Posted on - April 19, 2022 | Read 10 min | By GreenHonchos Team

In-House vs. Agency Marketing | For eCommerce Brand

We are living in a digital age where every brand is coming aboard the D2C train and focusing their D2C growth strategies on tech autotal marketing budget, followed by online videos which make 28% and paid search making 24%, leaving the rest of 19% for other expenses.

Since digital marketing is inexpensive and easy to focus so heavily on their digital marketing efforts, they need people who can market their products and services as well as get the brands’ communication across. We stand at a crossroad where marketing and experience are synonymous and this begs the question, where do you invest your brand’s marketing in, an in-house marketing team or a partner agency?

What is an In-house Marketing team?

The In-house Marketing team is a special unit within an organisation whose sole purpose is to serve the audience’s needs and demands.

In-house marketers are paid by a business to give out. They are also more adept at communicating with other teams of the organisation as they work in the same space and are in close contact with each other, making the approval process easier.

On the other hand, In-house Marketing teams are often plagued by inter-departmental dependencies, shifting priorities, a one-dimensional view of campaign ideas, limited to start showing results since the agility of an in-house team is quite low.

What is an Agency?

Simply put, Marketing Agencies help organisations execute and manage their marketing efforts to get a detailed and coherent campaign.

Most of the big brands use Agencies along with having an In-house Marketing team since they are inherently more creative and tend tools and software since they have a talent pool working in different functions that require the aforementioned software. Agencies also perform frequent check-ups on their campaigns, modifying them for maximum optimisation as they go.

In-house Marketing v/s Agency

	In-House Marketing Team	Agency
Brand Familiarity	Familiarity with the brand makes it easier for them to set objectives or modify them in real-time, as the organisation wishes.	The client success team at an Agency makes it easy for brandsto vast resources, ensuring no communication gap between the stakeholders and delivering optimum performance as and when needed.
Technology	Tools and software are seldom expensive and the limited capabilities of the In-house marketing team make it harder for them to all the to their requirements.
Functions	In the same vein as the point above, In-house Marketing teams have limited capabilities as they are hired for singular tasks, leaving a large gap in the marketing efforts of an organisation.	Agencies have a large talent pool that works across domains, offering 360 degrees marketing services required by brands for achieving desired objectives of an organisation.
Working Processes	In-house marketing teams, owingto the close communication with the organisation, often face shifting priorities, different processes and workload which makes it harder for them to specialise in one thing and most of the time, they end up hiring a specialised agency to get the work done.	Agencies can easily take the burden of different workloads and processes and the tasks which can’t be done parallelly, they do sequentially, eventually checking everything off the list according to deadlines as deadlines are priority one.
Scalability & Profit	Scalability is often limited with an In-house marketing team since it requires more leads, more sales, more revenue and more business in the shortest amount of time and as the In-house marketing team’s functions are limited, so is the scalability.	Agencies are focused on completing and over-delivering on the marketing objectives set by the organisation, thus, making it easier for them to contribute to the organisation’s scaling process.
Cost	In-house marketing teams are more expensive to build as the organisation has tools, software and much more.	Agencies are cheaper and more flexible in terms of payment. You can opt for monthly subscription fees or revenue share models which are directly tied with the organisation’s performance and marketing objectives.
Multidimensional approach	For different processes, the In-house team has to hire a: Marketing DirectorDigital Marketing Manager Public Relations ManagerMarComm SpecialistSocial Media Strategist And other people in the team.	For the same diverse processes, Agencies have to only look at five different existing teams that can get the work done. Here are the different functions of an agency: SEO Digital Marketing Website Designing & Development Social Media Management Marketplace Management Creative Designers At an agency, all of the teams are well-defined, in the process and ready to onboard & deliver from day 1.
Hiring Objective	In-house teams are specially hired to realise the goals of the organisations across different verticals of marketing like integrated marketing campaigns, digital marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation etc.

Thus, most of the brands find it easierto deliver best performance and results.

If you are looking for a Online 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.

Posted on - August 25, 2023 | Read 8 min | By GreenHonchos Team

Instagram Threads – Fad or a Trend? What does it hold for the D2C Brands?

It’s been a while since Meta introduced its contender to Twitter, a move that has reverberated across the social media landscape, leaving behind a trail of both positive and mixed takeaways. Within just 24 hours of its launch, the app amassed an impressive 30 million users, effectively disrupting the annals of social media history. This success owes a debt of gratitude to Instagram which has previously catalyzed the success of e-commerce brands. Thus, Threads, the new application from Instagram has raised the benchmark significantly capturing the keen interest of brands within the Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) realm.

However, is it really good? Does it genuinely deliver the intended advantages to brands? Or is it merely a passing fad, destined to be short-lived?

In the wake of its launch, these pivotal questions have occupied the thoughts of many. As a full-stack D2C enabler , we at the GH encountered a deluge of inquiries regarding our perspective on this novel platform’s functionality, potential benefits, and how it can be harnessed to gain an edge. In response to this surge of interest, our team undertook a comprehensive assessment of this platform, delving into its details to unearth the key insights that determine its potential value for D2C brands in the long haul.

In this article, we dissect the intricacies of Instagram Threads, shedding light on its positive, negative, and not-so-bad aspects for D2C brands.

The Positives…

Leveraging Textual Expression and Syndication Power

When you start using Instagram Threads, at first glance, it might remind you of an early beta version of Twitter, albeit with a distinct focus on textual content. The textual orientation provides an avenue for D2C brands to express their opinions, manage online reputation, share new launches or existing product details, gauge sentiment within the social share, etc.

For instance, brands in the CPG and B&PC space where audiences are interested to read about product descriptions, ingredients, unique features, etc. may benefit from the platform more in the longer run as compared to other brands in the fashion and

lifestyle industry. Thus, the platform is more suited for brands that rely heavily on textual content and look for low-form factors for branding and conversion.

Additionally, the platform capitalizes on the power of free-flow API syndication through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other platforms under the Meta umbrella. Such a syndication network offers D2C brands a broader reach and the ability to streamline their messaging across different platforms. However, its only MOAT compared to Twitter would be its syndication network power of free flow APIs.

Functionality and Compatibility

The platform offers a streamlined set of functionalities allowing threads or posts to be up to 500 characters long supporting links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length. With a capacity to include up to 10 media items, D2C brands can craft content that is informative, engaging, and conversion-altering.

Furthermore, Instagram Threads is accessible on both iOS and Android devices, Threads is currently available in more than 100 countries excluding the EU, making it more widely accessible for users. Adding to this, brands can also import their existing follower base ensuring a seamless transition and maintaining essential settings.

Seamless Identity Transition and the Following Continuity

Instagram Threads introduces a compelling narrative for D2C brands i.e. intertwining identity and follower migration seamlessly. It means verified profile marks from Instagram seamlessly carry over, establishing brand authenticity and trust on Threads, regardless of participation in the Meta Verified Program. Meanwhile, brands can facilitate effortless follower migration, enabling brands to import their current base with usernames, names, and even block lists.

The migration safeguards engagement momentum, allowing D2C brand to nurture their community without starting afresh. These features empower brands to extend their credibility, while also necessitating content adaptation to Threads’ unique landscape and potentially diverse user demographics.

The Negatives…

Limitations and Drawbacks

Even though the app launch was perfectly planned, it’s hard to see Threads as anything but a plagiarised attempt by Meta to return to its glory days. Though Instagram Threads offers a distinct approach to content and engagement, it’s necessary to consider or acknowledge the drawbacks and limitations that D2C brands might face once they start committing to the platform. For instance,

Visuals Taking a Backseat:

In the current digital era where visual content is holding immense influence, Instagram Threads taking a different approach by prioritizing textual content only. Unlike platforms such as Instagram and Facebook where images and videos are a core way of communication, Threads lean more towards written expressions. It can pose challenges for D2C brands that heavily rely on visual content to captivate and engage their audience. Industries such as Fashion and Lifestyle which often leverage eye-catching visuals to drive impulse-based shopping, might find it difficult to create the same level of urgency on Threads.

Lack of AdTech Capabilities:

One of the major gaps in Instagram Threads’ arsenal is its limited advertising technology capabilities. Unlike more established platforms that offer advanced targeting, tracking, and customization for advertising, Instagram Threads fall short in this aspect. This limitation can restrict brands from fully utilizing the platform as a promotional tool. The absence of robust AdTech features might hinder brands from effectively reaching their target audience and measuring the success of their campaigns.

Lack of AdTech Capabilities:

While Instagram Threads presents itself as an intriguing platform for D2C brands to explore, there are underlying shortcomings that might cast a shadow over the overall user experience and effectiveness of marketing strategies.

Limited Performance Metrics:

One of the unavoidable and critical aspects of Threads that can impact D2C brands is the absence of comprehensive performance metrics. Unlike well-established platforms that offer in-depth insights into post performance, engagement, reach, and audience behaviour, Threads falls short in this aspect. The lack of detailed metrics or analytics

can leave brands grappling with uncertainty about the impact of their existing content. Metrics such as shares, likes, comments and click-through rates serve as vital indicators of content performance, guiding brands in refining their strategies. Without such data, D2C brands might find it challenging to assess the resonance of their messages and adapt their approach for optimal results.

