You ask yourself the same question time and again when it comes to your blog, “what do I write about that is valuable for my ecommerce customers and will convert more sales?”  Instruction from experts always includes the same answer….Volusion’s Sr. SEO Manager, Julianne Conway wrote a post about this very topic put it this way….

“Whatever their questions, let your content be their expert source of information.”

This is a pretty common response when it comes to discussing quality content creation, you find out what questions your customers are already asking you and let that guide your content creation.  Over time, you should be the recognized expert to handle all the pre-sales questions customers have around the products that you’re selling.  Sounds simple, right?

Unfortunately, concrete steps to take to achieve that efficiently in a process that can actually increase your ecommerce sales with a positive ROI has not been so clearly laid out.  This article should be able to help make these steps clearer.

At Answerbase, when we talk to perspective ecommerce customers about their current marketing efforts….many of them communicate that blogging is not a big part of their activities or most times not part of their marketing strategy at all when we first start the relationship with them.  They’ve either not tried it because they can’t make the common-sense connection on how its going to attract new business to their store over a reasonable time period…..or they’ve tried it and didn’t see any measurable results, so they stopped.    The good news that we provide them with is that this process shouldn’t feel like you’re throwing money out the window, there are ways of KNOWING that the content that you’re posting is demanded by your customers and going to convert.

The first step is to get Q&A content that you’re already creating working for you.  There is golden content that is typically hidden within chat communication or emails, take that and get it out into the open.  Of course, this is what we do for a living…but regardless of whether you use Answerbase to power Q&A for your ecommerce store or use another service….make it happen.  While making this happen, ensure that content is creating its own landing pages for each Q&A thread.   Every question you answer for your customer can not only support that one customer that one time, but it can actually effectively service every customer who is asking that same question about products you sell through search engines.  That’s the foundation, make that happen as a first step and make sure its content posted in a way that search engines can get to.  See this example of a search, and see how product Q&A content hits the mark….

After you’ve established that, this becomes much easier to focus your efforts on what to have your team spend time on or what you should pay a quality blogger to write posts about.  Track that activity from those naturally growing Q&A pages….and you use that to figure out what is worth doing a deeper dive into….its that easy.  Some of our customers will find that a few of their Q&A combinations will rise to the top and start receiving 10K+ organic visits a month on their own.   Bingo, you’ve just found a content gap in the market.  Then, make sure that you have the conversion tracking lined up so you can see which of your popular Q&A posts are actually converting to new sales…and “voila”….there you have it, focus on those content gaps.

In Answerbase we make this easy on you because we track all of this activity for you (organic traffic, in-site searches, incoming questions from other customers, etc.), and then just wrap it into one “Demand Score” to spit out the content gaps.  That allows you to focus your efforts either for specific posts or general topics….and then recommend next actions based on that.

Regardless of whether you use Answerbase’s Content Insights or put together your own custom analytics reports….make sure that you can have a well-rounded understanding of the actual demand for that content and ensuring it gives you real conversion results…and let that drive everything else.   Natural next steps are to do a deep dive with an article, video, or whatever content format is the best way of managing that pain point.   Boom, you’re no longer guessing, you’re focusing your time and resources on solving real problems that a critical mass of your customers have which will optimize your marketing reach and sales conversions.

Stop the guessing game and focus your content creation efforts on topics that actually convert.  Happy selling.

“We fired up Answerbase Q&A on our product pages and it’s been amazing for increasing sales.” – Bill Rowell, Owner of Rvupgrades

 Start a free trial of Answerbase today to support Ecommerce Product Q&A on your store.