Archive for the 'eCommerce Strategies' Category
5 Reasons to Start Inbound Marketing
In their new book Inbound Marketing, CEO of HubSpot Brian Halligan, and CTO of Hubspot and creator of onstartups.com Dharmesh Shah spend a couple of chapters describing the need to create “remarkable” value propositions and content. Remarkable ideas and content are ones that would be unique and worthy of remarks and comments from other people. This could be the way you differentiate your products and services, blog about compelling topics, or Twitter about the things your dad says. I think this is entirely true if you want to dominate a market niche, but not everyone has a product like the iPod, expert knowledge like Guy Kawasaki, or a funny dad like Justin Halpern.
So for the other 99.999% of the website owners out there, following the advice of Brian and Dharmesh and many of the Inbound Marketing tactics they suggest will still pay in dividends. Here’s a quick look at why some of the tactics they describe are winners, even without remarkable content.
1. Content is King
OK, the best thing to do is to write a blog post that goes viral. Not everyone is that compelling. Simply generate a regular blog relating to your products and services. That gives the search engines a reason to keep crawling your site, and let’s you try new keywords and SEO tactics without changing your website. You can also experiment with video, conduct a webinar, release a whitepaper. These give people reasons to link to your site, which improves your status with the search engines.
2. Engage Your Customer Base
Brian and Dharmesh suggest using social media to essentially hang out with your customer base online and engage them through the social medium. What a great way to get some primary research done: talk directly with the people who you want as customers. Engage them with your blog, participate in discussion groups, or provide answers to their posted questions. Find every way possible to give them a voice and show them you’re listening.
3. Follow the Industry Buzz
Use tools like Google Alerts, RSS, Twitter hash searches, and email subscriptions to have relevant posts pushed to you daily. Even if you just consume the information and don’t contribute it’s a fantastic way to understand trends and attitudes in your space and to stay on top of your competitors.
4. Raise Brand Awareness
You can pay to put your banner ad on industry-related discussion sites, or you can get your logo in there for free by engaging in forum discussions and commenting on blog posts. Sure you may not get much link juice from it, but marketing is still an associative game. If people see your brand everywhere they look for information on a topic, they might seek you out directly. Just make sure what you say doesn’t damage your brand.
5. Inbound Marketing is a Virtuous Circle
Inbound marketing is about bringing together a suite of tactics that compliment one another to increase the effectiveness of the whole strategy. It goes beyond keywords, back-links, and press-releases to leverage the powerful communications capability of the Internet and social media to connect with people at a personal level. The more you connect to people online, the more you’ll be found, and the more connections you can make. It doesn’t have to be viral to be successful.
Inbound Marketing employs a number of very useful tactics to get the story of your brand deeper into the marketplace in a way that both search engines and humans can use. Having remarkable content can achieve the goals much more quickly, but you can still take advantage of these tactics to connect with customers, keep on top of industry buzz and generate brand awareness. Don’t wait for your remarkable inspiration to get started.
Strategies for a Successful eCommerce Site Part 2: Choose your Platform
Part 2: Choose your eCommerce Platform
There are a number of eCommerce products to choose from that range from hosted (ebay, Amazon), to free open sourced (OSCommerce, Magento), to licensed (AspDotNetStoreFront, Interprise Suite eCommerce). Each has its strengths and weaknesses and finding the right fit depends greatly on the types of products you are selling and the size of your budget. There are 3 key strategic considerations when choosing a platform: Inventory management, SEO, and Cost.
1) Inventory Management and Point of Sale:
Managing inventory is tough. Managing the same inventory in two places is ridiculous. If you have an existing inventory management system in place, you should look for an eCommerce solution that can synchronize or integrate with your existing software.
If you have a brick and mortar operation but are only putting a small subset of products on the Web, consider the future. It will be a lot easier to work from an inventory management / Point of Sale solution and push products to the Web than to build an on-line inventory and try to link that with your Point of Sale later. Look for a package that integrates Inventory Management, PoS and eCommerce at a minimum.
2) SEO Friendliness:
Let’s face it, SEO is no longer a competitive advantage on the Internet; it is a necessity. You will spend time and money initially and in the long run to attract customers to your site. You should be very careful when choosing an eCommerce platform that it formats HTML and URLs in an SEO friendly manner. Most current eCommerce platforms will do this, but some are better than others. Part 3 is dedicated to SEO considerations.