Missing Major Features Compared to Competitors:

In the realm of social media, competition is fierce with each platform striving to provide a comprehensive platform user experience. In comparison to its rival app Twitter, Instagram Threads lacks certain features that have become standard expectations for users.

For instance, the absence of long video formats, direct message functionalities, live audio rooms, etc. limits the versatility of Threads as a communication platform. D2C brands who desire a range of engagement options on social media platforms might find Threads somewhat restrictive in meeting their needs.

No Delete, Deactivation Only:

One major point that needs to be considered inconvenient for D2C brands is the inability to delete a Threads Account once it has been activated. According to Meta’s ‘Supplemental Privacy Policy’ users who delete their threads account or profile will also be deactivating their Instagram account. Why?

Since both Threads and Instagram accounts are interlinked with each other, deleting Threads would simultaneously delete your Instagram account too! For brands that have invested time and resources in building their Instagram presence, this limitation can result in significant disruption. The lack of flexibility might deter some brands from fully embracing Threads especially if they have concerns about potential complications.

The Not-So-Bads…

List of Missing Functionalities:

Beyond performance metrics, there is the absence of certain functionalities on Threads that can hinder the execution of well-rounded marketing campaigns. These functional gaps can prove to be obstacles for D2C brands looking to establish a holistic and engaging online presence. These missing elements are

Following Feed:

The absence of a following feed diminishes the sense of connection and community that brands can foster with their audience. Unlike other platforms that offer chronological feeds of content from accounts followed, Threads lacks this feature, potentially limiting users’ ability to engage with brands in real time.

GIF Support:

GIFs have become a staple of online communication, injecting touches of humour and visuals into interactions. The absence of GIF support on Threads restricts brands’ ability to add a dynamic and relatable element to their messaging, potentially impacting engagement.

Post-Editing:

We are humans. Brands are made of humans. And humans make mistakes. Thus mistakes happen and being able to edit posts is crucial to avoid mistakes. It’s an important feature for maintaining a polished and error-free online presence. Threads lacks post-editing capabilities which can be frustrating for brands that wish to rectify errors or update content after publishing.

User-generated Alt-Image Text:

Accessibility is a paramount consideration in modern digital marketing. The ability to add user-generated alternative image text hampers brands’ efforts to make their content inclusive and accessible to all users including those with visual impairments.

Hashtag Redirection:

Hashtags play an impressive role in content discovery and exposure on social media. Unlike Instagram, the absence of a feature on Threads that redirects users to related content when clicking on hashtags limits brands’ ability to capitalize on trending topics and conversations.

Takeaways…

Meta “Threads” app, poised as a Twitter contender, catching the D2C brand’s attention. It offers benefits depending on your type of brand and requirements. It’s good for

niches that use words a lot like Beauty or Food. Though the app has its extensions, limitations, or restrictions. For instance,

At the onset, it seems like an early launch of the beta version of Twitter, with fewer features and a comparatively poor user experience.
The platform is structured around the textual content which is more inclined towards expressing the brand opinion, managing ORM, and sentiment around the brand in the social spectrum.
In contrast to Facebook & Instagram, images and videos are not part of the key algorithms and can’t be factored in to promote impulse-based shopping.
In its current form, the platform also doesn’t have AdTech capabilities on offer and it would be too early to comment on its promotional aspect.
Its only MOAT compared to Twitter would be its syndication network power of free flow API: FB, Insta, WhatsApp, etc. which are all part of the Meta family.
In terms of category-centricity, the platform is more suited for brands that rely heavily on textual content and need low-form factors for branding and conversion. For example, brands in the CPG & B&PC space where people are interested in reading about product descriptions, ingredients, unique features, etc. may benefit from the platform more in the longer run compared to the brands in the fashion and lifestyle space.
On the functionality front – all posts/threads can be up to 500 characters long and can include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length. It also supports up to 10 media items.
Profile verification marks from Instagram are carried over by default, even if you have paid for Meta Verified. Brands can also import their current follower base through a single-click window and retain the username, name, and settings like a block list.
Available on both IOS and Android, Threads is currently available in more than 100 countries excluding the EU.
Posts on Threads can only be syndicated as stories on IG profiles and not as posts.
Unlike Twitter, Threads doesn’t have features such as long video, direct messages, and live audio rooms.
One of the major drawbacks is that once you activate the Threads account there is no option of deleting it. It can only be deactivated. Deleting the brand’s Threads page would also delete the Instagram page as well.
Apart from many other features in comparison to Twitter, Threads also doesn’t include features like a following feed, support for GIFs, post-editing, support for user-generated Alt image text, hashtags redirection, and doesn’t offer metrics to access the performance of posts.

Key Note: So, is it a fad or a trend? Well!

It is important to note that since its launch user engagement on Instagram Threads has plummeted by 80%. And our early assessments suggest that the established brands should hold on for now and not venture into the platform. We reckon that it would be limited to being a syndication platform as far as eComm/D2C/eRetail businesses are concerned where global/well-established brands can add it to their arsenal of customer touchpoints. For now, it largely remains a space to watch out for!

Ready to take your brand online? GreenHonchos can prove to be a growth partner for your brand. Helping kickstart, execute and manage the growth of over 200 leading D2C brands, GreenHonchos is a leading full-stack D2C enabler offering services like growth marketing, eCommerce digital marketing, marketplace management, social media marketing and much more! For more valuable insights on eCommerce marketing and D2C growth strategies, follow us LinkedIn, Facebook , Instagram , and Twitter or visit our website to know more about our services.

Posted on - June 21, 2023 | Read | By GreenHonchos Team

The Secret Sauce To Scale Your Brand On Amazon

Marketing your brand at Amazon can exponentially boost your brand’s initial eCommerce journey. As the biggest online marketplace, reaching almost 58 countries and 1.2 Bn people across the globe, Amazon can help you reach limitless audiences and diversify your brand while keeping an eye on multiple growth opportunities.

Beginning your journey at a Marketplace may provide you with the initial boost you need in terms of marketing, credibility, and a consistent flow of sales. These are the areas where you need to focus in order to begin your eCommerce journey and lay the foundation for a profitable and long-lasting business.

However, the challenge comes when you see the stream of thousands of brands fighting to promote their product and listing them on the first page of Amazon. How can you differentiate your brand to get the attention of visitors and convert them into customers? How can you make your product stand out from the rest when you and your competitor are fighting for the same product at the same price and using the same promotional strategy?

Here’s the secret sauce that will help you scale your brand on Amazon:

Constant Competition Monitoring

To improve your Amazon listing, understanding the gravity of what your brand is competing against is essential in the initial days. In categories like fashion, electricals, computer peripherals, skincare, etc. you can get enormous results and hundreds of pages of products filled with your competitors. It’s not possible to search for a ‘black dress’ unless you understand the user intent, map the hot keywords and implement it all in your PLP. Furthermore, surveying your products and your competitors’ goods routinely can make you aware of the best practices that can help you move forward in your journey to rank better in the Amazon digital space.

Take a regular digest of product reviews and Q&A of your contender’s pages. Customers are extremely clear on what their preferences are. This can be an R&D exercise to further improve the product and offer better customer satisfaction. Are customers complaining about instructions? Is the packaging not intuitive? How many customers talk about the cost in their reviews? You need to acknowledge each perspective.

How frequently are the competitors updating their product content, pictures, creatives, videos, etc? Are you aware of the product’s USPs and the benefits that they are putting in? How frequently do they change their price range and what impact does that have on their Bestseller ranking? All of this should be taken into consideration.

It’s paramount to move rapidly while analyzing such things and making changes to see the difference. Assuming you see a competitor’s inventory is out of stock, that might be a great time for you to bring down pricing or potentially increase ads and marketing. In case, your competitor’s inventory reviews are increasing at a quicker rate than yours, attempt to understand the reason. Search for new and creative ideas and be experimentative to find your brand language.

Finally, you need to keep a lookout for all the new ways to promote your brand on Amazon. There are new opportunities for ad placements, as well as, getting your product on the front page that keeps on appearing. Moreover, market awareness can keep your brand on top.

Name of the Game: PLPs & Product Listings

Customers, especially on Amazon, settle in a matter of seconds on whether they need to additionally get in to see the detailed PLP or return to listings. How would you pass this obstacle so the customer goes inside to move him further down the sales funnel? Break everything down, make it informative, simplify it for them, and pull at their impulses.

Does your title make it obvious to customers what your product is and is it viable with their requirements? Does it refer to the brand name? Does it explain what the use case is or any essential advantage? Above all, does it crisply do all of this so it isn’t too lengthy and the consumers are not skimming?

Good Presentation is the key

Before the customer looks beneath the desktop or on their smartphone, try to address every key point they need to know. To troubleshoot any problems the customer might run into, warranty and customer care accessibility should be available. Furthermore, try not to have too much content since it is likely to be skipped if it runs over a couple of lines.

Creatives And Pictures

Customers must not need to zoom in on the main pictures if they wish to understand what the item is. Include as many pictures as you can from various angles and settings. Pictures with rear angles, guidelines, dimensions, etc provide customers with a sense of the size of the product.

What is visible, sells!

