Latest Trends and Efficiency of Digital Marketing in E-commerce

09/07/2021

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing includes all marketing efforts that make use of electronic devices or the internet to communicate with existing and potential customers. It involves use of different digital tools, search engines, social media platforms, marketing tools, and other websites to let target customers know about our brand, products, and services. It also serves as an effective means to influence the customers, encourage them to buy our products as well as help companies to get ahead of existing competition.

Why Do You Need Digital Marketing?

As mentioned above, just like traditional marketing techniques (advertising using print ads, physical marketing etc.) digital marketing also helps increase brand awareness and boost sales. But digital marketing for online business is more effective than traditional marketing for the following reasons:

Provides wider reach: Easy access to cheap smartphones and internet has boosted internet penetration rates in India. India has nearly 700 million internet users in 2020. The figure is expected to reach 974 million by 2025. The number of smartphone users is almost the same. So, using digital marketing channels and online promotion tools ‘can easily provide you with a wider reach.
Helps connect easily: Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn are becoming extremely popular among people. The number of social media users are expected to reach 448 million by 2023. Most of these users now expect brands to have a social media presence. Research suggests, about 69% of buyers prefer searching about products and services online using mobile devices before making a purchase. Such platforms are widely used in digital marketing and this makes it easier for brands to connect with people. (Click here to know more about social media marketing.)
Provides higher return on investment at lower costs: One of the main concerns for SMBs is the huge expenditure to market their services. Digital marketing provides excellent returns on the investment made and provides the needed results at lower costs than traditional marketing.
Provides flexibility: While traditional marketing provides avenues to tweak the strategy based on the audience response, it does not let you overhaul the entire marketing campaign or structure. It usually involves a lot of paperwork, and even if the marketing campaign does not perform as expected, not many changes can be made in the campaign. However, in digital marketing, sellers can easily and selectively invest in marketing campaigns that provide better results. Similarly, low performing campaigns can be easily modified or stopped altogether.
Helps precise targeting for better conversion rates: Traditional marketing is more of a ‘spray and pray’ method where campaigns are run with the hope that they will reach the target audience. This makes the success of a campaign uncertain, involves loss of time and money, and makes campaigns impersonalized. However, digital marketing uses cookies, Google Analytics, transactional emails etc. to segment customers based on their preferences and needs. This helps to customize the marketing content for specific audiences which increases the likelihood of sales.

Latest Digital Marketing Trends

Awareness of latest trends is important for sellers and marketers as it provides better insights for their marketing plans. This increases the success rate of a marketing campaign and helps businesses to thrive in this age of innovation. Here is list of the latest digital marketing trends for you:

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is becoming increasingly popular in e-commerce marketplaces. In fact, the AI global market is projected to reach $190 billion by 2025. There are several factors behind this growth. Presently, different AI based tools are radically transforming e-commerce marketplaces. Successful e-commerce companies such as Amazon have been using AI tools like chatbots to automate communication with customers as well as providing a variety of web-services.
Video marketing is another trend being adopted by marketers. Research suggests:

People find video marketing extremely compelling. It boosts organic search by 50 times. 72% marketers agree that video marketing has improved conversion rates and 88% have confirmed that this has increased positive ROI. 92 % marketers confirm using video marketing due to its effectiveness. 99% of video marketers want to continue using product videos for marketing and better reach. 95% marketers want to increase their investments in video marketing while 59% marketers expect to start using video marketing.
YouTube (used by 85% marketers), LinkedIn (used by 87% marketers), and Facebook (used by 79% marketers) are the top three platforms used for video marketing.
Brand videos are shared by 70% people on social media thereby creating brand awareness. 52% consumers prefer to watch product videos as that makes them more confident of their choices while purchasing online.
4. Live video, 1:1 video, 360 video, YouTube SEO are few of the most popular trends in video marketing.

Influencers are celebrities or people with huge social media followings that are increasingly being used for word- of- mouth marketing about products and services. Research suggests that 63% of consumers consider influencer marketing to be more authentic than corporate marketing. In fact, 58% of consumers confirm buying products after hearing the opinions of influencers.
A significant number of consumers, especially millennials (62%) find products after uploading images using visual search lens tools such as Google Lens/Google visual search engine, Pinterest lens, etc. The trend is so popular that 600 million visual searches are recorded on Pinterest every month.
85% online stores confirm using personalized push notifications to inform their customers about new deals, products, discounts, and offers or to remind them about abandoned carts. Customers too prefer signing up for web push notifications instead of newsletters. The popularity is such, that customers on an average take 6.4 hours to open a newsletter but open a push notification immediately after receiving it. Personalized push notifications also improve customer conversion rates by 54% and have an open rate of 7%.
91% buyers look for interactive content before making a purchase. Thus, content marketing still dominates the marketing strategies and 88% of marketers use content marketing to gain customer loyalty. Moreover, content marketing provides better ROI, (3x leads generation, 6x conversion rates at 62% lesser costs) thereby adding more to its popularity.
Multi-channel marketing is becoming increasingly popular because it boosts:

- Engagement rates by 18.96% compared to 5.4% on single channels.
Purchase frequency.
- Customer retention rates (90% more than single channel marketing).
- Average order value (13% more per product than single channel marketing).
Predictive analytics (tools such as Amazon Assistant) and augmented analytics are being used to help customers make better purchase decisions by offering data backed suggestions.
Using geo-fencing or geo-targeting advertising to target customers based on their locations.

Conclusion

Digital marketing offers high potential to drive your business success. With proper research and minimal investment, sellers can easily leverage digital marketing for online business.

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