E-commerce sales are expected to be the fastest-growing section of the tea market for the next several years. So, if you see e-commerce or “tea-commerce” in your future, there’s no better focus for a newbie tea entrepreneur than investing in sales-enhancing content for your website.
Of course, this article isn’t about building your website; it’s focused on the words you populate it with. Once your website designer has the site wireframe ready, you need to load it with educational, search-optimized content. The copy is all important, because it defines how buyers relate to your brand.
The Real Job of E-Commerce Website Copy
The main job of an e-commerce tea website is to convince tea enthusiasts or the tea curious to try your product. Marketing copy should answer key questions, create a preference, motivate behavior and make a sale.
The basic strategy is to answer the questions that send potential buyers online. Give them all the information they need, so that the only thing left to do is click the “order now” button.
Essential Website Content for a New E-Commerce Tea Business
Don’t make the mistake of throwing up a flashy site with lots of artsy images, white space and no useful information. Here are basic pages you will need to start:
- Homepage - This is usually the most visited page of any website but fight the urge to make it a lengthy vanity page. Make your homepage is the website’s concierge. Focus on getting your buyer to the next step. You might offer links to an FAQ page, the “about” page or a “product” page.
- About Page - This will be a highly visited section of your website. Talk about the kind of tea provider you want to be. Explain what led you to the business, and what you hope buyers will get from your tea. Share your mission and introduce the people behind it. Include photos of people to reinforce a human connection with buyers. Keep it simple and sincere.
- Product Pages - A LOT of teas will come up in searches for brands like yours. What makes you different? Why would people prefer a boutique brand of tea? What makes your tea worth drinking? Marketing is about creating preference, so use the product pages to give your customers reasons they can buy into.
Think of potential differentiators such as:
- Organic
- Woman-owned
- Sustainable production
- Ethical sourcing
- And so on...
Explain these and others in the content on your “product” pages.
- Order Pages - Marketers often recommend using social proof on the order page to reinforce the buyer’s decision. Encourage reviews through follow-up emails and review sites.
Social proof – like tea reviews – is marketing “gold” wherever they appear on your site. Sprinkle customer quotes on your homepage, order page, “about” page – anywhere you can add them.
You will probably add web pages as you grow, but start with these basics for now.
Don’t Be Intimidated by Creating Brand Content
If you can talk about your brand, you can write about your brand. No one knows your tea better than you. You may also know your customers better than you think, because aren’t you a tea lover, too? What questions did you have when you were exploring teas? What helped you learn?
Creating content for your “tea-commerce” site is something you can tackle yourself. Write it as you would say it. Use an audio transcription tool like Google Voice to bring the words right from your mouth to the page. Use ChatGPT to clean up copy and check the grammar.
Questions – Possibly the Best Source of Content for a Tea Website
Your future buyer is on a journey to your product. What search queries would your ideal buyer use to find a new tea to try? What questions come up over and over? Start making a list. You can’t have too many.
Let’s say you’ve got a new tea blend that’s recommended for immunity health. Online searchers might use these words, phrases and questions:
- Healthy teas
- Immunity teas
- Healthy immunity teas
- What teas are good for immunity?
- What are immunity teas made of?
- What ingredients are in immunity teas?
- Benefits of immunity teas?
- What are the best immunity teas?
This is where your buyers start, so it’s a good place to start with that type of content. For questions that have longer answers, make them standalone pages or blog posts on your site. Other times, it makes sense to cluster a number of answers on one page when the topics are related. FAQ pages are another good format for this type of content. This is also how search engines like their copy.
On-Page SEO Is Your Best Friend
Your best bet is to focus on getting found online, and the secret is really simple – provide good answers for buyers’ searches. If you do this well, Google and other search engines will reward you with traffic to your website.
One of the best, affordable tea-commerce content marketing tactics is search engine optimization, or SEO. You can't think about web copy without thinking about SEO, too. Done right, well-optimized website content will attract organic leads to your site.
Know a Few On-Page SEO Basics
On-page search optimization isn’t hard. If your content is helpful to start with, there are just a few things to know, and they repeat for every page. In addition to including search terms buyers use, take advantage of meta title and description copy, and H1 and H2 headline tags. That’s all you need to get started with on-page SEO.
After your website is loaded with optimized content, let the site run for a few months and see how your search performs and what page visits reveal. Use free Google Analytics to track progress, or ask your website designer about metrics capabilities of the platforms they use.
Continue Learning about Tea Marketing
Just as you can do good, low-cost content marketing yourself, you can also find low-cost continuing education about marketing a tea business. There’s no shortage of organizations dedicated to networking and learning. Take advantage of resources like World Tea News and the annual World Tea Expo.
In the end, your website is your store front, and you need to staff it with the right words. Effective content can become the most important piece of your tea marketing strategy. The tea-curious have questions. Your strategy is to provide the best answers on the Internet.
Don’t worry about visitor volume. Focus on sincerely helping, and search will reward you.
Carro Ford is a successful marketer, researcher and writer/reporter based in Lexington, Ky. In addition to being an occasional contributor to Questex’s World Tea News and Bar & Restaurant News, she's worked in numerous industries and is also the author of The Smartass Marketer's Handbook: A Guide to B2B Marketing with Attitude.
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