Pictures are great, but videos are even better. Customers are skimming a 10-line long section because they want information in a digestible format and fast. Utilize your brand voice and repeat key USPs while referencing any supporting facts that can assist customers to buy your product.

Reviews To Build Credibility

Reviews are critical. 95% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase and prefer choosing products with more positive reviews compared to articles with fewer or bad reviews. As referenced at the beginning, reviews on a marketplace like Amazon will affect different channels, including your D2C website, as customers prefer looking at the Amazon PLP first.

Amazon recently rolled out an improvement to the review policy that you might have caught the wind of. Its synopsis is that Amazon is restricting reviews for discounted products for Professional Sellers. Many brands have been providing discounted or free products to clients in return for reviews. A new study of 7 Mn+ reviews showed that the average rating for incentivized reviews was higher than for non-incentivized reviews.

Fortunately, the new change will make things fair and easier for upcoming brands. To boost reviews, shady brands opt for crafty techniques. So, how do you get the reviews up on your PLPs?

Data harvesting

Data harvesting is the answer to it. Use any points of data that you might have on the consumers, including contact numbers, email addresses etc. If they liked the product, try to reach out and nudge them to leave a review for it. Sellers on Amazon are permitted to send follow-up messages to clients connected through any particular order. There are a few automated services that can assist you in dealing with this cycle. Speaking of best practices, avoid sending marketing emails or promotional messages, add links to other sites and demand, request, or boost positive reviews.

Automatic targeting of new brands

Amazon offers the option of automatic targeting of new brands or novices to Amazon Sponsored Ads. Through these ads, it utilizes its strong search algorithms to recommend a comprehensive rundown of potential keywords for you. Further, this requires picking a flat default bid across all keywords. However, the objective here is to get data on how different keywords perform for your brand or your product. This will help you to move on to running manual campaigns and provide greater control.

Automated targeting campaign

When you have garnered enough data, you can move on to assessing your automated targeting campaign to figure out which keywords played out the best. You will need to progress those over to a manual campaign, where you will be able to mention zero in on the most significant and relevant keywords that performed well for you. With a manual campaign, you can adjust bids by keyword. Keep on repeating your manual campaigns for keywords and bids.

Experimenting is the key

Data is your dearest friend, however, if you believe that you should incorporate extra keywords that haven’t performed well, you can test different bid amounts. Different bid amounts can yield different placements and yield shifting outcomes. Therefore, keep on testing until you track down something that functions well for you.

Although to scale effectively and run ads in an organized and efficient manner, it’s better to hire Marketplace Management growth partners like GreenHonchos who have extensive knowledge of everything Marketplace and can also help you build your exclusive online channel. GreenHonchos can prove to be such a growth partner for brands. Helping kickstart, execute and manage the growth of over 200 leading eRetail brands, GreenHonchos is a leading full-stack enabler. GreenHonchos – a Full-Stack eCommerce enabler offers services like growth marketing, eCommerce digital marketing, marketplace management, social media marketing and much more! For more valuable insights 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.

Posted on - June 21, 2023 | Read 10 min | By GreenHonchos Team

Content to Commerce: Building The Narrative To Drive Conversions

The D2C brands had exponential growth during the epidemic, but it has since reached a ceiling and has been sharply declining ever since. Reason: Staking everything on select mainstream platforms and enhancing brand performance solely through paid marketing only! For D2C brand leaders across industry verticals, there are now more reasons to be concerned than ever before due to the growing number of players entering the direct-to-consumer market, the constantly evolving algorithms of mainstream platforms, and the availability of limited real estate to attract customer attention.

Broad-basing Channels of Outreach

Broad-Basing your marketing channels is the need of the hour. And the most tangible and essential factor in the same is the content you choose to fabricate your touchpoints.

Content syndication and the use of a unified brand story across platforms will ensure a strong brand recall amongst your consumers when they are looking for relevant products in the market.

The idea is to build up a compelling story around the brand and use as many touch points as possible to deliver the narrative to the customers. This way the customers have every bit of information about the brand readily accessible, helping them make the decision to buy.

Improves Funnel Push

When you build up content around the brand and have it spread through digital mediums like social media platforms, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, webinars, videos, product reviews, etc., you build a strong personality for the brand with excellent recall value.

A brand with clear communication about itself and its benefits can get customers from the bottom of the buyer’s pyramid to the top relatively faster than a brand that doesn’t have its communication in order.

Reduces RTOs

Brands are bound to reduce RTOs considerably with clear communication. Since the brand has already built a reputation using comprehensive communication from the get-go, customers already have a preconceived notion about its products and services. In such a case, the chances of the brand not meeting its customers’ expectations is highly unlikely. And thus RTOs consequently decrease.

Search Engine Likeability

Consumers are no longer looking to buy products that only suffice their needs. They want to have a personal connection with the brand and its products.

Search engines know that search queries have certain intent behind them. And the brand that best serves that intent comes on top of the search results, enhancing its click-through rate and on-page engagement.

Thumb Stopping Communication

With such a large number of digital mediums and a plethora of brands online, it can be challenging to reach an accurate audience and make the right impression.

In such a crowd, your potential new customer might be paying just as much attention to your competitor’s online reviews and social media promotions as they are to your carefully constructed marketing campaigns.

With clear communication and a gripping story, brands can generate messages that cut through the noise and deliver results.

Content to commerce is like vitamins and minerals

In a digital world where every brand is focused on pushing their sales, content to commerce comes as a holistic way of growing your brand.

Paid advertising and performance marketing are like steroids for your brand. They can push your brand ahead faster and to a wider audience. Nevertheless, the timeline of your brand’s growth will be limited.

Content to commerce, on the other hand, is like vitamins and minerals for your brand. It is essential for your brand’s long-term growth and the best way to ensure the brand has a lasting impact and a strong recall value among its customers.

Metrics like AOV (Average Order Value), CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), and RLV (Retail Listings Visualisations) are impacted by CTC (Content to Commerce).

Age-old digital adage – Content is king

The entire digital customer journey should be supported by content, from the initial idea, through product selection and purchase, to the use of the product after purchase. Customers must be able to access the content they need at any digital touchpoint.

Content creation is becoming a major contributor to engaging customers and opening up new channels for marketing as the focus on paid marketing alone in India is waning. Brands are leveraging content marketing strategy to achieve competitive advantage and draw clients to their business by creating original and diverse content on a frequent basis.

As digital marketing becomes omnipresent and the majority of brands use digital real estate to promote themselves and their products, how do you differentiate to delight consumers into coming to you? How do you make your marketing efforts seem organic and really tap into the ever-shifting consumer intent?

Differentiating to Delight Consumers

Today’s customers are spoiled for choices and constantly look for brands that can engage them.

Brands that can attract people and build a community are the ones that are gaining more audience, getting more conversions, and ultimately building a commendable reputation among its customers and prospects. This goes on to consumers turning into brand advocates who give constant support and are early adopters of horizontal or vertical scaling of the brand.

How to make Content your Organic growth driver?

For your brand competing in the 6 major segments of the D2C sector, chances are you’re not dabbling with a niche product. If you are not, that means that the 7 Ps of your product’s marketing, that is, Product, Price, Promotion, Place, People, Process, and Physical evidence, are going to be very similar to your competitors in the same market. While you can differentiate in Price, Place, Process, and Physical Evidence, it would be a tough nut to crack the other 3 Ps. The only way to drive changes in those aspects is to create unique content.

Content is one way to vastly differentiate your Product, Promotion, and People and use your brand narrative and user experience to motivate consumers to choose your products and brands over the competition.

Can Content drive down the Customer Acquisition Cost?

In the simplest terms, yes. The process, however, is something you need to strap yourself in. Content to commerce, again, is a long-term investment that needs focuses strategy. Average Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) across platforms has increased over the years due to the D2C clutter and an increased focus on paid advertising.

There is vast evidence that paid marketing efforts are driving brand awareness and assisting place the brand in the person’s subconscious. However, the consumer fatigue kicks in over the period of time due to the constant targeting of ads and the efficacy of the strategy goes down severely.

Organic marketing tactics are centered around the content that can engage the consumer. Engaging content drives down the CAC, making way for content to be an effective growth driver for your marketing efforts.

Enhancing the User Journey through Content

According to recent studies, digital proliferation and increased use of multiple channels of marketing has the sales funnel beat. The basic model of Awareness -> Consideration -> Purchase is rendered ineffective due to the multiple touchpoints through which the audience interacts with the brand.

Adding on, studies have shown that most user journeys don’t even resemble a funnel anymore, now they look like a prism, a diamond, an hourglass, a trapezoid etc. User journeys are more 3D, they move across dimensions and include more touch points and are constantly changing due to intent-change and evolution of the consumer. In modern marketing, no two user journeys are the same and that’s why the role of content is redefined as an important factor in enhancing user experience & journey.

Tracking user intent and delivering tailor-fitting content according to their needs and demands, giving A+ content, updating reviews, giving comprehensive guides, answering questions, setting up query hotlines, building comprehensive FAQ pages, curating FAQ videos, keeping users informed through email marketing, tracking new ways to increase touch points with the consumer and broad basing the communication channels are some of the ways to enhance and strengthen the user journey through content.

