Most ecommerce shops treat content like a lucky dip. A blog post here, a social reel there, maybe a buying guide somebody knocked together on a Friday afternoon. None of it connects. None of it builds towards a sale. And six months later, the whole lot gets binned because ‘content marketing didn’t work for us.’ The problem is never content itself. It’s the absence of a proper ecommerce content marketing funnel that moves people from curiosity to checkout in a logical sequence.
A funnel gives every piece of content a job. Top-of-funnel posts attract people who don’t yet know your product category exists. Mid-funnel guides help them compare options. Bottom-of-funnel pages close the deal. Post-purchase content turns a one-off buyer into somebody who comes back three, four, five times a year. Miss a stage and you’ve got gaps where potential customers quietly disappear.
I’ve seen this play out across dozens of ecommerce brands, from Shopify supplements shops to WooCommerce homeware retailers. The ones who get the funnel right don’t just rank well in Google. They build an asset that compounds month after month, pulling in organic traffic that converts without a penny spent on paid ads. The ones who skip the funnel? They’re the ones still chucking £3,000 a month at Google Ads and wondering why their cost per acquisition keeps climbing.
If you need a hand mapping this out for your own shop, our ecommerce SEO audit service covers the full content gap analysis. We also run a content writing and on-page SEO service for brands who’d rather hand the production over to someone who’s done this before.
Matching Content Types to Each Funnel Stage
Every stage of the ecommerce content marketing funnel calls for a different type of content because the person reading it is in a completely different headspace. Someone Googling ‘how to stop my dog pulling on the lead’ isn’t ready to buy a £45 no-pull harness. They need educating first. Someone Googling ‘Julius K9 vs Ruffwear harness’ is practically reaching for their wallet.
The table below maps this out. Each stage has its own search intent, and the content format has to match that intent or it falls flat.
| Stage | Example Search | Content That Fits |
|---|---|---|
| Top-of-Funnel | ‘How do I stop spots on my chin?’ | Blog posts, infographics, short-form video |
| Middle-of-Funnel | ‘Best salicylic acid cleansers UK’ | Buying guides, comparison pages, email courses |
| Bottom-of-Funnel | ‘CeraVe SA cleanser review’ | Product reviews, UGC galleries, FAQ pages |
| Post-Purchase | ‘How often should I use salicylic acid?’ | Onboarding emails, tutorials, loyalty content |
The trick is recognising that each stage flows into the next. Your TOFU blog post on chin spots should link naturally to your MOFU buying guide on salicylic acid cleansers. That buying guide should push readers towards your BOFU product review. Each piece hands the reader off to the next, gently, like a relay baton.
Top-of-Funnel: Solving Problems They Already Have
People at the top of the funnel aren’t shopping. They’re Googling a frustration, a symptom, a question they can’t answer themselves. They’ve got no idea your product exists, and frankly, they don’t care yet. Your job at this stage is dead simple: be the most helpful answer to that question and earn their trust before anyone mentions a product.
The mistake most ecommerce brands make here is targeting product-level keywords too early. A skincare brand going straight for ‘best moisturiser for dry skin’ is competing with Boots, Superdrug, and every beauty publication in the country. Going after ‘why does my skin feel tight after washing my face’ puts them in front of the same audience at a point where competition is far thinner and the searcher is genuinely grateful for a decent answer.
Formats that land well at this stage include long-form blog posts built around informational ecommerce keyword research, short explainer videos for TikTok and Instagram Reels, diagnostic quizzes (‘What’s causing your breakouts?’), and infographics that break down causes and effects. The content should feel like advice from a knowledgeable mate, not a sales pitch dressed up as a blog post.
Middle-of-Funnel: Helping Them Compare Options
Once somebody knows they’ve got a problem, their next move is weighing up solutions. This is where the ecommerce content marketing funnel gets properly interesting, because you’re not just competing against other brands. You’re competing against entirely different product categories. Someone with persistent back pain might be comparing posture correctors against standing desks against physiotherapy sessions. Your content needs to make the case for your solution type first, then your specific product second.