3) Cost Factors:
Typically, the key strategic decision in choosing a platform is if you can get it to do what you need within your allotted budget. The following are areas that will cost you time and money when implementing your eCommerce solution:
- Software Licenses
- Web Hosting
- Site configuration and Product Setup
- Graphics Design and Layout
- Custom Feature Development
- Payment Gateway Integration
The trick is to pick the software that will minimize your costs in these areas while providing the maximum alignment with your product marketing strategy.
Software Licenses
If your needs are simple, you can probably get away with available open-source (free!) software. As your needs become more complex, there is often a trade off between license fees and custom development. A open source site may cost $10K in customization to get it to do what a $1K licensed shopping cart may do out of the box.
eCommerce Web Hosting
There are many providers who offer eCommerce software as a service (SaaS), where you can essentially rent an eCommerce site and payment system. This may be a way of offsetting expensive license fees, or a cost effective way of testing a product in the eCommerce sphere. Otherwise you will have to host your eCommerce site somewhere.
Site Configuration and Product Setup
Number of Products
Adding one item to your store is easy. Adding 1000 might not be. You will want to look at the ways you can upload inventory information into the software including images, product descriptions, key words and any other configuration the software allows. Some packages will offer import wizards, others will require some SQL skills, which may mean the difference between some one-on-one time with Excel or hiring a consultant.
Types of Products
This will be a deciding factor for some packages: they simply may not support the types of product you want to sell. Most current packages support downloads and hard goods. Services can be somewhat tricky depending on what information the customer is required to provide. Some platforms support kit items (think Dell’s computer configuration), some don’t. Some make it easy to create product attributes (matrix items) (size and color as an example) where some require you to create separate items for every SKU.
Product Information
How do you intend to communicate your product value proposition? Can it be done simply with words and pictures, or does it require animation or more sophisticated media? Most eCommerce software packages support multiple images, which in many cases is enough to communicate the necessary features of a product, but you may have some special requirements like Flash integration or product feature grids.
Graphics Design and Layout
This is one area where you have good control over your costs. If you have a small budget, sites like Template Monster provide templates for OSCommerce, Magento, Zend Cart, and C.R.E. Loaded. If you have a larger budget and are positioning your brand in a premium space you should consider spending money here for a custom eCommerce web design.
Some packages are easier to skin than others. Some also allow for multiple skins that can be easily changed, scheduled, or triggered by category.
Custom Feature Development
If you have specific requirements that are met by existing features, then you can often get the features built by custom software design shops. Again, this often a cost trade off with licenses, but some packages are more development friendly than others. If you are determined to develop some features, try to pick software that has a strong development community and a track record for easy customization.
Payment Gateway Integration
Whether you are planning to use third party gateways like Google Checkout and Paypal, or you want to integrate with your existing merchant accounts it is important to understand what support is available for receiving payments. Payment gateway customization can be expensive, but at the end of the day, this is the point at which you make your money on-line so it has to work. I’ll go into more detail on this in Part 4.
Budgeting and choosing what’s right for you
Now that you know what you’re after, take a look at the software platforms that are out there. Don’t fear the expensive ones because they can often save you an immense amount of time, and therefore cost, to set up and configure your store. Find the best fit for your budget that aligns with your objectives and start turning your eCommerce vision into a revenue stream!
Strategies for a Successful eCommerce Site Part 1: Define your Market
So you’re thinking about taking some business on-line. I wish you all the success, but your dreams and my emotional support aren’t all it takes to launch a successful eCommerce initiative. The pioneering days of being the lone eCommerce store at the top of the hill are gone replaced with the thick, oppressive sprawl of a virtual big box outlets, mega-malls, shady back-alley stands, Starbucks-on-every-corner landscape. It takes careful planning and diligent execution to grab your first piece of that ePie. Let me take you through some of the key strategic elements in building an eCommerce strategy; it’s probably more useful to you than good intentions.
We’ll take a look at five strategic areas that have a large impact on eCommerce success:
- Part 1: Define Your Market
- Part 2: Choose Your Platform
- Part 3: Add Content, Content, Content
- Part 4: Select Your Payment Method
- Part 5: High Performance Tweaks
Throughout this series, I’ll use the term product to mean whatever you are going to peddle. It can be a tangible good, a package, a service, or any other construct.
