Digital media accounted for 64.4% of global ad spend in 2021, up from 60.5% in 2020 and 52.1% in 2019. As digital media steps into the role of a goliath, Digital Marketing has taken an integral part in the success…
Marketers since generations have banked heavily on the traditional means of marketing for the share of voice and getting people to buy their products & services. However, over the period of the last 20 years, there has been a significant and constant increase in ad spend on Digital Marketing in comparison to Traditional means of marketing.
This pivot has largely been attributed to the exponential increase in the number of internet users across the world, adoption of technology within the marketing circles and the predictability of returns that new-age digital media has to offer. As of today, over 560 Mn Indians are on the Internet and the growth of this domain remains unprecedented. To know more about the differences of Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing here is an elaborative guide:
The main difference between traditional and digital marketing is the medium used to reach a wide set of audiences for an organisation’s marketing efforts. Traditional marketing uses magazines, newspapers, OOH etc. while digital marketing uses social media, websites, search engines etc. Since the advent of the Internet, businesses have started putting a lot of emphasis on digital marketing efforts since it provides a great ROI & ROAS but that doesn’t mean traditional marketing is lagging.
Traditional marketing provides an impactful & immersive experience and puts your brand physically in front of your audience whereas digital marketing uses every digital touchpoint of your audience’s to increase the exposure of your brand, as using the Internet for hours has become the normal part of everyone’s lives.
Mediums of Traditional Marketing:
Traditional marketing methods include all the offline marketing methods including ATL and BTL marketing. Traditional marketing is great to make your business stand out or popularise it in a local market and compounding your marketing efforts with digital marketing will lead to a holistic campaign made of all relevant channels. Here are a few advantages of traditional marketing:
Credibility: Since the collaterals in traditional marketing are tangible (OOH, print media etc.) and rolled out in a bulk manner, from a psychological standpoint, it gives users more confidence in a brand than other forms of marketing. The additional point of a larger budget involved also portrays Traditional marketing as a more credible channel.
Diversity: The collaterals in traditional marketing are rolled out in bulk, which means that the brand will be able to reach a wider and a more diverse audience than digital marketing. The whole play of digital marketing is segmentation and personalisation, thus, traditional marketing stands out as a winner in this field too.
Scope Of Human Touch: Traditional marketing methods can arguably be more engaging and involve a human factor more than its digital counterpart. Offline activation like contests, events, concerts etc. make people interact with the brand and portray the human side of it too.
Here are a couple of examples of how digital marketing fares in comparison to the traditional marketing:
Performance Predictability: Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing can be run for days with a small, managed budget as well. TVCs take crores of rupees, the same is the case with OOHs and even pamphlets can cost you thousands, without giving you a proper track of the KPIs. With digital marketing, small businesses can run digital ads under their D2C growth strategies and ensure that a set budget is used to omnipresent ads with trackable KPIs.
Huge ROI: Digital marketing offers a great return on investment (ROI) over a small ad spent as well. You can start campaigns that last for a day to over months. As a thumb rule, digital marketers should aim for 5X ROI, that is, gaining INR 5 for every INR 1 spent. Great digital marketing campaigns can offer up to 10X ROI as well. eCommerce marketing requires a holistic use of social media promotions, digital marketing (PPC, Google Ads etc.), email marketing etc.
Trackable Conversions: Digital marketing enables ads that are specialised in making the audience convert. You can set conversions as a goal, run the campaign, gather data from the campaign, make changes and run them again. These campaigns can be tracked and come with an additional perk: digital marketing’s conversion rate is higher than the conversion rate of other forms of marketing.
Campaign Flexibility: One part where traditional marketing truly suffers is campaign flexibility. Since a large budget is involved and physical, tangible collaterals are involved, once rolled out, it becomes increasingly difficult to make changes or adjustments to your ongoing campaigns. A TVC once aired, cannot be reshot or a printed ad once circulated cannot be taken back, whereas digital marketing allows marketers with tools to make adjustments and optimise or pause ads depending on their learnings and insights.
Growth-focused Strategies: Successful growth strategies give way to more conversions and more conversions translate to increased revenue. Email Marketing alone offers an approx. 4400% ROI and an average open rate of 15-20% (source: MailChimp). Thus, a combination of content marketing and digital growth marketing strategies is bound to bring you a high response and revenue.
Targeting The Right Audience: As mentioned before, digital marketing is highly personalised through not only demographics but also psychographics. So, for example, if you want to target a college professor or an under-18 athlete, you can easily do it through the tools provided. This gives way to personalisation like never before, making digital marketing win over traditional marketing.
The interactions done with the target audience are result-oriented. They help to achieve predetermined goals. With e-mail marketing, one can directly target a specific person. Therefore, digital marketing is considered the highest personalised form of marketing.