Buying guides are the workhorse of mid-funnel content. A well-structured ‘best X for Y’ guide that ranks in Google can drive qualified traffic for years with zero ongoing ad spend. The trick is writing one that’s genuinely useful rather than just a thinly veiled product plug. Name competitors. Acknowledge trade-offs. Give the reader enough information to make a confident decision, even if that decision leads them somewhere else. Counterintuitively, that honesty is exactly what brings people back.
Other formats that perform at this stage include comparison pages (Product A vs Product B), email sequences that drip educational content over a fortnight, interactive product finders, and webinars that demonstrate your solution in action. Shoppers at this stage are also trawling Reddit threads and Facebook groups for unbiased opinions, so user-generated content and genuine customer testimonials carry serious weight here.
Bottom-of-Funnel: Removing the Last Doubts
By now, your reader has picked a solution category and is evaluating specific products. They know what they want. What’s stopping them is doubt. Will it fit? Is it worth the price? What if it’s rubbish and returns are a faff?
BOFU content is about killing those objections one by one. Detailed product pages with specifications, real customer photos, sizing charts, and compatibility checkers all do heavy lifting here. FAQ sections that tackle the awkward questions people won’t ring your customer service line about are gold. ‘Can I use this next to my gas hob?’ or ‘Will this stain my worktop?’ might sound trivial, but these micro-anxieties are the reason people abandon their basket at checkout.
Social proof is everything at this point. Reviews, video testimonials, and UGC galleries carry more weight than any copywriting you’ll ever produce. A shopper who sees 200 genuine reviews with photos is a shopper who’s already mentally committed. Layer in clear returns policies, warranty details, and payment plan options via Klarna or ClearPay, and you’ve stripped away the final excuses.
Post-Purchase: Turning Buyers Into Repeat Customers
The sale is where most ecommerce brands stop thinking about content. That’s a proper missed trick. Post-purchase is where lifetime value gets built, and it’s where content marketing earns its keep long after the initial transaction.
Buyer’s remorse is real, especially for purchases over £50. A well-timed post-purchase email sequence that reinforces the decision (‘here’s how to get the best results from your new X’) squashes that anxiety before it festers into a return request. Follow it up with usage tips, care guides, and complementary product suggestions timed to when the customer is most likely to need them.
Community content locks people in long-term. Research from the University of Michigan found that customers who joined a brand’s online community spent 19-20% more than those who didn’t. Loyalty programmes, exclusive member content, and even a private Facebook group give buyers a reason to stick around and spend again. The cost of retaining an existing customer is a fraction of acquiring a new one, so this stage of the funnel is where your margins really improve.
Getting Your Content in Front of People
Brilliant content sat on a blog that nobody visits is just an expensive diary. Distribution is where most ecommerce content marketing funnels fall over, because brands pour all their energy into creation and leave nothing in the tank for getting it seen.
Organic Search as the Foundation
SEO should be the backbone of your distribution strategy. A blog post that ranks on page one of Google for a relevant keyword will pull in traffic month after month without any ongoing spend. That’s the compounding effect that makes content marketing so powerful for ecommerce. Your ecommerce SEO strategy and your content calendar need to be built together, not treated as separate projects.
Repurposing Across Channels
Every long-form blog post you write contains three or four pieces of short-form content waiting to be pulled out. Key stats become LinkedIn carousels. Practical tips become Instagram Reels or TikTok clips. Product comparisons become email newsletter segments. One solid 2,000-word guide, repurposed properly, can fuel a fortnight of social content across every platform. The effort-to-output ratio is spot on.
Email is your most underrated distribution channel. Adding evergreen content to Klaviyo welcome flows, post-purchase sequences, and win-back campaigns means your best content keeps working months after publication. Segment by product category or customer type and open rates climb noticeably compared to generic broadcast sends.