The brand communication must be clear, the brand positioning must be transparent and the marketing efforts must speak to the relevant audiences in tandem.

Final thoughts

Language and words bind people together. Your clients are real people. Offering them stuff that may inform, inspire, and excite them is the first step in developing relationships with them.

As you build long-lasting relationships, integrating a content marketing plan with your online business can boost conversion rates while also enhancing client retention.

By providing you with top-of-the-line solutions for both a frontend content management system and a backend eCommerce powerhouse, Headless is one possible route to developing a solid content marketing strategy.

Ready to take your brand online? GreenHonchos can prove to be a growth partner for your brand. Helping kickstart, execute and manage the growth of over 200 leading D2C brands, GreenHonchos is a leading full-stack D2C enabler offering services like growth marketing, eCommerce digital marketing, marketplace management, social media marketing and much more! For more valuable insights 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.

Posted on - June 19, 2023 | Read 10 min | By GreenHonchos Team

Key eCommerce Marketing Strategies to Scale your Business in India

Being a noticeable D2C brand that stands out in digital clutter today is perplexing, also the ever-increasing product whitespace battle between brands jostling to make a name or gain a spot in digital real estate. The recent D2C boost in India, fuelled by the pandemic, is not only bringing legacy brands but also a wave of new brands online. In this highly competitive market, the best way to get the much-needed initial boost for your brand is to set up a channel of sales on marketplaces.

Want to know more about how marketplaces can boost your eCommerce sales? Keep reading;

Building Credibility through Marketplaces

To build credibility with your customers, so they can trust you, accessibility and transparency are an absolute must — in tandem these two standpoints exhibit care, and that care constructs trust.

Marketplaces make your brand transparent. It gives a complete story on everything and keeps a reliable and familiar customer experience. Customers trust marketplaces, owing to their existence for quite a while, and don’t rethink the shopping process. That inherent trust is a major piece of what makes marketplaces so convenient and reliable.

In a 2021 review, 70% of online customers referred to marketplaces as the “most convenient” way of buying products. Convenience and satisfaction tend to come from that implicit trust, predictable ease of use, and membership packages, which incentivize customers to get the best value through timely purchases.

Product discovery and suggestive algorithms drive high conversion of products on marketplaces regardless of the awareness of your brand among digital buyers.

Greater Brand Visibility and Positioning

Building a digital-first brand is a continuous struggle. A significant advantage of selling on marketplaces lies in their dynamic, diverse, and robust audiences.

Customers who shop online typically turn to their favoured marketplaces. There is a high possibility that your products will sell if your brand is there. This can also eliminate a portion of the labor & capital that goes into marketing, driving traffic, and overseeing leads.

Instead of building the following from scratch, you can leverage the trustworthiness of markets to entice more clients at a lower cost. It’s not just about the initial acquisition, marketplace customers convert to repeat customers easily and come back to purchase more from the platform. As a marketplace brand, you can easily work on improving your brand awareness among your key target group and even extend to various demographics.

In contrast to traditional D2C SEO, you can increase consumer volume while spending less money by utilising the SEO capabilities of marketplaces. Since marketplaces have an extensive catalogue of products, usage of A+ content will help you to index your brand and products better. Strong SEO practices for optimal marketplace reach also mean higher rankings on popular search engines.

An Array of Payment Processing Options

In regard to online payment methods, more is always better. Customers like to pay for shopping through different payment options, for instance, UPI, Debit/Credit card, Buy Now Pay Later integrations, Wallet, etc. Hence, to empower customers to convert and push their impulse to shop, your official website must provide various payment options to customers. Several factors influence the customer’s decision of making payment from the options available:

Processing fees
Scale and cost-based availability
Location, speed, hosting-based technicalities
Personal preference

The payment handling setup on the marketplaces has been designed in such a way that enables sellers to have a quick as well as an easy management system. This system even permits customers to convert rapidly and maximise conversions after A2C. Furthermore, the payment handling process on marketplaces is secure, convenient, and available in multiple choices.

Quicker, more reliable shipping

Satisfaction assumptions for online stores are rising. In regard to making a purchase, 40% of customers say that a delivery time of two days or more would keep them from purchasing; moreover, 63% of purchasers expect orders to show up in three days or less.

As a web-based seller, you need to give the greatest experience from screen to delivery, yet that isn’t always attainable. When it comes to digital commerce, the greatest obstacles to customer satisfaction are the post-order, and the last mile journey. The last mile journey is generally out of your hands as soon as the order is transported. Lastly, the most common problem that plagues most Indian eCommerce brands — RTOs and returns.

Marketplaces offer mechanised services that wipe out the burden of order fulfilment at minimal additional expense. When you consider the scope of post-sale processes and overhead expenses, the charges of services like Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) and Myntra Fulfilment Centre are a little price to pay for the immense value they offer.

With the right marketplace fulfilment solution, any small to medium brand can scale its business without affecting quality or accessibility.

Streamlined Stock Management

Stock management is another area of risk that can prompt a huge number of issues and expenses, all of which adversely impact the bottom line of your business.

If you’re considering leveraging marketplaces to scale your business, having a powerful stock management framework is the ground zero. Scaling a business doesn’t mean dealing with additional orders. Scaling a business is also about building your expenses in all cases (manufacturing, fulfilment, advertising, and so on). Automated stock systems permit you to scale your brand while minimising expenses smoothly.

Fulfilment services like FBA and Myntra Fulfilment Centre automate inventory management processes and solve some of the most common eCommerce inventory challenges, such as:

Managing products in different locations
Communicating between suppliers
Overselling and/or overstocking
Limited data insights
Manual sales management
Return and refund processing
When you embrace marketplace automation, you streamline inventory management and fulfilment logistics and get actionable insights to improve your processes

Global Reach

Marketplaces bring global shopping experiences right into your smartphone for shoppers from one side of the planet to the other. They empower you to seek after cross-border selling while avoiding all the common pitfalls and struggles of localization. Because of an implicit worldwide framework, you can depend on marketplaces to assist you with selling to anybody, from any place, and whenever needed.

Posted on - June 14, 2023 | Read 8 min | By GreenHonchos Team

The Phygital Approach: Reinventing the customer experience in the eCommerce Industry

The pandemic has brought about a lot of changes and adaptations which have efficaciously changed the way people shop and experience brands. Adjusting to this mad rush of brands emerging online and everyone chasing ‘phygital’ and ‘omnichannel’ has unlocked a new horizon of opportunities for D2C brands; as customers take charge to demand and dictate the pathways of the brands. This ‘new-normal’ has been grueling for brands to adjust to and has tested the D2C readiness so much so that even legacy brands in India are taking the D2C path and trying to provide an effective phygital experience. So, the question arises, what exactly is phygital and how can you use this approach to reinvent the customer experience?

Phygital is an amalgamation of two words – physical and digital. It is redefining the eCommerce industry landscape by marrying the online convenience and penetration of the D2C industry with the human interaction, look and feel of the physical store. Basically, Phygital blends online and offline purchasing to create a seamless customer experience (CX). Brands have been very proactive in setting up experience centers and specialty stores that solely exist to give the consumers the missing element of the brand-human interaction. FabIndia, Wagh Bakri Chai, OnePlus, Kent, Urban Ladder etc. are a few of the leading brands that are operating their experience centers in a wide variety of locations. Phygital gives a double edge to your brand as discovery is accelerated through the internet but the way your customer accesses your product becomes multi-fold.

Phygital is revamping the future of the eCommerce industry to deliver enhanced customer experiences. To enable this, a multitude of forces are driving the increased adoption of the Phygital approach in the industry.

Dimensions of a Phygital approach

Instead of the funnel model, phygital compliments the flywheel marketing method and puts the customer at the center of it all. From attraction to engagement and delighting the customer, marketers use this new approach to deliver their products and offerings while communicating to the customer their story – why they exist and what they are solving.

Let’s explore the multiple functions of a brand and how different technologies are used to make them phygital. For Sales – chatbots, machine learning; for Product – virtual try-ons, biometric fittings; for Customer Experience – virtual stores, AI-assisted shopping; for Catalogue – omnichannel catalog, demand sensing; for Marketing – omnichannel lead capture, Targeted digital campaigns; and for Stores – proximity marketing, Digital payments.

Advocating increased Personalisation

Phygital is not just integrating online and offline shopping channels, it is about providing a seamless purchasing experience to customers. Personalization is the key to boosting conversions through retargeting in which you can get your customer to become a repeat customer in a more organic way. Since you’ve mapped their journey online and offline, the content for your customer can be highly personalized.

Unification of promotions and seamlessness of loyalty redemption, across online and offline, envelops the customer for an absolute phygital experience. For post-order personalization, brands must ensure that the support desk can tell a customer’s order history, regardless of the channel they used to make the purchase. Ultimately, this can only happen from your point of sale and not the marketplace as you don’t get that much data. If you can harness the data and the AI Insights you can boost your customer lifetime value (CLV).

A big word in phygital is convenience, many people don’t realize it’s not a tech change or a norm. Ultimately, the shopper or the user will shift towards convenience. As per the reports, around 55% of shoppers research online first and then go buy the shortlisted products offline, contributing to USD 70 Bn of offline sales influenced by online consumer research.

