How Online Discount Brands Can Create Content That Bargain Hunters Will Love and Share (Big Guide)

Early last year we performed a large-scale investigation into the discount store industry to see who has the best strategy when it comes to SEO. And despite clear winners and losers, we noticed a recurring issue with nearly all of these sites – no guide and informational content! A big no-no in today’s world of online marketing.

Guides and informational content provide a lot of clout to a site and help brands speak clearly to their ideal customer. With the variety of products brands are selling, especially online, creating guides should be an easy feat.

Evidently, further education is needed to drive home this information point. If you’re an online discount store brand, you’re about to learn how to start incorporating guides into your site and reaping the benefits that come with them.

Understanding Your Target Market and What They Want to Read

The first step to creating killer consideration content is understanding your audience/market. Who exactly is coming through your doors and buying your stuff?

With online discount stores, you can suspect the people searching for discount products are inevitably looking for a bargain, so serve them with something that’ll be excited to read about.

They’re going to want saving tips and advice on how to be more frugal. These people are bargain hunters, so put yourself in their shoes. What would they want to read?

Currently, in the online discount store world, no one is writing this kind of content. There is a ton of opportunities surrounding these types of articles, and they have the potential to boost visibility and acquire more customers.

The idea isn’t just to talk about your products either. There are easy shoulder niches any of the brands within our report could dive into. Including but limited to:

  • Expert advice on saving money
  • Utility savings
  • Saving money on days-out
  • How save money on specific events (e.g. designing a child’s room)

With a bit of creativity and some of the research techniques we identify below, finding topics related to saving money becomes easy. If you know the methods and have the drive to be better online, taking this opportunity should be a must.

Finding the Ideas

If creating content for your target ‘bargain hunting’ market seems daunting, it shouldn’t. There are a ton of easy methods you can use to get hold of interesting money-saving ideas with little effort.

These are just a few of the methods we use to generate ideas for our clients. There are more complicated ways to go about it, but sometimes keeping it simple is the best way forward.

Reviewing the Competition

We’ve already mentioned the online discount store market is pretty poor when it comes to content and guides. Still, taking a look through the competition can be helpful, providing some fruitful opportunities which you can use for yourself.

The brand with the most guide content (at a glance) appears to be The Range. They have a large stockpile of content which you could crawl through and learn from.

The issue with The Range is it doesn’t look like they rank for a lot from their content hub. They’re not a great example when it comes to content strategy. Yes, they have a lot of articles but many of them don’t rank and they’re incredibly difficult to find. Also, some of them are particularly shallow and need a boost in word count.

Nonetheless, for ideas, they’re decent.

Go over to any one of their main category pages, scroll down, and find their articles:

Considering The Range sells pretty much everything, there is definitely a category on their site which sells the same things on yours. So, go through each one and find article ideas which they’ve written about and add them to your content calendar.

Remember to make them better through: more words, more imagery, and better keyword optimisation.

Analysing Adjacent Publications

A really good way to get content and guide ideas is by visiting publications that bump shoulders with your topic. They don’t have to be perfectly aligned. As long as they discuss topics which you know your target audience is going to read, you can go through and find article you can reproduce on your site.

If you’re looking to money-saving advice, pick a few publications that have a lot of content, a lot of traffic, and discuss the given topic.

Luckily for the discount store industry, a lot of publications and websites talk about this topic.

Websites you could add to your target list include:

These were picked up with just 5 minutes of research. For the marketing managers reading, this was done by literally typing “best sites for money saving advice”. That’s it. It’s that simple.

Your next job would be to filter through these publications and discover the best content for rankings, the best for social shares, and the best for links. All this can be done with Ahrefs (a backlink analysis tool).

Let’s take Money Magpie for example.

As you can see, they have great posts on making, managing, and saving money. If you look at the post to do with benefits for the over-60s, you’ll notice the page has over 130 referring domains! As you’ll learn later, this is a key effect of creating top-notch content.

Each of those highlighted posts ranks for hundreds of keywords as well.

‘Skint Dad’ is another site that details thrifty ways to save money and the blogger has been featured on tabloids like The Sun. Check out this article.