Paid Amplification for Proven Content
Paid promotion for content only makes sense once you know what’s already performing. A buying guide that’s converting organically at 3% is worth putting ad spend behind, because you’ve already validated that the content itself does the job. Run it as a Meta Ads campaign targeting lookalike audiences built from your existing customer list, and track assisted conversions in GA4 rather than relying on last-click attribution. The real value of TOFU content rarely shows up in a last-click report.
Measuring Ecommerce Content Marketing ROI
Page views on their own tell you nothing useful. The metrics that matter are the ones tied to revenue: content-assisted conversions, add-to-cart rate for visitors who read a blog post before hitting a product page, and revenue attributed to content landing pages in GA4’s exploration reports.
| Category | What to Track | Sensible Benchmarks |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic | Organic sessions, keyword rankings, new users from blog | 8-12% month-on-month growth |
| Engagement | Average engagement time, scroll depth, CTR to product pages | >1m 45s, >50% scroll, >4% CTR |
| Conversion | Content-assisted revenue, add-to-cart rate from blog | 1.5-3% conversion rate |
| Retention | Repeat purchase rate, email list growth from content | 22-28% repurchase within 90 days |
Set up content groupings in GA4 so you can see performance at the funnel-stage level, not just page by page. Tag every blog URL with a consistent UTM structure, build a Looker Studio dashboard that pulls from GA4 and Google Search Console, and review it monthly. That dashboard is how you spot which funnel stages are leaking and where new content needs plugging in.
Building a Content Team (or Making Do With What You’ve Got)
Most ecommerce brands don’t have the luxury of a five-person content squad. Running a proper ecommerce content marketing funnel with two or three people is entirely doable, but only if those people are clear on who owns what.
| Role | Core Responsibilities | Typical Time Split |
|---|---|---|
| Content Lead / Marketing Manager | Strategy, calendar ownership, performance reporting, cross-team coordination | 40% strategy, 30% analysis, 30% coordination |
| SEO / Performance Marketer | Keyword research, technical SEO, tracking setup, distribution tactics | 50% research, 30% tracking, 20% planning |
| Writer / Editor | Content production, brand voice, quality control, fact-checking | 70% writing, 20% editing, 10% planning |
| Designer / Video Creator | Visual content, product photography, video editing, brand consistency | 60% creation, 25% editing, 15% planning |
| Developer / No-Code Builder | Schema markup, page templates, tracking implementation, tool integrations | 40% build, 30% maintenance, 30% fixes |
If all five roles fall to one person (and on smaller Shopify stores, they often do), at least knowing the split helps you prioritise. Writing and SEO are the two roles that suffer most when outsourced badly, so if you’re going to bring in outside help, start there. Videography and design are easier to contract out on a project basis without losing quality.
Creating a Content Calendar You’ll Stick To
Overly ambitious content calendars are a false economy. I’ve watched ecommerce teams plan twelve blog posts, twenty reels, and a podcast series for month one, then publish absolutely nothing by month three because the whole thing collapsed under its own weight. Consistency beats volume every single time.
For a small team, a sensible monthly rhythm looks like this: two long-form blog posts (one TOFU, one MOFU or BOFU), four to eight short-form videos batched in a single filming session, a weekly email newsletter, and daily social posts written and scheduled in one sitting per week.
A sample month, kept deliberately lean:
- Week 1: Publish TOFU blog post + film two Reels from key points in the article
- Week 2: Publish buying guide + send email newsletter featuring the guide
- Week 3: Curate UGC round-up post + promote existing quiz to email list
- Week 4: Publish product-focused blog post + send promotional email with seasonal angle
Batch your production. One monthly photoshoot gives you product page images, blog hero images, social assets, and email headers. Film all your short-form video in one afternoon. Write a month’s social captions in a two-hour sprint. The less context-switching you do, the faster the output and the more consistent the quality.