Part 1: Define Your Market
Slick design, smart keyword analysis, and crafty product descriptions are usually what you start thinking about when taking that first step onto the Web. It’s all about technology, right? Well, yes, but don’t abandon what you may or may not know about marketing. The Web is about reach, but the secret is to connect with customers. Shopping cart software controls the presentation but it doesn’t do the marketing for you. The first thing you need to do before you worry about rounded corners, alpha blending, and ajax controls is define your target market.
Ultimately you want to define:
- Target Customers – who is going to buy the product?
- Product Positioning – why will they buy the product?
Defining Your Customers
OK, so who is going to buy your product? This is a very difficult question to answer, but an extremely important one. Maybe the most important one. The goal here is to determine the most attractive market segment for your product. Simply put, find the type of Internet shopper who you think will buy your product. This can be based on:
- Age
- Gender
- Income Level
- Occupation
- Education
- Lifestyle
- Behaviours
Keep in mind during this exercise that most successful entrepreneurial ventures target narrowly defined market segments. Casting a wide net can seem like a good idea, but often burns resources faster than the intiative can earn market share. That’s like selling at a loss and trying to make up for it in volume.
Just a quick word about pricing. Price is king. You can spend all the time and money getting everything else right about your eCommerce venture and then get killed on price. Do your due dilligence and know what your competition is offering. If you price too high, your competition may keep you from ever gaining traction in the market. If you price too low, you are leaving money on the table. If your competition has already driven the price down, you may not be able to charge enough for your product to make your business case.
So find your niche. Figure out who the first hundred people are that going to be your customers. And by all means, don’t be afraid to modify your product to fit the specific needs of the market. Think of it this way, Nike changed the world when they realized that they could sell a customized running shoe specifically to distance runners. It’s all about innovative segmentation.
PositioningYour Product
So you now know who your customers will be. Good work, but you now have to worry about differentiation. Yeah, but I found a neglected customer group and have the perfect product! Sure you do, but you need to tell them why they should buy your product and not your competitors. This is called differentiation and it is the reason why people buy. Michael Porter in his famous Harvard Business Review article ”What is Strategy” points out that: “A company can outperform its rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers or create comparable value at a lower cost, or both.”
The differentiator can be both physical and perceived. Physical differentiators can include features, ingredients, materials, and style. Perceived differentiators can include benefits, quality, usage, and pedigree. Once you understand what makes your product more attractive to your target customers, you will want to create a positioning statement on which you’ll hang the rest of your eCommerce strategy.
The positionsing statement should define the benefits the customer will obtain, rather than just defining features of your product. You want to find something in your differentiators that speaks the most to your target customers. And I mean something. As in one – two max. This thing is going to sit in your customers mind relative to their needs and the competition. In otherwords, you want your thing to rank higher with your target customers than your competitor’s thing.
Right, and an anectode: There’s this little blue pill. As heart medication it is just another heart medication in a fairly saturated market. In a more recreational application the same product earned more than $400 Million in sales in the first quarter after launch. Proper positioning can equate to a fatter wallet – don’t treat it lightly!
So What Next – Is Your Product a Good Fit for eCommerce?
Now that you’ve brought some definition to your target market, you’ll want to confirm that your product is still a good fit for eCommerce. Now you may just want an eCommerce presence to help advertise and drive traffic to your physical store. The lessons above are still valuable. If you still want to sell, you should do a quick sniff test to make sure your product and target market.
Make sure your product is in the sweet spot for selling on the Internet. Some basic criteria include:
- Good price range for credit card purchases: $50 – $500
- Easily shipped or downloadable
- Isn’t try before buy or tailored/fitted
Make sure your target customers are in a demographic that isn’t afraid to make on-line purchases.
Make sure your value statement can be communicated over the web in words and pictures.
Make sure your differentiators and value statement set you apart from existing providers. Don’t try to sell books unless you can do something Amazon can’t.
In the end, the Internet is a great communications tool and your eCommerce strategy may be highly experimental or simply for exposure. If this is the case, don’t be dissuaded, but at least go forward with that expectation.
Conclusion
eCommerce can seem daunting because of the technological considerations, but don’t lose sight of the basiscs of marketing before you get started. The Internet will let you reach to every corner of the globe, but don’t fall into the tempation of trying to do it all at once. Spend the time to clearly define your market by understanding your target customers, crafting your product’s value proposition to those customers and making sure the eCommerce business plan is viable.
Happy selling!