Influencer Marketing: An integral part of digital eCommerce marketing is influencer marketing. Social media has given birth to content creators who use their skills and talents to attract people. Influencers have a large follower count and cult fan-following, through which, they influence the decision of the general public and make them aware of a particular brand. Influencers have a great engagement and conversion rate as well, thus, apart from brand awareness, they can help businesses convert and turn their audience into repeat customers as well.
Measurable Results: Every ad platform provides specific tools, through which a marketer can easily measure results for every digital marketing platform. You can also organise, reorganise and collate historical data to make comparable and analytical reports.
Traditional methods are quite slow and limit your reach to the local level only. With digital marketing, potential customers can be identified, targeted and converted online very easily. Thus, digital marketing is taking a big portion of any business’s marketing efforts.
Both Traditional and Digital Marketing are important and necessary, basis your marketing needs and more often than not, their interplay makes a huge impact on the overall campaign. A digital marketing campaign backed by traditional marketing channels always leads to higher ROI in comparison to a stand alone digital marketing campaign.
With the digital proliferation, Digital Marketing is turning out to be essential for growing brands and established goliaths alike. To truly reap the benefits, you need to explore a multichannel approach but if you are looking for more performance predictability and quick gains then Digital Marketing is a more sensible investment.
If you are looking for a Brand Marketing agency that understands the needs of your D2C eCommerce, check out GreenHonchos – a Full-Stack D2C enabler offering services like growth marketing, eCommerce digital marketing, marketplace management, social media marketing agency and much more! For more tips & tricks on eCommerce marketing and D2C growth strategies, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or visit our website for more information.
Social Media has grown rapidly in the past couple of years. Currently, there are 624 million people in India who use social media, which translatesto come online and showcase their products and offerings. Due to reach a wider audience and…
The first step towards building a successful business is having clarity about your consumer personas and the means to reach out to them in the best possible way. For years & years, the advertising strategies of all successful businesses, even before starting any marketing efforts, have tried to figure out the target market their product or service is suitable for. Instead of traditional marketing where marketers would try to make something as generic as an ad and would use it for all the audiences, trying to work on the principle of ATL advertising in its greatest interruption marketing aspect.
Ever since marketing has gotten more nuanced and customer-centric, things have changed for the better and targeting the right audience with the right product and services at the right time, place and day has become an integral part of conversion-driven marketing campaigns. eCommerce marketing in particular has become a sophisticated space because of the unique challenges faced by industry, lack of availability of historical body of knowledge and talent. Leading full-stack enablers have been quite successful in filling that void by driving conversions through high performing automated ads, AI-driven digital campaigns, segmented email targeting and other key strategies.
Let’s take a dive and see how Target Marketing works. Target marketing is dividing your audience into different segments; identifying the size of demands and growth potential; developing an appropriate media mix and adapting to the changing target’s need by optimising ads. You can also involve emerging technologies like AdTech & MarTech to boost ROAS in an efficient and effective manner. Here’s is the step-by-step guide for your approach towards target marketing:
Stage 1 – Division of the market into multiple market segments through geographic, demographic, behavioural or psychographic segmentation.
Stage 2 – Recognising target segments on aspects like profit, demand size, the potential for growth etc.
Stage 3 – Developing the appropriate media & marketing mix and strategy for the target audience to maximise customer delight and move them further into the funnel.
Stage 4 – It’s really important to test and optimise ads as often as possible. This will give you a grasp of your audience, help you find the perfect blend of creativity, content and call to action in your ad and maximise your target audience base.
Target marketing is mostly an ever-evolving process since it takes time and energy to find the perfect audience mix for your product. Once you identify that perfect mix of audience, you can work on converting them into customers, then repeat customers and then eventually brand loyalists. In the first step of target marketing, marketers find out the demographic, geographic, or psychographic variables to explain buying needs, tastes, and behaviour variations. Then, they divide consumers into market segments based on these variables.
Here is a brief description of target audience segmentation for your digital marketing strategy:
Demographic Segmentation
Geographic Segmentation
Psychographic Segmentation
Behavioural Segmentation
Segments in target marketing consist of homogeneous consumers. Since they are divided in a certain way, they are bound to exhibit similar needs, tastes, and buying patterns, thus, they also respond to the marketing efforts in the same way. This gives some predictability to your growth marketing strategy and ensures a stable return to your eCommerce marketing efforts.
According to your marketing goals, when you segment your audience, you need to consider a couple of things in your mind. These factors will decide how your campaign goes and how the results will be. Here is the criterion in selecting target segments:
Once the marketers are done selecting the criterion, they then work to develop a growth marketing strategy and a media & marketing mix accordingly. Since the target market audience is homogeneous, the tough work of trying to make a ‘fit-for-all’ strategy is replaced by an easy, personalised and more effective marketing strategy.