Three Ecommerce Content Marketing Examples Worth Studying
Theory is grand, but seeing how real brands have built their content funnels is where the penny drops. For a broader look at how these play out across channels, our post on example content marketing campaigns covers more case studies.
Gymshark: Building a Community Before Selling a Stitch
Ben Francis started Gymshark in his parents’ garage in Birmingham in 2012 and grew it into a brand valued north of £1 billion, largely through content and community rather than traditional advertising. The brand’s entire strategy centred on creating content with its audience, not just for them.
Their #Gymshark66 challenge is a textbook TOFU play. Launched in 2018, it asks participants to commit to 66 days of fitness and post their progress on social media. The psychological hook is smart: 66 days is roughly how long research suggests it takes to form a habit, which means Gymshark becomes woven into a genuine life change rather than just flogging leggings. The challenge became an annual fixture, generating waves of user-created content each January.
Rather than paying influencers for one-off sponsored posts, Gymshark built long-term partnerships with fitness creators who already wore the gear. That authenticity showed. The brand’s TikTok hit 4.2 million followers with over 8 billion views on the #gymshark hashtag, and the company reached unicorn status without a single TV advert.
What to nick from this: Create a challenge tied to the transformation your product enables, not the product itself. Build long-term creator relationships instead of transactional sponsorship deals. Make your customers the protagonists of your content.
Glossier: Four Years of Content Before a Single Product
Emily Weiss launched the beauty blog ‘Into The Gloss’ in 2010 whilst working as an editorial assistant at Vogue. For four years, she published interviews with real women about their beauty routines, built an audience of over 10 million monthly readers, and only then launched Glossier in 2014 with four products.
The genius of this approach is that Glossier never had to guess what their audience wanted. They read thousands of blog comments, tracked which pain points kept recurring, and developed products in direct response. Their Milky Jelly Cleanser, one of their best sellers, was born from community feedback rather than a product development lab. As Glossier’s president Henry Davis put it: ‘The best thing we can do is give people content.’
The payoff speaks for itself. Nearly 80% of Glossier’s customers came through referrals, and the brand hit a £1.2 billion valuation with roughly 40 SKUs. That’s the power of building an audience first and selling to them second.
What to nick from this: Use content as public market research. Let your audience tell you what to build. If you can create a community before you have products, you’ll launch to buyers rather than strangers.
Dollar Shave Club: One Video, £3,400, a Billion-Pound Exit
Dollar Shave Club’s founder Michael Dubin spent $4,500 (about £3,400 at the time) on a single launch video in 2012. ‘Our Blades Are F***ing Great’ went live, and the company received over 12,000 orders in 48 hours. Four years later, Unilever bought the company for $1 billion.
The video landed because it nailed the audience’s frustration with surgical precision. Men were fed up paying over the odds for razors wrapped in ridiculous marketing from brands like Gillette. Dubin called that out directly, with a dry sense of humour that felt like a bloke you’d have a pint with rather than a corporate ad campaign. The content did the job of the entire funnel in three minutes: identified the problem, positioned the solution, and made signing up feel like a no-brainer.
What to nick from this: Identify the frustration your whole industry ignores, then address it head-on with genuine personality. One piece of content that properly connects with a real pain point is worth more than a year of lukewarm blog posts that play it safe.
Getting Started Without Overthinking It
The biggest mistake with ecommerce content marketing funnels isn’t getting the strategy wrong. It’s spending so long planning the strategy that nothing gets published. Pick one TOFU keyword, write one proper blog post targeting it, optimise it for search using a solid ecommerce SEO checklist, and publish it. Then write one MOFU buying guide that links from it. Then one BOFU product page that links from that.
Three pieces of content, connected in a logical sequence, is a functioning funnel. It’s not a finished one, but it’s a start. Every piece you add from there strengthens the chain. Six months of consistent output, even at just two posts a month, will give you a content library that drives organic traffic without costing a penny per click. The brands that win at this aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets. They’re the ones who started, kept going, and refined as they learned what their audience responded to.
