Digital marketing has transformed the way modern consumers make buying decisions. Retail businesses today cannot stay ahead of the curve without a solid and forward-thinking digital marketing strategy in place. Let’s try to understand how digital marketing for eCommerce is influencing consumer behaviour, sales opportunities, and overall retail marketing approaches.
Reaching new customers
Traditional retail marketing approaches used to focus on persuading customers to increase the frequency of store visits as a basis of their marketing efforts. With digital marketing, however, the focus is on reaching a wider range of audience and giving them an easier option to explore, select, and purchase just about anything they want online. Reaching more customers has never been easier with the help of platforms like social media and search engines. Today as much as 80% of marketers think that investing in social media marketing is a better use of resources for small businesses.
Customers first philosophy
The proliferation of eCommerce business means more stiff competition among rival firms and more choices for the consumers. It also means a harder-to-obtain customer loyalty and repeat business for retailers. In a market environment like that the only effective way for a business to stand out and retain customers is to focus on building closer relationships and providing more personalized services that competitors can’t match. The key is to understand what your customer preferences are and then streamline a communication strategy that ensures your customers are getting personalized treatment. Retail marketers need to be smarter in utilizing social media channels, online review platforms, live customer support, and whatever next is available, to directly connect with the customers to provide personalized responses and service.
Leveraging digital economy opportunities
The internet empowers retailers to reach consumers beyond geographical boundaries and any physical limitations. Retailers are able to connect with highly-niche audiences that can be sold to at higher margins because of the minimal overhead cost involved. In other words, digital marketing is truly helping retailers to scale their businesses at a rapid pace and effectively achieve their profitability goals at the same time.
How do you begin?
As a retail operation, you should start off focusing on crafting a smart digital marketing strategy that provides a mechanism to reach all the key points of contact where your audience can be found such as social media sites, review websites, email, apps, blogs and more. A genuine focus on personalized customer experience goes without saying. One better way to achieve this is by systematically utilizing data and analytics in order to understand and address your customers’ key habits, preferences and shopping needs. Another practical way is to look at your competitors’ strategies and closely monitor if there’s anything viable they are doing that works on your audience. Once you identify your key competitors (who you think are ahead in the game), there are ways to track their digital marketing activities online. As a preliminary move, you can go on semrush.com or ahrefs.com and run a quick performance report to help you get a feel for their online marketing efforts and the overall digital footprints.
ENCE Marketing Group is among the agencies featured in BestinSingapore for the 34 Best Digital Marketing Agencies in Singapore in 2020
