Ecommerce is growing, and businesses that want to reap the benefits should  lean on their content marketing strategies.

Not every business is in a position to pursue an ecommerce strategy, but those that are should take note of the latest study from Custora. It seems ecommerce growth has accelerated, and 2014 is looking like a good year to be selling products online.

The Custora Pulse shows ecommerce sales have increased 8 percent in January 2013, which is encouraging news for businesses that haven’t yet taken the plunge and used their content marketing powers to promote online sales. An even more heartening stat is the average conversion rate, which grew to 2.2 percent in January.

Optimal ecommerce tactics

At this point, you might be asking: So what? This might seem like a trend businesses can only hope will continue – but there are tweaks companies of any size can make to their social media strategies and content marketing efforts to ensure they continue to see sales climb, including:

  • Facebook promotions. Brafton has reported multiple times on the importance of of social media, but when it comes to ecommerce, the effect can’t be overstated – 62 percent of customers say they’re more likely to make a purchase after seeing pictures on social media. In the past, you might not have been quick to assume customers would actually purchase things after learning about them on networks like Facebook, but it seems that day has come.

  • Personalized Email. As long as you’re not alienating customers withshallow messages in their inboxes, you can count on higher conversions when you use personalized messages to recommend products and services.

  • Custom widgets. Wrangling customers in a competitive environment means you should consider every tool at your disposal. A Pinterest Rich Pin, which adds more information to a Pinterest link, might seem superfluous. Yet when there are tools that show the price of a product every time it’s pinned, it’s surely worth the effort.

Despite this uptick in ecommerce sales and overall conversions, content is still king and can give small companies a competitive advantage. As Brafton reported, independent vloggers still get a lot more attention than major beauty brands on relevant YouTube channels. You can never have too much high-quality news, videos or blog posts, so tweak your ecommerce tactics to align with the content you already produce.

Alex Butzbach is a Marketing Writer at Brafton. He studied Communications at Boston College, and after a brief stint teaching English in Japan, he entered the world of content marketing. When he isn't writing and researching, he can be found on a bike somewhere in Metro Boston.