Changing consumer behavior and demands

A major paradigm shift in the buying behavior of consumers was seen during the pandemic where even people from tier-2 and 3 cities came online to start shopping for essentials. Our studies at GreenHonchos point towards the experimentative nature and the greater order volumes of tier-2 and 3 markets. In the personal care and beauty segment, the AOVs are higher in tier-2 cities compared to tier-1 cities, similarly, this segment has shown 143% growth in the order value and 137% growth in the GMV in 2021. Tier-2 and 3 cities have had a massive 85% and 75% growth in emerging segments online, respectively.

Local to global access

Many established local players are expanding their geographical footprint from tier-2 and 3 cities to the international markets. During the pandemic, the concepts of dark stores and cloud kitchens have allowed brands to look beyond the local confines and extend their reach to a larger consumer base. This way, the brand can also perform localized studies to discover new potential offline markets in a post-pandemic world and capitalize on growth based on real-life evidence. Thus making it easier for D2C brands to adopt hyperlocal delivery channels and penetrate rural and remote areas. The benefits of extended access are enticing many retailers to go Phygital.

Leveraging the omnichannel approach

By going omnichannel, brands can make sure they are providing the same experience on all their channels, be it on their D2C website, on marketplaces, or offline. The omnichannel approach is redefining the customer experience since the customer can order online, pick it up offline, get grievances done on a call or text, and all of this is done online and offline, across channels in tandem. By leveraging the omnichannel approach brands can progress towards quick commerce since they’d be able to communicate inventory intelligence and logistics across different stores and warehouses.

Cost-effective retailing model

One of the most compelling arguments in favor of adopting a Phygital model is its cost-effectiveness. The Phygital retail model enables existing store owners to increase their customer reach by offering a digital store without incurring huge expansion costs. Similarly, D2C players can set up a small store or partner with local businesses without investing a substantial amount in a full-fledged store. This enables them to boost their last-mile reach to the customers economically.

Enhanced customer experience

As the pandemic transforms customer behaviors and aspirations, companies are looking at innovative and unconventional means of catering to their unique needs. A phygital offering increases customer convenience as they can shop whenever and wherever they like. User-friendly and easy-to-navigate online channels along with the in-store experience and interaction enhance customer experience.

Making Business Impact

During the monthly reviews with leading footwear listed brand with one of the largest presences pan-India (Liberty), the GreenHonchos team saw an emergence from a region in South India (Telangana) that kept rising the ranks, more organically than paid push, amongst the usual regions of high sale. That’s where the metrics like repeat customer purchases, AOVs, and non-discounted sales showed the strength of the location in terms of brand recall and the brand did not have enough offline presence. After consulting with GreenHonchos, the brand took a conscious and data-backed approach through its D2C analytics and the store turned profitable within the third month itself. Which is a record in terms of net profit that doesn’t happen often.

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What is more testament to the emergence of phygital than the huge growth in Quick Commerce which keeps the actual Kirana or the dark store at the center of its supply chain for fulfillment, whereas the CX is managed online between the customer and the business app.

Final thoughts

As businesses across the globe navigate through the unique challenges posed by the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, embracing innovation can help them traverse uncertainties. The phygital transition can potentially help retailers in not only diversifying their offerings but also in expanding their customer reach and network.

Phygital is emerging as one of the key concepts in the eCommerce space, paving the way for improved Customer Experience and adding the parameter of ‘look and feel’ to the eCommerce Space. For brands to deploy such techniques, they need a growth partner that can recognize the potential of these emerging technologies and implement them, unlocking new areas of growth and opportunities for the brand. GreenHonchos can prove to be such a growth partner for brands. Helping kickstart, execute and manage the growth of over 200 leading D2C brands, GreenHonchos is a leading full-stack enabler. GreenHonchos – a Full-Stack D2C enabler offers services like growth marketing, eCommerce digital marketing, marketplace management, social media marketing, and much more! For more valuable insights 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.

Posted on - June 24, 2022 | Read 5 min | By GreenHonchos Team

What is the Marketplace model of eCommerce and how to leverage it for scale?

There is no denying the fact that marketplaces have been the biggest driving forces in establishing eCommerce on a global scale since the early 2000s, with Amazon being at the forefront of this drive. Amazon came out in the late 90s as an online bookstore marketplace and now has taken the world by storm by being the largest online marketplace. India witnessed an eCommerce revolution at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century with the entrance of Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Jabong and others making way for the migration of offline consumers to online marketplaces. The biggest challenge for this was the distrust of the Indian consumer of the Internet and its commodities.

Marketplaces initially suffered in India due to this. The concepts of returns and exchanges of products were fairly alien across the western marketplaces and the consumers were agreeable with that. The Indian consumer, on the other hand, is very used to getting returns and exchanges done seamlessly offline and is more of a hands-on trying out person. To solve this, marketplaces in India revolutionised the online consumer’s shopping experience, providing Cash on Delivery options and a robust no questions asked exchange/returns process. Powered by heavy marketing campaigns, Amazon and Myntra championed the trust of the consumers and made way for penetration in not only the Tier-I cities but also the bigger markets in Tier-II cities.

In September of 2016, the launch of Reliance Jio paved the way for accelerated internet usage. Disrupting the market with zero data charges and then moving towards bare minimum charges solidified India’s tech dependency. It was then that the penetration happened in the Tier – II & III cities the most. Consumers from these markets were experimentative, and bolstered by their belief in the exchanges and return policies, they stormed the marketplaces to make their purchases.

Now we stand in 2022, where everyday small purchases like food, groceries and FMCG products are offered through instant delivery reliant models like Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, Zepto etc. As for the other categories like Fashion & Lifestyle, Beauty & Personal care, CPG, Pet Care, Baby Care, Home & Homeware etc. shoppers are frequenting marketplaces as well as the brand’s D2C website for making a purchase. The mass digital proliferation, cheap data plans, and flexible exchanges and returns policy of marketplaces has made way for more and more buyers to shop confidently online for everyday products.

Where the marketplace stands out for brand owners and marketers is the initial push in terms of brand reach, engagement and conversions that your brand can get. To better understand how to kickstart your brand on the marketplace and how to market your brand better, read further.

What is the Marketplace Model all about?

The Marketplace model of eCommerce provides a website or an app-based platform for a business to sell its products online. In this model, the Marketplace acts as a facilitator between buyer and seller. The role of mediating the purchase process between buyers and sellers has proved to be wildly popular all over the world with the biggest players like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra etc. connecting millions of businesses to billion of customers across the globe.

The Marketplace model can be a great growth driver for brands looking to start their online journey and can enable them to reach a pool of buyers very soon, without having to manage each step of the eCommerce value chain directly. To supplement this growth, brands also explore the D2C model for claiming the ownership of their frequent buyers and build a sustainable business model for scaling profitably online.

How Marketplaces can help your business

Marketplaces can give you advantages that can be easily leveraged to drive more attention to your business and get more conversions across channels. Here are some ways marketplaces can help you achieve your online commerce goals:

Brand Awareness:

Marketplaces keep your products in the forefront, which allows your brand to share the same digital real estate with the big players in the same segment. Brands on marketplaces are also considered to be genuine, carrying the surety of the aggregator, making your brand seem more genuine and enabling customers to feel free and be more experimental.

Cost-effective Model:

Since marketplaces take a small percentage of your earnings, in the beginning, they can be cost-effective for new brands who don’t have to spend too much on marketing their products. The complete responsibility for the initial launch and take-off falls on the marketplaces. Marketplaces also have more reviews and thus, people who are happy with the product will spread the good word around.

Risk Abatement:

Since the majority of the risk about supply-demand management, delivery, warehousing, logistics, returns and exchanges etc. fall on marketplaces, you as a brand can focus on building your product and your exclusive channel while making sure you have good stock movement, healthy stock cover, capital for R&D and marketing.

Organic Marketing:

Marketplace websites have a high domain authority and a lot of web hygiene exercises are regularly done by them. This means that your brand or your product category will shine on the front page of google, urging users to tap on it and convert. Additionally, the trust of marketplaces due to their flexible return policies and years of business with lakhs of customers will make your new brand seem genuine in front of people.

Instant Scalability:

Marketplaces give you a chance to scale your business initially by helping you engage thousands of potential customers. If your product is high-quality and brings something new to the table, you can rest assured that a lot of new customers will be jumping on board the bandwagon and give you rave reviews, which is essential for growing brands.

Horizontal Growth:

Marketplaces have different categories and usually sell multiple categories. This includes Electronics, Fashion and Apparel, Footwear, Personal Care and Beauty, Home and Homeware, Furniture, Food and Beverages, FMCG etc. Thus, it’s easier for new retailers to expand on their horizontal growth early and scale up their offerings.

Product Range:

Today’s customers are spoiled for choices. To make your brand a success in the initial months, you need to showcase all of your products and give the customers choices that they can choose from. You can showcase all of your products on marketplaces without worrying about the cost incurred to make multiple PLPs or waiting to upload your stock. This way, small brands can use marketplaces to supplement their growth in the initial days easily.

