Attn Businesses in New Jersey: Online Marketing Terms Small Business Owners Need to Know
by Kainaat
The world of digital marketing is evolving every day, and trends are predicted to change drastically in the coming years. The strategies that have been working in the last few years won’t be as successful in just a few short years.
If you’re doing business in the Garden State, New Jersey online marketing team Reclaim Digital is here to keep your finger on the pulse of the evolving digital marketing world. We’re talking about two major shifts in the way businesses large and small must leverage online marketing and search engine advertising in order to corner their target market – within New Jersey and beyond.
Online marketing is moving to an omnichannel approach. For the past few years, marketers have been able to build a business with only one channel. For example, social media grew leaps and bounds by simply asking each member to invite their friends to join their website. Some channels could even access your address book and invite all your friends automatically, even without your permission. But, due to increasing privacy regulations, all of that has changed and those tactics aren’t as simple as they once were.
Instead, using an omnichannel approach includes pay per click (PPC) campaigns, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), growth hacking, content marketing and many more digital marketing strategies. The more channels you use, the better. Since the majority of business is transacted online in today’s market, competition among digital marketing is tough. Therefore, if your plan only includes single-channel marketing tactics, you’ll be lapped by the competition in no time.
A second trend that is expected to shape digital marketing in the next few years is that search is moving to voice search. By 2020 Comscore estimates that half the searches on Google will be through Voice Search. At the moment, two out of every 5 adults are using voice search. Therefore, to do well in the coming future, your business needs to be leveraging voice search. For this, you need to make sure that your website is HTTPS and your website is loading fast.
A third trend that will be important for small businesses looking to beef up their New Jersey online marketing strategy is to learn to leverage funnels. Marketing funnels are going to be more critical in the coming future than ever. Previously, businesses could simply optimize their online advertising campaigns and see a quick return on their investment. Now, it’s important to review a myriad of analytics: up sales, down sales, cross sales, lifetime value of a customer, churn and many more. You’ll need to track everything from visitor behaviors to a conversion point. For businesses in New Jersey, online marketing teams will have plenty of full-time work to keep their businesses on track for growth.
Important Online Marketing Terms You Need to Know
In addition to the general trends shifting in New Jersey online marketing strategies, there are four terms that every business owner needs to become familiar with in order to develop a killer digital marketing strategy. You’ll be hearing these terms more and more as they take the seat in the top rungs of best practices, so the New Jersey online marketing experts at Reclaim Digital are breaking them down for you.
Headless Commerce
The first term we’ll be talking about is “headless commerce.” To understand what headless commerce does for a business, we have to explain how traditional e-commerce has been conducted.
In the most simple form of e-commerce, a customer visits your business’s website and make a purchase directly from your online shop. Creating a website to handle basic e-commerce transactions was as straightforward as adding products and registering through a shopping platform like Shopify.
With the advent of mobile web browsing on a variety of devices, your business’s web shop needed to be more flexible to accommodate shopping from a variety of touchpoints. Touch points include apps, the screen and the voice interfaces that customers use to interact with your business, as well as the data within your business. Your website developer’s job became slightly more complicated in an effort to integrate responsive shopping experiences across different platforms seamlessly in your back-end programming.
Fast forward to today’s e-commerce, which includes the ability of customers to shop from any social media website (such as Facebook shops and Instagram markets), custom mobile apps, Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Alexa. Now, your web developer is faced with the challenge of programming your website in a variety of configurations to accommodate each type of shopping experience. Every time your business adds a new shopping channel or customer touch point, both the front-end and back-end of your webshop must be reconfigured and optimized.
The core operational systems like ERP, financial systems and merchandising systems are actually used to run the business. They might take up to two to three years to implement in some cases, and the key thing about them is that they’re designed to be highly stable, efficient and robust. However, they cause problems due to the amount of time they take to upgrade and implement because when a new business initiative comes along, they might require additional work in order to support that.
The problem is that e-commerce is evolving almost more quickly than web developers can reconfigure their client’s web shops to keep up with new touch points.
The solution is called headless commerce.
Headless Commerce is where we separate the front-end customer touchpoints from the back end operational systems that we actually use to run the business’s webshop.
Headless Commerce architecture allows you to connect the customer touchpoints to the core operational systems in a way that is appropriate for the evolving business requirements. Therefore, as new shopping variations are developed, it becomes more simple to orchestrate a process again across the core operational systems easily.
There are three real benefits for this architecture. First, you must only replace the components of the architecture of the systems that need actual replacing. The second advantage is that you can actually build logic that spans the individual core operational systems that exist. So, when it comes to trying out new initiatives, you can do that by orchestrating across the individual core operational systems. The third advantage is that it offers the ability a to add new touch points.