People love reading this content and the kind of people who shop at discount stores are the prime audience. Write about the things listed on these kinds of sites you’ll be on to winning the SEO race for sure.

Researching Questions Asked Online

Instead of going through a third party to get ideas for content, why not research what your target market are talking about DIRECTLY.

People ask questions all the time online, specially about saving money and finding bargains. There are even online forums dedicated to this kind of behaviour. So, check out places like Quora for people asking about saving advice.

What would be better than answering the questions asked by your dream customer?

An easy way to find questions in bulk is by using sites like Answer the Public:

Simply type in your topic and a ton of questions will come up which are being asked by REAL PEOPLE.

Check out the results when I insert ‘saving money’:

Unfortunately, so many results came up that I couldn’t fit them all into one screenshot.

But, if you look closely, a ton of potential topics come up, including saving money for grandchildren, kids, and a house. There are also plenty of further detail below this graph on Answer The Public segmenting questions into different areas.

Any of these questions could form the basis of an entire topic of discussion on your site. One that is likely to land you more visitors and more trust.

A second way to find questions around saving money/bargain hunting is to seek out related forums.

Again, this is pretty simple.

With the Google search “saving money forums”, I found these results:

Now, your task is to filter through these forums and find relevant topics you can talk about on your own site.

There are quick ways to filter through the thousands of pages on these forums to find the most fruitful opportunities, using tools like Ahrefs and X-Path on things like comments and thumbs-up. However, I’ll save those for another time.

Expanding on Keywords

The simplest and straight-forward way to find topic ideas for the bargain hunting audience is by building from existing keywords.

Big brands like The Range and Money Saving Expert have pages and content that ranks for hundreds of keywords. However, not all the keywords its ranking for are being targeted in the copy.

Here is where the opportunity lies.

If you can find an authoritative post that ranks for a lot of keywords, you can filter through the get more content ideas based only on the keywords.

For example, a post ranking for ‘how to save money on your home’ may also accidently rank for ‘how to save money on your water bill’ or ‘how to decorate your home on a budget’, etc, etc.

Take Money Magpie’s post on over-60’s benefits.

As well as ranking for terms directly associated with the post, it also ranks for things like ‘over 60 restaurant discounts uk’.

This is just one example of this. If you were to look at more pages, they’ll be opportunities like this all over the shop.

You then take this keyword and make an individual post about it, talking about restaurants specifically to align with search intent. The bonus? Link it well and you’ll start become an authority on the wider topic too.

Killing Two Birds with One Stone – Backlinks and Content go Hand-in-Hand

Now, building out a content and guides hub not only helps to attract more visitors and improve your visibility – it also helps to attract authoritative backlinks.

I won’t dwell on this point too long because I’m sure every marketing manager and SEO under the sun knows good content gets links, but it’s worth nothing that money saving-type articles can get a flurry of links fast.

If you can create something weird and a little ‘out there’ with your content, you’re more likely to get picked up by large sites and reap the rewards from the authority boost.

Providing expert advice like Martin Lewis and ‘Skint Dad’ can also land links with big publications.

The point here? With some creativity you can easily create assets with the potential to change the game for you and your brand.

The Two-Fold Reason to Add Guides to Your Discount Store Site

I also want to quickly note that creating content and guides is not solely for the purpose of attracting more readers or more backlinks. Creating content also helps to add depth and context to categories.

By fleshing out your site (and categories) with guides and supporting content, Google will read your site as more authoritative, ranking your main money pages better as a result.

We have a whole guide on using content to bolster your category content on our site written by our very own Liam Porter.

I suggest you check it out for more info. 

Rounding it up

This post is getting a little long now but hopefully you get the idea.

Online discount stores have been lacking severely in the content and guide space, and it’s time for an overhaul.

There are a thousand-and-one ways discount brands can create an effective hub for content, especially if they focus on saving, managing, and making money. After all, it’s always going to be a hot topic.

If you want to learn how we can create a stellar content strategy using the techniques above (as well as some of our own secret methods), get in touch today for a free consultation.