Growth Incubator:

Nowadays, for selected top-quality brands with interesting offerings and high growth potential, marketplaces are offering growth incubator or startup accelerator programs. These programs ensure that your brand and range of products get the maximum exposure and conversions and have the backing of marketplaces like Myntra, Amazon, Flipkart etc. Your brand can make the cut for these accelerator programs depending on the investments, exit values, and business areas. After getting the proper awareness around your brand, you can easily work towards making your D2C channel more successful as well.

Managing Marketplaces 101: GH Approach

Our full-stack offerings at GreenHonchos also cover your brand listing and promotion on 12+ top-performing marketplaces in India.

Channel Management

From onboarding to listing as well as the competitive intelligence in category and operations management, we create an optimised end-to-end strategy across all marketplaces through risk mitigation and process-driven scale-up.

Merchandising Inputs

Apart from calculating sales velocity, incorporating lead time and predicting sales spikes of merchandise, our team stays updated with competitive trends, and product & price positioning strategies to complete the merchandising cycle for brands.

Multichannel Inventory

Driving efficiencies of stock across channels to achieve maximum sales is our primary goal. Suggestions on regional utilisation, inventory model selection, implementation & returns management are factored into our planning process.

Sponsored Marketing

Marketplaces continue to innovate with diverse advertising options. Our team keeps a laser-sharp focus on ad spend and delivering the ROI through strategic approaches such as competitive pricing strategy, multiple fulfilment modes, customer reviews, content optimization and merchandise visibility.

A+ Content Creation

Experiential content and vibrant imagery are the keys to outshining your products. Our catalogue enhancement, as well as optimization, includes organising, standardising and publishing the product with rich, relevant, search engine optimised and product feature-focused descriptions.

Payments Reconciliation

Reconciliation has been an Achilles heel for business owners. Our intuitive dashboards keep an iron grip on your P&L with simplified and accurate reporting of each expense header & focus on leakage areas with consistent accuracy levels above 98%.

If you are looking for a Marketplace Marketing agency that understands the needs of your eCommerce business, 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.

Channel Management D2C Brand Awareness eCommerce revolution Growth Marketing marketplace management Marketplace Model Online Shopping Organic Marketing Sponsored Marketing

Posted on - June 22, 2022 | Read 10 min | By GreenHonchos Team

Which eCommerce platform is best for your D2C business?

The post-pandemic world has made brands realise the importance of having an exclusive online channel that gives them complete control over their marketing efforts, the CX they provide, theirstory of Snitch – an online exclusive D2C brand that began operations in 2020.

The D2C mad rush is partly due to go with when you take your brand online?

The Holy Trinity – Launching, Scalability and Profitability

An eCommerce platform is the lifeblood of your online business, running deep in not only the day-to help you choose the best for your buck.

The current players – KartmaX, Magento and Shopify

Kartmax – Headless, Serverless and AI-Powered

KartmaX by GreenHonchos is an enterprise-grade eCommerce platform which has grown significantly in recent times becoming the preferred platform for brand leaders and developers’ in the eCommerce ecosystem. The platform offers brands complete custo scale and grow their business. It employs and supports all the latest technologies like Progressive Web App (PWA), Jamstack, Serverless, Service-oriented architecture and Headless commerce. Being born in India for the world, KartmaX also has specifically designed modules fit for the Indian context like Fraud Detection for COD-based orders, reduction in RTOs, Pincode blocker, Search AI, KartmaX checkout and many more.

KartmaX is AI-powered and on the front-end, its sophisticated technology chooses autom or start with a readily available conversion-focused design template.

KartmaX has a serverless architecture that gives significantly reduces the hosting expenses on a pay-per-use model. As the traffic is usually non-uniform, some days your brand website might experience large traffic while some days the number might be quite small. A Serverless system allows you to invest heavily in large capacity servers during high volume sales time and then have no use of them on BAU days.

On the account reconciliation front, KartmaX allows you to your commands as well.

One place where marketplaces win in comparison with D2C websites is the post-purchase experience. Order tracking is really important for custo shoppers on every purchase

Moreover, if your customer funds seamlessly.

Magen to – The Legacy Monolithic Platform (now Adobe Commerce)

Magen tomer experience (CX).

As Magen to be easily created.

Being a monolithic platform, however, Magento a slower speed.

The structure of Magento a tailored-fit experience.

Magento continuously invest in multiple load balancing servers which can increase the cost. The flexibility also ends here as the nature of online traffic is such that it dwindles in numbers. You might expect thousands of sessions a day, for which you would need multiple servers and yet see the traffic in hundreds, rendering the additional server capability useless.

Shopify – A new-age SaaS platform

Shopify is a new-age easy-to go online with very lessto USD 2000 per month, depending on the version you choose to opt for. For bigger businesses, Shopify has a transparent variable fee model that generally is a small percentage of the revenue that a brand generates on its platform.

To start with Shopify’s wildly popular feature, the drag and drop theme builder, offers you an easy system that makes it easy top your marketing efforts, depending on the analytics and insights derived from real data.

Shopify has a flexible payment model which allows youto run with almost no in-house team of developers.

Shopify is inherently faster than a monolithic architecture, owing to this reason, Shopify also has fewer bugs than a legacy platform.

This was a comprehensive guideto see your strengths, improvement areas and opportunities for growth.

Are you looking for an eCommerce technology partner that understands the needs of your D2C eCommerce? Check out GreenHonchos – a Full-Stack D2C enabler offering services like D2C technology, growth marketing, eCommerce digital marketing, marketplace management, social media marketing and much more! For more valuable insights on eCommerce marketing and D2C growth strategies, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or visit our websiteto know more about our services.

Audience Building Brand Engagement Brand Marketing eCommerce Consulting eCommerce Insights eCommerce Platform eCommerce Technology KartmaX Magento Persona Profiling Shopify Technology

Posted on - April 19, 2022 | Read 9 min | By GreenHonchos Team

Your Definitive Guide To The Digital Marketing Basics

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 of eCommerce businesses. If you want to scale your business and make it profitable, you need to invest smartly and heavily in the digital marketing efforts of your business. Digital marketing will boost your brand’s awareness and make it come in front of your target audience, eventually leading to an increase in sales, brand recall, and repeat customers.

To get started with digital marketing, it is important to understand your intentions and objectives. Taking note of your business goals in a strategic, step-by-step fashion and then considering the useful channels is better than jumping onboard every single channel available. Let’s take a deep dive into more Digital Marketing basics to get you up to speed on how to use it to your advantage.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the promotion of an organisation’s marketing efforts using the Internet and other digital channels such as social media, paid advertising, search engine marketing, email marketing etc. Digital marketing gives great control over the marketing processes to the marketers, making their campaigns more trackable, giving them the option to optimise them as the public reaction comes in and retargeting the customers who show interest in the product or service.

Due to the emergence of smartphones and access to cheap and high-speed internet across the globe, digital marketing has taken precedence over other forms of marketing. In 2022, 73% of all digital ad spend is projected to be disseminated through mobile devices.

Here are some of the widely used forms of digital marketing:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Influencer Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
PR Wire Networks

Advantages of Digital Marketing

There are multiple advantages of Digital Marketing over other forms of marketing, ROI being one of the biggest ones. As per industry reports, Email marketing provides around 4400% ROI, and Google Ads & Social Media platforms can lead to anywhere from 200% – 1000% ROI or even more, depending on the messaging, ad hygiene, creative and other qualitative factors. This is enough to show you how big of an advantage, in terms of ROI Digital marketing gives. Apart from the ROI and great ROAS, things like reachability, the ability to home in on the target audience based on their demographics, interests and behaviour is also advantageous. Here are some other advantages of Digital marketing:

Attribute Targeting: Through audience segmentation, you can segment your audience and modify your communication to suit their needs the best. Target marketing works especially well since the audience feels that there is a personal connection between the brand and the individual, making them recall the brand, trust it and become a brand advocate.

Cost-effectiveness: Digital marketing is also more cost-effective than other forms of marketing. You can continuously evaluate your campaign, modify it or stop it according to its performance, unlike in other forms of marketing where you need to spend a lot and have limited control over the modifications of the campaign.

Easy Measurability Through Defined KPIs: Digital marketing across platforms gives you a whole suite of tools through which you can track not only the audience reactions & sentiments but also impressions, click-through rates, actions, conversions and much more. In offline ads, it’s not possible to track the campaign performance since it’s difficult to track the customer footprint.

Customer Reach: As you take your business online, you get the chance to reach customers around the globe. Anyone from anywhere can look at your products and services and order online, provided you deliver to their place. With such great potential, it becomes increasingly important to gain the ability to market your offerings to the audience. Through digital marketing, you can easily target people from any country or region and make sure they get to see your marketing communications.

Seamless Experience & Convenience: A digital ad is made of 5 five key elements – Creative, Caption, Message/Offer (if any), USPs of the product and a Call To Action (CTA) button. The CTA buttons are well defined and clear so if a customer sees your ad and is interested in knowing more about your brand, getting frequent updates from your brand or looking to purchase your product or service, they are just a few clicks away.

To know more about Digital Marketing and its advantages, check out this blog.