In a nutshell, headless commerce means that each business doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel of responsive and flexible e-commerce experiences every time their business adds a shopping touchpoint for their customers.
For example, Reclaim Digital can help you develop or manage a platform that links e-commerce shops to a cloud-based warehouse/distributor for your business. Utilizing headless commerce architecture through a cloud-based distributor cuts out the middle man and integrates your business’s front-end shopping experience to a distribution or manufacturing center without any need to reconfigure your website to accommodate different touchpoints. If you’re interested in determining the best tactics to grow your business’s online shopping experience in the most cost-efficient, streamlined method possible, contact the experts at Reclaim Digital for a consultation.
ROPO (Research Online Purchase Offline)
Consumer shopping habits have transitioned to a research offline, purchases online (ROPO) model. This means that more and more shoppers (88% according to a recent survey) will spend the time researching a product online and comparing options, but will go to a brick-and-mortar retail space in order to purchase their product in person. We shall discuss how brands and retailers can leverage this consumer behavior.
The question that comes to mind: in a world of convenient online shopping, why do customers still like retail showrooming? For some products, the purchase decision is made easier when the customer can see and feel the product like shoes or a new chair for their computer desk. So, it presents the challenge of determining whether purely online retailers should consider maintaining or opening brick-and-mortar stores and retailers to use showrooming to their advantage.
The customer experience is something that ecommerce cannot fully provide. Well-strategized retail execution showcases the products that the customers are expecting. Valuable and pleasurable in-store experiences are an essential part of building customer trust, loyalty and interest. Today, your customers may show up solely for showrooming. You need to use your staff to build warm relationships with the customers. That is what makes them come back. And retail mobile data collection helps you determine whether you are stocked correctly for showroomers and if you should make adjustments to your store layout. Loyalty programs, in-store discounts and clearance sections often provide specials the customer can’t access online. Therefore, as stated earlier, omnichannel strategy is a necessity. Provide your customers with the same great experiences whether they shop in-store or online.
Showrooming represents a significant opportunity. Pay attention to the customer experience and you will see that the hard work will pay off. To capitalize on the ROPO effect, New Jersey online marketing experts at Reclaim Digital suggest integrating personalized digital touchpoints with an in-store experience.
Another strategy is to measure your online marketing effect on in-store purchases in order to measure the ROI of the most significant channels, such as Facebook ads, Google AdWords, email campaigns, and your newsletter.
Conversational Marketing
Conversational Marketing is a straightforward tactic that involves having organic conversations with potential customers rather than capturing their information anonymously through a generic opt-in form or lead magnet. It helps you to engage with your audience and have a cohesive conversation rather than sending them general emails and newsletters. Generally, it helps you improve the conversion rate and the quality of leads also gets better.
This form of marketing involves live chat and chatbots. It even includes having team members interact in social media groups and forums to identify potential customers and guide them in the direction of your company’s website. You can take leverage from this technology by gathering necessary information instantly in place of lead forms and waiting days for a response.
When implementing live chats on your website, you need to make sure that you do not end up annoying the customer. All these demands can be a little overwhelming for your company, but it can actually help a lot in securing a sales lead. The customers prefer communications through messages as they are smooth, fast and feels like personal experience.
For small businesses in New Jersey, online marketing techniques like this cannot always be implemented 24/7 as you may not have the capital to hire staff to answer the messages from customers round the clock. But there are several tools that you can deploy to keep the channels open. You can have AI chatbots installed for the non-business hours that can answer certain questions that the customers might ask. This will help increase the customer experience as even during non-working hours you can manage to respond to the customer.
Social Commerce
You have heard of e-commerce, mobile commerce and social media. If Amazon, an e-commerce platform, is bringing in 100 billion dollars plus an annual revenue, there is a reason. If Facebook, a social platform, is making 25 billion dollars in annual revenue, there is a reason. If more and more businesses get involved in online commerce, there is a reason.
The future is clear and the power is in the hands of the crowd. Imagine being able to merge an e-commerce along with a social platform. That sounds that you have created something amazing. You offer the crowd to keep doing what they are doing and earn money out of it. For example, people can earn credits and get paid for posting or forwarding posts, publishing/sharing, filling in surveys/reviews, introducing a store to your platform, generating sales, referring new clients to your latest offers and much more.
People rely on social opinions more than they do on advertising. Advertisements make people aware of a product, but it is the opinions that make the sale. Therefore, the power is in the hands of the crowd.
Reclaim Digital takes social commerce concepts heavily into consideration when designing a website for a company. When working with a brand, it’s important to do market research into the customer’s psyche to design a website that speaks directly to them. Additionally, we can design and implement strategic email marketing campaigns that are directly targeted to a company’s target audience.