One of the first things a marketer does while deliberating upon the growth marketing strategy is to try to segment the audience in different parts. These parts are further categorised into sub-parts and each is important to cover before you start working on your eCommerce marketing strategy. Check these out here:
Demographic Segmentation – Your basic information such as age, gender, education level, marital status, race, religion, income level and more. This data is easy to obtain and categorise because there are only a handful of options for each category.
Psychographic Segmentation – Psychographics help you determine and explore the psyche or the interests of your audience, thus, operating as the building block of your growth marketing strategy. These include values, beliefs, interests, lifestyles, personalities and other intangible things.
Behaviour Segmentation – Based on how the target customers act and behave, this segmentation includes their purchasing habits, spending patterns, user-level and all manners of brand interactions.
Geographic segmentation – Your target audience’s location can help you better your eCommerce marketing strategy. Be it neighbourhoods, area codes, cities, regions, countries, etc., this data is crucial in formulating hyperlocal or local campaigns for your eCommerce agency.
Better ROI in terms of resources used – Since the growth marketing strategy is tailor-made for a certain set of consumers, you’re bound to have a higher engagement since the content that you are using is also tailored to answer their needs and wishes. This means the content will be able to delight the consumer more and also help in pushing them further into the funnel. Employing AI & ML powered AdTech & MarTech technologies, you can boost your ROAS more.
Better conversions – A large chunk of target marketing is oriented towards delighting the consumers and pushing them further in the funnel, you’re bound to notice a good bump in conversions. The content will have high acceptance and will be attractive to the Target audience, thus boosting sales.
Trackable and predictable results – By the virtue of mapping the segments of a homogeneous audience, you can use the tools provided by your campaign manager to get a clearer approximation of your marketing efforts.
These are some of the essential points of data your eCommerce Digital Marketing team or a service provider would need to formulate for deriving a perfect eCommerce marketing strategy for your brand to scale profitably.
Looking for eCommerce Digital Marketing solutions or an eCommerce Agency? Choose the Full-Stack D2C Enabler – GreenHonchos and scale your business online! For more tips & tricks on eCommerce marketing and D2C growth strategies, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or visit our website to know more about our services.
In the past decade, the accelerated adoption of the Internet in everyday lives of people has led tool to reach new audiences on a global scale. Evidently, the future of advertising is Digital Marketing as it has revolutionised the way…
In the fast-paced world of eCommerce, it has become pertinent to catch up with the latest trends and map your brand’s growth. In 2019, the global eCommerce market was valued at USD 21.8 Trillion and the Indian eCommerce market was valued at around USD 22 Billion. Apart from the ever increasing rate of internet adoption and proliferation of digital devices, COVID-19 specifically fueled the growth of the Indian D2C eCommerce market at an unprecedented rate and now almost all the major brands are taking the D2C way to realise their true potential. Amidst all this rush to try to serve consumers better and scale their online businesses, many brands are looking to formulate the perfect eCommerce Marketing strategy. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of it all, we need to understand what eCommerce Marketing Strategy is.
Simply put, eCommerce marketing is the act of rallying visibility & conversions toward a business that sells its product or service electronically. Some channels that marketers use to get the results digitally are social media, digital content, search engines, and email campaigns.
To achieve economies of scale, increase efficiency and reduce operational costs, almost all eCommerce companies use a partner agency to achieve their desired results as the in-house data does not provide a versatile point of view of the market. With the help of a Growth Marketing agency, marketers can get access to new-edge technology and a holistic view of the wants & needs of consumers for formulating a perfect D2C growth strategy to attract their target audience.
In order to formulate the best eCommerce Marketing strategy, you need to factor in key growth elements which can lead to sustainable growth of your eRetail brand online. Here is a definitive checklist for your next D2C eCommerce marketing strategy:
1. Original Content
Writing original content which is deep rooted in your brand ethos, appeals to you consumer persona and leads to an audience building is an absolute must for your eCommerce marketing strategy. Content amplification that contributes to customers resonance and gives them something to take away from it will lead to brand engagement. One way to do this is to produce original content that gives a holistic view of the topic at hand. Original content also does better on Google and will rank better than commodity content which only gives readers a superficial view of the subject.
Utilising social listening and monitoring, you need to write blogs, share listicles and make product videos that can deeply explain the technologies involved and how to use the products or services the best. Mini videos on office life, employee stories, product demos, real-life use cases etc. do very well and resonate with the customers, portraying a human connection of your organisation.