Strategising the different tenets of Digital marketing

A good digital marketing strategy relies on marketers using all the relevant tenets of digital marketing in tandem. This results in a robust marketing strategy that covers all the bases and gives you effective & measurable results. For example, if you are looking for a strategy that focuses on brand awareness and also drives sales, you can use SEO, PPC, social media marketing and other digital marketing campaigns to boost your visibility and make people interested in your offerings.

Performance marketing is usually the preferred way of digital marketing as it provides large returns on small investments, where ROIs can range from an average of 2X to 20X, i.e., 200% to 20,000% on what you spend. Sounds good, right? Let’s look at some of the different verticals of digital marketing and get to know how to best use them:

1. Performance Marketing: Performance marketing is a type of advertising where the advertiser only pays when a certain action occurs. This action can be anything from gaining a lead, making a sale, the viewer clicking on the ad etc. Performance marketing is one of the largest paid marketing channels and includes the following types of marketing:

Social Media advertising
Sponsored advertising
Affiliate marketing
Search Engine Marketing

2. Social Media Marketing: Using social media to promote your brand and its products or services is a part of social media advertising. Marketers use platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. to display ads to their audiences for various purposes, be it sales, increasing follow count, getting more social engagement, making people aware of the brand etc.

3. Sponsored Advertising: Sponsored advertising is when an organisation pays to be a part of a specific event of another organisation or for their content to appear on their website. This content can include their PR Articles, Display Ads, Promotional Videos etc

4. Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is when an organisation pays individuals like influencers, bloggers, celebrities etc. to promote their products and services to generate sales. The affiliates then place the organisation’s ads and market the brand’s products and offerings and are paid a commission every time someone converts through their ads.

5. Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Marketing, commonly known as SEM is when an advertiser has to pay for getting the search result on the first page using PPC ads. Pay-per-click is an ad model in which the advertiser pays for every click. PPC is majorly used on search engines where at the top of search results, you can find the relevant ads from advertisers. Google Adwords is one of the most popular platforms which uses the PPC model for advertising.

Beyond digital marketing there are other organic means of digital marketing like Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is the process of optimising your website to appear in search results of search engines. Although SEO is free and not a part of paid digital marketing, if you are focusing on getting more real estate on websites, you have to invest in SEO too. It’s an extremely important domain as 93% of all website data is driven through search engines. Search engines like Google, Bing, Duckduckgo etc. use ‘crawl bots’ to index websites according to keywords.

Thus, if your website has a good keyword strategy, it’s bound to appear on the first page of the search results. SEO also requires you to do other basic website hygiene maintenance like using alt tags, image tags, meta titles, meta descriptions etc. so that the website visitors are well informed on what they will find on the webpage.

Using digital marketing strategies can drastically increase your brand awareness which ultimately leads to more sales and repeat business. Looking for a Digital 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 valuable insights on eCommerce marketing and D2C growth strategies, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or visit our website.

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Posted on - April 19, 2022 | Read 10 min | By GreenHonchos Team

In-House vs. Agency Marketing | For eCommerce Brand

What is an In-house Marketing team?

The In-house Marketing team is a special unit within an organisation whose sole purpose is to serve the audience’s needs and demands.

What is an Agency?

Simply put, Marketing Agencies help organisations execute and manage their marketing efforts to get a detailed and coherent campaign.

In-house Marketing v/s Agency

	In-House Marketing Team	Agency
Brand Familiarity	Familiarity with the brand makes it easier for them to set objectives or modify them in real-time, as the organisation wishes.	The client success team at an Agency makes it easy for brandsto vast resources, ensuring no communication gap between the stakeholders and delivering optimum performance as and when needed.
Technology	Tools and software are seldom expensive and the limited capabilities of the In-house marketing team make it harder for them to all the to their requirements.
Functions	In the same vein as the point above, In-house Marketing teams have limited capabilities as they are hired for singular tasks, leaving a large gap in the marketing efforts of an organisation.	Agencies have a large talent pool that works across domains, offering 360 degrees marketing services required by brands for achieving desired objectives of an organisation.
Working Processes	In-house marketing teams, owingto the close communication with the organisation, often face shifting priorities, different processes and workload which makes it harder for them to specialise in one thing and most of the time, they end up hiring a specialised agency to get the work done.	Agencies can easily take the burden of different workloads and processes and the tasks which can’t be done parallelly, they do sequentially, eventually checking everything off the list according to deadlines as deadlines are priority one.
Scalability & Profit	Scalability is often limited with an In-house marketing team since it requires more leads, more sales, more revenue and more business in the shortest amount of time and as the In-house marketing team’s functions are limited, so is the scalability.	Agencies are focused on completing and over-delivering on the marketing objectives set by the organisation, thus, making it easier for them to contribute to the organisation’s scaling process.
Cost	In-house marketing teams are more expensive to build as the organisation has tools, software and much more.	Agencies are cheaper and more flexible in terms of payment. You can opt for monthly subscription fees or revenue share models which are directly tied with the organisation’s performance and marketing objectives.
Multidimensional approach	For different processes, the In-house team has to hire a: Marketing DirectorDigital Marketing Manager Public Relations ManagerMarComm SpecialistSocial Media Strategist And other people in the team.	For the same diverse processes, Agencies have to only look at five different existing teams that can get the work done. Here are the different functions of an agency: SEO Digital Marketing Website Designing & Development Social Media Management Marketplace Management Creative Designers At an agency, all of the teams are well-defined, in the process and ready to onboard & deliver from day 1.
Hiring Objective	In-house teams are specially hired to realise the goals of the organisations across different verticals of marketing like integrated marketing campaigns, digital marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation etc.

Thus, most of the brands find it easierto deliver best performance and results.

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Posted on - April 18, 2022 | Read 7 min | By GreenHonchos Team

Where to bid your money? Digital Marketing v/s Traditional Marketing

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:

Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing: What’s the difference?

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:

Out-of-home or OOH – Billboards, Bus/Cab wraps, Hoardings, Banners etc
TV, Radio Broadcasting
Print Media – Magazines, Newspapers, Posters etc.
Mail – Catalogues, leaflets etc.
Telemarketing – Phone, SMS etc.

What makes Traditional Marketing the OG marketing channel?

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.

What makes Digital Marketing stand out?

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.

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Posted on - February 16, 2022 | Read 7 min | By GreenHonchos Team

How to Segment & Target
audience for driving
conversions

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.

Cogs & Pegs of Target Marketing

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

Gender
Age
Life cycle
Education
Income
Profession
Religion

Geographic Segmentation

City
Urban
Suburbs
Country
Climate

Psychographic Segmentation

Personality
Lifestyle
Attitude
Interests
Values

Behavioural Segmentation

Benefits-oriented
User status
Usage rate
Purchase occasion
Readiness status
Attitude-driven
Loyalty status

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:

Segment Size
Growth Prospect
Potential Profit
Structural Attractiveness

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.

Get up to speed on: Segmenting & Attributing

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.

Target Marketing & how it can be an efficient tool

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.

AdTech AI eCommerce marketing Growth Marketing MarTech ML Performance Marketing ROAS

Posted on - February 16, 2022 | Read 7 min | By GreenHonchos Team

How Digital Marketing is
giving small businesses
an edge

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 marketers advertise their products and services tors and region-specific businessesto MNCs and global brands, digital ads have become the leading means to measure campaign effectiveness.

Online marketing has become an economic and effective alternativetowards working with an expert Online commerce marketing agency that can help them achieve their desired growth with predictability.

On an average, there are 4.66 Bn people online to grow at a 59% CAGR to USD 17 Bn in gross merchandise value by 2025. People are becoming increasingly tech-dependent and 82% of people use their phones to make an online search before they decide to purchase from a store. In the same vein, 50% of consumers are inclined towards a particular brand if the name appears more than once during their search.

So now that we know about the importance of Digital Marketing for eRetail brands, it’s time to learn how to hone D2C growth strategies using it. Here are the different domains of Digital Marketing:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Content Marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Affiliate Marketing
Email Marketing
Inbound Marketing

Let’s take a look at all these domains in a little more detail.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility when people search for products or services related to your brand or organisation through search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. These search engines use bots to crawl pages on the internet. Bots go from website to website and collect information on those pages, putting them in an index. This indexing helps search engines to show your webpage at the forefront of the search.

PPC (Pay-Per-Click): In Search Engine Marketing, PPC is a model of internet marketing in which the advertiser pays a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Thus, the visibility is essentially free but for a website visit, you’ll have to pay the required amount. PPC is the most popular form of SEM, allowing advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine’s sponsored ad section when someone searches with a keyword related to their business. Using AdTech and MarTech, you can significantly increase your ROAS and maximise high intent lead generation.

Content Marketing: Content marketing is one of the most omnipresent types of marketing. It involves strategic creation and sharing of relevant online content such as videos, blogs, social media posts etc. to generate interest in a brand or organisation’s offerings instead of promoting them. Content marketing is also seen as comparatively organic, which helps the brand in preventing outbound, ‘in-your-face’ advertising, thus, drawing them in, organically. Mainly, there are two main factors when going for content marketing – Content Syndication and Content Amplification.

Social Media Marketing (SMM): Simply put, SMM is using social media to market a brand’s products and services. Social media is a great way to interact with customers, get a conversation around your brand, reel in organic views and followers and reach new people in a subtle yet effective way. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc are the most famous social media platforms as of now.

Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing has made a big comeback ever since the advent of social media influencers. Many marketplaces and D2C brands have highly successful affiliate marketing programs. This form of eCommerce marketing takes the use of brand ethos and rhetoric, using the influencers reputation and audience-connect to provide traction to the brand’s marketing efforts.

Email marketing: Email marketing, simply put, is the strategic use of emails to reach out to your audience and make them aware of your brand, drive conversions, ask for reviews and get engagement. Email marketing has a very high ROI of 4400% and is a great way to personalise shopping experience and communication for all segments of your audience.

Inbound marketing: In Inbound marketing, strategic, relevant & valuable content is tailored to delight and attract customers organically. This type of marketing relies on the customers finding your marketing efforts instead of you promoting them with the content they might not always want to see.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is blog-3-1.jpg

After understanding the different domains that can be used for eCommerce marketing and growth marketing of your D2C brand, here are a couple of arguments on what are the benefits of digital marketing for small businesses:

Enabling Customer Conversations – Social media platforms have enabled easy and instant communication between the brand and the audience. You can connect to the audience not only domestically but also internationally.

Content Distribution – In 2020, 2.5 quintillion data bytes of content was distributed over the internet. Millions of content pieces over social media and websites are created and distributed every day. This amount is increasing day by day and a marketer can leverage the highly organised routes to strategically work towards Content Amplification and the increase of ROAS.

Customer Information – When a customer comes online on a D2C website, they leave their digital footprint everywhere, unlike, say, at a brick and mortar store. The analysis of this data can help the marketer in accessing the likes and preferences of customers for creating an appropriate growth marketing strategy.

Personalisation and an enhanced consumer experience – Through Digital Marketing analytics, you can devise an eCommerce Marketing strategy that not only effectively communicates your brand’s messages but also helps in product’s personalisation and further an enhanced consumer experience.

Emerging Innovations – Digital marketing, powered by an ever-evolving MarTech & AdTech ecosystem enables innovations and emerging technology, leveraging them to create a D2C eCommerce marketing strategy that delivers on the key ROI metrics.

Looking to scale your business with an 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 to know more about our services.

AdTech D2C eCommerce D2C Growth Strategies MarTech Performance Marketing ROAS Search Engine Marketing Search Engine Optimisation Search Optimisation Social Commerce

Posted on - February 16, 2022 | Read 8 min | By GreenHonchos Team

Build A Robust eCommerce
Marketing Strategy To Scale
Exponentially

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.

What is an eCommerce Marketing Strategy?

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.

The Definitive eCommerce Marketing Checklist

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.

Audience Building Brand Engagement CLV Content Amplification Content Syndication Persona Profiling RLV Search Engine Optimisation SEO Social Listening Social Monitoring

Posted on - February 20, 2022 | Read 8 min | By GreenHonchos Team

Make Social Media Your
Ace Growth Multiplier

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 immerse them in marketing communications.

To reach a relevant audience segment, social media has also emerged as a greatto grow your business on social media and nitigrities of mainstream social media platforms.

Get upto speed on: Social Media Marketing

Simply put, social media marketing is using social media platformsto track the success of their efforts.

The biggest benefit of social media is that it can be used by micro and small businesses without employing specialists. Butto opt for an agency.

Learn how to implement Social Media Marketing

Social media has transformed the way we interact with each other and connect. People can have conversations with each other at a global level instantly by the means of text messages, images, audio and video. As technology evolves, we are stepping into converse, see and feel interactions and experiences in real-time at home.

Social media websites have also transformed consumer behaviour. Especially after the pandemic, people are looking at more and more ways to resonate with users.

Social Media Marketing has an average ROI of 95% and if employed strategically, it can provide you a lot more than that. In order to scale brands online and utilise social media as a growth multiplier, brands majorly opt for a partner agency with deep understanding of eCommerce businesses and industry categories. It helps them achieve desired results efficiently and effectively while they focus on their core business area.

So what face to help you make a decision:

Strategy: From persona profiling to be shared.

Planning and Publishing: The Digital advertising agency that you are considering should plan drafts of their type of content, this should be a mix of pho to the platform.

Online Monitomers, and other stakeholders are saying about the brand should be the key priority of your social media marketing company. This way they can tailor content and drive engagement.

Analytics, Reporting & Insights: After getting all the necessary data and insights on your marketing strategy, you need to your growing audience’s interests and behaviours.

Content Segregation: A good content syndication strategy should take into your target audience, resulting in engagement, conversions and brand recall as well. Here are a few ways how content should be guided on different platforms:

Facebook – One of the oldest and most crowded platforms on the internet, Facebook has evolved from young people’s social playgroundto middle-aged and older people’s preferred social media platform in the last decade.

Facebook is a great place to your brand’s style.

Instagram – Second most popular after Facebook in social media, Instagram is the place to be if your target audience falls between 15-50 years old, including millennials and Gen Zs.

Instagram, now owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has a great ad algorithm system which is quite inexpensive as well.
You can use multiple content styles like reels, stories, videos and image posts.
Influencer marketing is also mostly done through Instagram.

Twitter – Being a microblogging site, the preferred content of Twitter is text, however, you can feel free too.

Content strategies of brands like Wendy’s, Zomator is very high as a lot of viral Twitter threads come out of Twitter.
A lot of co-branding activities can also be done over Twitter where different brands can keep the conversation going by retweeting and commenting on your tweet.

LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a place where people from all professions can connect and network. It’s social media for work and for finding talent, connecting with your colleagues and employers etc. It’s also where brands connect with brands and other businesses and communication shifts to B2B.

Content should be formal and pertainingto work or business.
The usual content which is posted on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter will not work on LinkedIn.
Brands can share their business accomplishments, employee activities, hiring news, case studies etc. on LinkedIn.

Are you 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 valuable insights 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.

Audience Building Brand Engagement Brand Marketing Brand rhetoric CLV Content Amplification Content Syndication Digital Advertising Agency Persona Profiling RLV Social Listening Social Monitoring

In-House vs. Agency Marketing | For eCommerce Brand

What is an In-house Marketing team?

What is an Agency?

In-house Marketing v/s Agency

Instagram Threads – Fad or a Trend? What does it hold for the D2C Brands?

The Positives…

Leveraging Textual Expression and Syndication Power

Functionality and Compatibility

Seamless Identity Transition and the Following Continuity

The Negatives…

Limitations and Drawbacks

Visuals Taking a Backseat:

Lack of AdTech Capabilities:

Lack of AdTech Capabilities:

Limited Performance Metrics:

Missing Major Features Compared to Competitors:

No Delete, Deactivation Only:

The Not-So-Bads…

List of Missing Functionalities:

Following Feed:

GIF Support:

Post-Editing:

User-generated Alt-Image Text:

Hashtag Redirection:

Takeaways…

Key Note: So, is it a fad or a trend? Well!

The Secret Sauce To Scale Your Brand On Amazon

Constant Competition Monitoring

Name of the Game: PLPs & Product Listings

Good Presentation is the key

Creatives And Pictures

What is visible, sells!

Reviews To Build Credibility

Data harvesting

Sponsored Product Ads Enhance Scalability

Automatic targeting of new brands

Automated targeting campaign

Experimenting is the key

Content to Commerce: Building The Narrative To Drive Conversions

Broad-basing Channels of Outreach

Improves Funnel Push

Reduces RTOs

Search Engine Likeability

Thumb Stopping Communication

Content to commerce is like vitamins and minerals

Age-old digital adage – Content is king

Differentiating to Delight Consumers

How to make Content your Organic growth driver?

Can Content drive down the Customer Acquisition Cost?

Enhancing the User Journey through Content

Final thoughts

Key eCommerce Marketing Strategies to Scale your Business in India

Building Credibility through Marketplaces

Greater Brand Visibility and Positioning

An Array of Payment Processing Options

Quicker, more reliable shipping

Streamlined Stock Management

Global Reach

The Phygital Approach: Reinventing the customer experience in the eCommerce Industry

Dimensions of a Phygital approach

Advocating increased Personalisation

Changing consumer behavior and demands

Local to global access

Leveraging the omnichannel approach

Cost-effective retailing model

Enhanced customer experience

Making Business Impact

Final thoughts

What is the Marketplace model of eCommerce and how to leverage it for scale?

What is the Marketplace Model all about?

How Marketplaces can help your business

Managing Marketplaces 101: GH Approach

Which eCommerce platform is best for your D2C business?

The Holy Trinity – Launching, Scalability and Profitability

The current players – KartmaX, Magento and Shopify

Your Definitive Guide To The Digital Marketing Basics

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Advantages of Digital Marketing

Strategising the different tenets of Digital marketing

In-House vs. Agency Marketing | For eCommerce Brand

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audience for driving
conversions

How Digital Marketing is
giving small businesses
an edge

Build A Robust eCommerce
Marketing Strategy To Scale
Exponentially

Make Social Media Your
Ace Growth Multiplier

Make Social Media Your
Ace Growth Multiplier

How to Segment & Target
audience for driving
conversions

How Digital Marketing is
giving small businesses
an edge

Build A Robust eCommerce
Marketing Strategy To Scale
Exponentially

Let’s Grow your
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