Gary Vee’s #1 tip for eCommerce sellers in 2023: create content

2023 has just begun, and many businesses are asking what it will take to succeed in the world of eCommerce this year. The fast paced online selling ecosystem is constantly changing, and there are always new trends and developments to keep up with. So how can you set your brand apart from the competition in the year ahead?

In order to answer this question, we asked Gary Vaynerchuk, also known as Gary Vee, for his number one tip going into 2023. Gary Vee is a serial entrepreneur, internet personality, chairman of VaynerX, CEO of VaynerMedia and VeeFriends, bestselling author, and more. He’s a great source of knowledge and advice about how to succeed in your business ventures.

True to form, Gary gave us a very simple yet very practical answer: create content outside of the eCommerce ecosystems.

Content, Content, and More Content

Content is extremely important to your eCommerce business strategy. With the rise of social media and non-stop consumption of content, it’s time to take content creation seriously. Your brand depends on it.

As more and more people seek out high quality, useful content that they can learn from and engage with, content marketing has become a central strategy for many businesses. Content marketing is a marketing strategy in which videos, articles, podcasts, and more are used to attract and engage an audience by providing them with relevant and informative content. Instead of solely creating content to advertise a product, content marketing encourages businesses to provide value through content. This has proven to be an invaluable tool.

In fact, according to a survey conducted by SEO platform Semrush, 97% of respondents said that content was an important aspect of their marketing strategy. These brands reported using content marketing to increase brand awareness, attract traffic, generate leads, increase sales, and build customer loyalty and engagement.

As a business expert and one of the top content creators in the space, Gary Vee knows what it takes to succeed. “It’s content outside of the ecosystems you sell,” he told us. “Bringing demand into platforms is imperative so that you have control, not the platforms.”

Building a Content Strategy

We can agree that content is important, but simply creating content with no direction or goals in mind probably won’t get you the results you want. It can also be challenging to think up topic after topic to cover in your content marketing. That’s why it’s important to have a strategy.

To start out, it’s crucial to identify your target audience. These are the people you want to interact with your content. Then, you can tailor your content to your audience’s unique needs, desires, and pain points. This will help you make sure that your audience is truly interested in the content you spend time and effort producing.

Take a look at your buyers and determine their average age, stage of life, income, spending habits, location, pain points, and any other identifying factors. When you create your content strategy, do your best to create content that will be most relevant to people that fit the description you came up with.

Once you know who will be consuming your content, it’s time to start creating. Since there are so many different channels out there, the challenge here is to build a strategy that allows you to create lots of relevant, high-quality content suitable for each one. This can include blog posts, videos, social media posts, podcasts, and more. You want to create content to post on your blog, YouTube channel, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. That’s a lot.

In order to help brands accomplish this task, Gary Vee shared his content strategy with the world. It’s the model that he uses to create over 30 pieces of content from just one keynote speech, podcast, or interview. So far, it has brought him a great deal of success, and it can help you improve your content strategy as well.

Gary Vee’s Content Strategy

Gary Vee’s content strategy is based on the shape of an inverted pyramid. It encourages you to think about content from the top down while giving you the means to create dozens of pieces of content from just one big piece of content.

Pillar content

The strategy starts with one big, comprehensive piece of content. This is called the “pillar content”. For Gary Vee, this tends to take the form of a daily vlog, a keynote speech, or an interview, but it can be anything from a video to a podcast.

The pillar content should be long form, which allows you to break it down into smaller pieces. You can even use the creation of the pillar page as an opportunity to create more content. For example, if your pillar content is a video, film a behind-the-scenes video to post on TikTok, Instagram stories, and Facebook.

Micro content

Once you have your pillar content, you can create “micro content” from it. This entails breaking down the pillar content into a number of smaller, more digestible bites. For example, you can cut out a particularly smart quote and turn it into a social media post. This is a great opportunity to repurpose the best parts of your pillar content and make sure that they reach your audience.

When choosing which elements of your pillar content to use as micro content, it’s wise to think about the moments that will resonate most strongly with the audience. These shorter pieces of content are great for social media, where viewers’ attention spans tend to be shorter. If someone is particularly interested in the micro content, they’re also more likely to seek out the pillar content from which it came.

Micro content brings awareness to the longer pillar content, while also giving you the ability to post many different pieces of content on various social media outlets. Using this strategy, you can easily create loads of content from just one long-form piece of content. Short videos, images, memes, quotes, and stories are just some examples of the many possibilities out there. In fact, Gary Vee is able to make over 30 individual pieces of micro content from just one piece of pillar content! This gets you more views across platforms, helps increase user engagement, and drives brand awareness.

Distribute content

The distribution of your micro content is the final level of the pyramid. In this stage, go ahead and spread your many pieces of micro content around the assorted social media platforms. Your goal should be to drive viewers back to the original pillar content. Choose which type of content to place on which platform based on what works best on that specific platform.

For example, a short video clip is great for TikTok and Instagram stories, while a meme could work well on Facebook. If you find a meaningful quote in your pillar content, you can post it on LinkedIn with a caption summarizing its importance. Articles may be a good fit on your blog, Quora, Medium, and sent via email. The possibilities are endless, and it all came from just one original piece of pillar content.

Get feedback, learn, and repeat

Once you distribute your micro content across channels, it’s time to take a step back and find out how your audience is reacting. Identify the content that most resonates with them, and then create more content based on that feedback.

If a specific quote is receiving a lot of attention, you might want to create more content surrounding that quote. If you post a video that gets strong reactions at a certain time code, go ahead and create more content about that topic, or using that moment of the video.

Then, you can go through the whole process of creating and distributing micro content again, getting even more use out of your original pillar content!

This strategy allows you to get maximum traction out of every piece of content. What’s more, you no longer have to brainstorm ideas for every individual social media post. It’s a win-win method that makes your work more efficient and organizes your content strategy.

Funding for Your Content Strategy

Building a high-quality and effective marketing strategy is vital for the success of your business, but certain types of marketing can get expensive. While posting on social media and content creation are cost-effective ways to raise brand awareness and increase traffic, sometimes you need to shell out some cash for PPC advertising, influencer marketing, and more.

For eCommerce businesses that need to pay various supply chain costs to stay in stock, working capital can be hard to come by. 8fig is here to help. We provide eCommerce brands with an AI CFO that gives them cash flow-friendly, flexible funding and the tools needed to manage it and make better decisions for growth.

Sign up today to find out how an 8fig Growth Plan can benefit your business!