branding.
Now, you might ask, what exactly is branding? Is it a particular color scheme, a logo, or a name? It’s more than the sum of its parts. It’s a feeling customers get when they associate with your store. And that feeling is shaped by all their interactions with you in every facet of your business.
Some of the benefits of branding are that it fortifies you against the ever-changing search engines or being dependent on one particular channel for business. If you build your brand, community, and email list of customers and potential customers, you can drive your sales.
You want people to reach the point where they type your brand or web address in their browser rather than searching for you in the search engines.
If you get people commenting on your blog posts or Facebook posts or following you on Twitter or Pinterest, you will get more sales when you send an email.
Okay, now you know that building a brand is very important. But how do we do it, and what strategies are we using to engage the community and spread our brand across that market?
So, we are using a video blog. Here are some of the benefits of video blogging. You get more face time with your community. The goal is to create a relationship with your customers and become more to them than just a store where they go to buy products. Become their friends.
Business is going more social. There are so many ways to communicate with people now, and people expect it. If you aren’t doing this, they will buy from someone who is.
You can become so much more to people than just a place to buy self-defense products. You can become part of their lives and world, something they talk to their friends about, and maybe share your videos and things you’ve said.
We’ll get into what kind of content to create in a little bit, but the point is you have an opportunity to connect with people, and if you want to build an asset and make an impact on people’s lives, then blogging for your store is the way to do it—and one other thing. Relationships are built by consistent relating. You become friends with people you consistently see and consistently relate with in your life. Right? So, consistency is key for blogs. Consistency is key for relationship building.
Another reason blogging is so good for your store is that it helps with SEO. Each video blog post gives you at least four new links to your website and four new channels to rank in the search engines.
Google is all about providing the best possible value to its users. It wants the sites that it displays in its search results to be up to date and have relevant products for what people are searching for.
Doing a weekly video blog helps with your overall SEO because it brings freshness to your site, which is a factor in ranking. Freshness is a part of Google’s algorithm.
Another thing is that you will get social signals. Social signals are another ranking factor. They are something that boosts you higher in the search engines. When Google is going through and trying to decide which pages are most relevant for which queries, it looks at all these things: off-site, on-site, freshness, and social signals, and you get those from blogging.
When you share your content on social networks, people reshare it, like it, Tweet it, and pin it. This helps your site’s overall SEO.
Another thing is that this medium—video—can be easily transformed into other mediums. It can be transcribed and posted on your blog, the audio can be stripped out and uploaded to iTunes, and I will get to syndication in a second. The thing to remember is that different people prefer to consume content in different ways. Some like to watch it, some like to read it, and some prefer to listen to it.
Videos will also help you make sales. Blogs don’t seem like a sales pitch, and people are comfortable with them. They make it easy to give information about your products without seeming like you’re trying to sell them something. People will be happy and thankful to receive your content, and you’ll also be able to sell them.