2. Website Layout
An important part of your growth marketing strategy should be constructing a minimalistic UI that ensures the user on your website has a good experience. Get regular checks of your website’s layout, language, and placement of conversion elements done and do an analysis of your website session time to find weaknesses and leakages. A proper sitemap will make sure that the people redirecting to your website have a clear view of where they are and where they want to go.
3. Inbound Content Marketing
Content marketing plays a large role in gaining organic traffic. When you go about making a D2C eCommerce strategy, you need to focus on pushing out tailored content which is strategic, valuable, relevant and addresses the problem statement of an end-user. Content Syndication and content amplification will make sure your message reaches the largest relevant audience A large part of your marketing budget can be saved if you focus on high-quality, consumer-driven content that works on getting the people interested in your products and services organically, instead of interrupting them with ads while they’re browsing. Inbound marketing also ensures a higher conversion rate, repeat customers and brand recall.
4. Social Media Marketing
To increase your CLV & RLV, you need a strong connection with your audience. Social media marketing is the usage of social media to communicate your organisation’s messages to all the relevant stakeholders, and implementing social listening and monitoring to increase content relevance. It is a large part of an eCommerce marketing strategy. Chances are, the eCommerce digital marketing services agency you are looking for also offers social media management. Social Commerce is an emerging field, gaining more and more traction. If you are a budding eCommerce company, it can effectively communicate your messages to relevant audiences without burning a hole in your marketing budget.
Read more on the top social media marketing companies.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a brilliant way to reach out to your existing customers and give them a nudge towards coming back and also push forward new customers towards the end of the purchasing funnel. One of the most effective ways to communicate with your audience is through email marketing. Since you have the option to segment your contact list, you can send a more personalised email to your customers, depending on what they want or need. You can test your audience through this, get to understand what works best with them on the ground level. Email marketing has been around for so long since it works and can offer up to 4400% ROI. Original, creative and effective content is needed and for D2C eCommerce, the quirkier it is, the better.
6. Search Engine Optimisation
To make sure that your products, services and brand name pops up on the first page of search across search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc., you need to invest in a good SEO growth marketing strategy. The first five organic results are responsible for 67.60% of all the clicks. To keep your page popping up first on the first page of Google, businesses must keep their website hygiene in check and do timely SEO audits of their website.
7. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
PPC ads are the form of ads which you see on top of the search results on your search engine. Wildly popular on Google, PPC uses a certain model in which you only pay for the clicks on the search engine. A good PPC eCommerce marketing strategy uses three elements – the ad, the offer and the landing page. For maximum ROI, you need to make sure that your ad is attractive, offers the best deal and your landing page is smooth and coherent for the end-user. PPC advertising relies heavily on your keyword strategy, thus, working closely with your SEO team will result in a great ROAS on your next PPC campaign.
8. Mobile Optimisation
Often an overlooked factor, mobile optimisation plays a big part in conversions as more and more people come online through their smartphones. Out of the 749 million internet users in India, 744 million users access the internet via their smartphones regularly. Thus, to get the most ROAS, you need to optimise your website for mobile as well. Making your website agile to be able to look like an app or scaling the text and font in a way that mobile users can access it easily, you need to deploy UX strategies that can help you convert visitors into repeat customers for growing your D2C eCommerce business.
9. Retargeting Through Ads
In the search for lead generation and unique visitors, more often than not, an eCommerce agency might not focus as much on retargeting through ads. You need to use AdTech & MarTech technologies to make sure that the growth marketing strategy for your eCommerce company is focused on retargeting too. Retargeting, simply put, is using ads to reach out to the people who have previously visited your website and did not take an action. This set of the audience has already shown their interest in your products or services and thus, are more likely to purchase than a new audience. Displaying your ads with the intent of getting them back to your website and converting them is the main focus of a retargeting campaign.
10. The Human Factor
Although social media is the best way to make your organisation seem more human and personalised to your audience, there are multiple other ways to improve your eCommerce marketing strategy. Sending out personalised emails without pushing products on your customers, making UI more experience-focused and taking reviews and suggestions seriously and acting on them are some of the small ways you can win the end consumer. The Human factor will ensure that your business achieves brand recall and even turn some people into brand loyalists.
11. Focusing On Emerging Technologies
It is highly recommended that your business can adapt to new technological changes if it is not at the forefront of them. There are a lot of new technologies coming in like VR, wearables and Metaverse that can revolutionise your D2C eCommerce company and we are barely scratching the surface. The possibilities are limitless.
For more tips on growth marketing, sign up for our newsletter! If you are looking for a Brand Marketing agency that understands the needs of your D2C eCommerce, check out GreenHonchos – a Full-Stack D2C enabler offering services like growth marketing, eCommerce digital marketing, marketplace management, social media marketing and much more! For more tips & tricks on eCommerce marketing and D2C growth strategies, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or visit our website to know more about our services.
