Building an e-commerce brand involves several steps, including:
- Define your brand: Determine what your brand stands for and what makes it unique. This will help you create a strong brand identity and differentiate your business from competitors.
- Create a website: Develop a professional website that showcases your products and provides an easy-to-use shopping experience for your customers.
- Establish a social media presence: Use social media platforms to connect with customers, showcase your products, and build your brand’s reputation.
- Develop a content marketing strategy: Create valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, and to ultimately drive profitable customer action.
- Choose the right e-commerce platform: There are many options available, so research and compare the features and fees of each to determine the best fit for your business.
- Set up payment processing: Choose a payment processor that is secure and easy for customers to use, and make sure it is integrated with your e-commerce platform.
- Start marketing your brand: Use a combination of online marketing techniques, such as search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, and social media advertising, to reach potential customers and drive sales.
- Track and analyze your results: Use tools like Google Analytics to track the performance of your e-commerce site and identify opportunities for improvement.
Recent research has presented the movement of brands that have taken control over their advertising activity. The study was conducted by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and clearly states that the main motivation of brands to introduce capabilities from programmatic advertising, is control, which is based on four factors:
Transparency, Brand safety, Viewability, and Ad fraud.
It is certainly possible to claim that the programmatic advertising industry brought a lot of value to brands, yet many players took advantage of the many loopholes in the field and caused brands to ask themselves questions such as:
How much do they really know where their ads run?
How much of their brand is present on worthy sites and apps?
To what extent is their exposure to their marketing messages real and effective?
In other words, brands have come to the conclusion that it was about time to take ownership and control over their advertising activity & costs. But, as I have stated, this trend will not stop at programmatic advertising. Brands and companies need to bring home not only programmatic capabilities, but the following other strategic activity anchors as well:
- Listening tool. The most important and necessary component of any marketing activity in the digital age is the ability to listen to potential customers and consumers. A brand has to continuously know what customers think about it, what they say about its products and what is their input on the company’s customer service. Marketing managers should treat these data as the most crucial and discrete basis that directs their continuous activity. Listening technologies are accessible and can be purchased or rented in different configurations. Brands can form technological cooperation and / or reach a level similar to that of companies such as Netbase or Brandwatch:
- Value management and content distribution tools. Listening tools will bring the target audience closer to the brand. Based on the data, potential customers should be provided with relevant value through personalized content on a regular basis.
This does not necessitate a large content department. It is sufficient to use smart systems to manage content, distribution and social, for example: www.marketo.com
- In house publishing capabilities which aims to change the classic structure of relationships between brand and media. Brands need to implement a publishers’ strategy and invest in their own media.
Brands that turn into micro-publishers – for example, establish a blog that takes ownership of a particular domain and simultaneously creates the presence of complementary content on social.
– In the future, we will see a consortium of complementary brands that will jointly establish invested media ventures. I recommend complementary brand groups to set up a marketing strategy to directly link products and services with consumers. The Marketplace format is an ideal one for brands to approach potential customers through existing technologies and accessibility.
It should be taken into consideration that traditional publishers (news sites, sports, fashion, etc.) have weakened considerably and will continue to experience problems such as loss of users and advertising revenue in favor of social networks and messaging players. This gap will draw in brands that will begin to think like publishers and primarily those who will implement DDP – Detachable Digital Publishers strategy. That is, those who will not try to bring users to their website, but instead will bring relevant content to users wherever they may be.
Brands, companies including medium-sized businesses need to be prepared to bring home content and paging as well.
- Analytics.-
Instead of using existing sporadic tools, it looks to set up or buy a system that tracks the entire marketing-communication activity of the brand or company at any given moment. The marketing manager’s dashboard should consist of a micro-segmented distribution as well as the marketing activity of each micro-segment, while tracking all their important activities on all platforms, allowing comparison of performance between different platforms and campaigns.
For example, the influence of advertising unit cost, CTR, exposure, shares, and user reviews, ROMI – Return On Marketing Investment,, on the frequency of purchases over time.
The market offers excellent pinpointed solutions for any platform or area, for example: Klout, Hootsuite, Google Analytics, Salesforce Wave Analytics, Zoho, Flurry, App Annie
The trend of bringing capabilities back home will have a massive impact on brand relations with their advertising agencies.