What does a 2015 e-commerce strategy look like for brands? Well according the Melbourne Online Retailer and ecommerce conference held last week, ecommerce strategies involve smart marketing, should be all encompassing, and including a plethora of solutions and services. All of this combined helps to ensure that brands are competitive in this modern day ecommerce business environment.
Smart marketing is performance marketing, and enables brands to reduce their risks, by paying for only the results achieved. Are you for example looking to drive targeted traffic to your website? The most common answer to this question is a big fat YES. Therefore, should you be investing in SEO, which can take 6 months to see you rank anywhere near the first page of the search engines that you want to appear on, for the key words that are important to your business. By this time, are these keywords even relevant to your business? Search is an evolving process from the point of view of providers, users and website owners. What worked yesterday may not work today and be counter-productive or harmful tomorrow. All it takes is for Google to update their algorithm for things to turn to the worse. Performance marketing takes out this element of risk; meaning that you as an advertiser have the opportunity to only pay for the clicks, or even leads that are achieved.
Your ecommerce strategy should be dictated by your budget, as well as what your brand represents, which in turn sets the expectations in terms of service provided. For example, if you have positioned yourself a premium watch and jewelry provider then you will need to ensure that the appropriate investments have been made in Fraud Prevention, Internet security as well as a Order management system. All of the above is a minimum expectation nowadays for all companies claiming to be a premium supplier of products that can be purchased online.
With so much on offer it is unrealistic for the smaller business owner to be able to afford all of these solutions, however please find below a checklist that you can reference when putting together or updating your ecommerce strategy.
Understanding emotions that affect purchasing behaviours is a key to ensuring brands succeed with their marketing budgets. Lets look at an example. Kmarts ‘Bom Bom Bom’ campaign and the discount ‘everyday low price’ strategy. Kmart worked to change consumer’s attitudes to the brand using the ‘Bom Bom Bom’ and on the emotions that drive consumption […]
After more than 6 years of experience, I get the same question again and again: How can we engage our email lists from the initial subscription and convert them all the way through to loyal customers? For that reason, we joined last week a a Webinar with Bob Kamal from Lyris HQ who presented on […]
Facebook Ads can be used for very different reasons, from growing your community online to trafficking the users to a page of your website and make them take an action (fill a form, download an app, etc.). But I can do that with Google Ads, why should I use Facebook Ads instead? I would say […]