5 keys for brands to continue growing in ecommerce
The Covid-19 pandemic brought the development of ecommerce, which grew in months what would have taken years to achieve, how to take advantage of this wave?
During the last six months, the world has gone, for the most part, from being on the streets to staying inside their homes, because practically all people sought to protect themselves in the best possible way from the Covid-19 epidemic.
It was a completely atypical event, as never happened in the recent history of man, but it ended up modifying most of the behavior of human life, who went on to do almost all of their day-to-day tasks in inside the four walls of your home.
Among them is precisely the fact of buying, from basic inputs for food that were previously purchased in the supermarket to any type of clothing, previously purchased in traditional department stores.
How then did people solve this? Relying mainly on electronic commerce, which recorded unprecedented growth like never before, specifying in countries like the United States in just three months the development that was projected for the next 10 years.
A clear example of this registered momentum is shown by platforms such as Mercado Libre, which at the end of the second quarter of the year achieved that its unique active users rose by 45.2%, adding a total of 51.5 million in Latin America.
Also, the marketplace sold 178.5 million articles, growing up to 101.4% compared to the same period last year. Finally, the total of its payment transactions also exploded by 122.9% against 2019.
It is based on the learning they have obtained in recent months, that executives warn about the importance it has for brands, if they want to continue taking advantage of this boom in electronic commerce, that they work as soon as possible on 5 points.
- Differentiation: It is very important that brands also work on their ability to differentiate themselves from their competitors, an action that will allow their online sales channel to stand out from others .
- Consumer understanding: Brands cannot afford to neglect the knowledge they have about their consumer, they must also worry about understanding who is following them from the other side of the screen.
- Data analysis: Especially in the online sales environment, data analysis, which in this field is present all time. The more priority is given to this issue, the better the results.
- Union between ecommerce and marketing: The importance that exists in the fact of unifying efforts between the areas of electronic commerce and marketing in companies, generating them to walk together in favor of the same objective, to grow.
- Continue to build trust: The challenge that companies have in general, beyond the growth that has been observed in recent months, to continue generating trust in people, since there is still a lot of potential going forward.
Running a successful ecommerce website doesn’t have to be a struggle or pricey, here at Kreativa we can help you launch a profitable online store.
Please get in touch with us, we’ll be happy to help!
WHAT ARE UNICORN COMPANIES?
The term is coined by Aileen Lee, venture capital investor in 2013: unicorn startup. This is the expression the founder of Cowboy Ventures used to refer to those technology businesses that achieve a worth of 1 billion dollars without being quoted on the Stock Exchange.
The classic unicorn company in the business world was born almost a decade before Lee’s idea and is non other than Facebook. In fact, the US company outstripped the unicorn concept and was labelled a super-unicorn — a term reserved for those worth in excess of 100 billion dollars. When Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook together with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, he was only 20 and that — the insulting youth of its founders — is one of the defining characteristics for most of these unicorn companies. What’s more, 90% of the founders of these companies share a common past, either academic or professional.
Unicorns and Venture Investing
Since the publication of Lee’s article, the term has become widely used to refer to startups in the technology, mobile technology, and information technology sectors—usually at the intersection of all three—with very high valuations questionably supported by their fundamental finances.
Benchmark Capital partner and investment guru Bill Gurley wrote about the difference between late-stage private capital fundraising and an IPO in a blog post, saying that “an unprecedented 80 private companies have raised financings at valuations over $1B” since the 2010s, and that “late-stage investors, desperately afraid of missing out on acquiring shareholding positions in possible ‘unicorn’ companies, have essentially abandoned their traditional risk analysis.”
Valuations of Unicorns
The value of unicorns is generally based on how investors and venture capitalists feel they will grow and develop, so it all comes down to longer-term forecasting. This means their valuations have nothing to do with the way they perform financially. In fact, many of these companies rarely generate any profits when they first get running.
Current Unicorns
Far from being merely mythological creatures, unicorns are a regular feature in popular business and finance discussions. Some familiar U.S.-based unicorns include Uber, Airbnb, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, WeWork, and Pinterest. China claims a number of unicorns as well, including Didi Chuxing, Xiaomi, China Internet Plus Holding (Meituan Dianping), and Lu.com.
Were you aware of this term? Do you know any other Unicorn companies?
If you do, share them with us, let us know what you think!
Data Mining
Data mining is the process of finding anomalies, patterns and correlations within large data sets to predict outcomes. Using a broad range of techniques, you can use this information to increase revenues, cut costs, improve customer relationships, reduce risks and more.
Why is data mining important?
So why is data mining important? You’ve seen the staggering numbers – the volume of data produced is doubling every two years. Unstructured data alone makes up 90 percent of the digital universe. But more information does not necessarily mean more knowledge.
Data mining allows you to:
- Sift through all the chaotic and repetitive noise in your data.
- Understand what is relevant and then make good use of that information to assess likely outcomes.
- Accelerate the pace of making informed decisions.
Data mining is a cornerstone of analytics, helping you develop the models that can uncover connections within millions or billions of records
Who’s using it?
Data mining is at the heart of analytics efforts across a variety of industries and disciplines.
Communications: In an overloaded market where competition is tight, the answers are often within your consumer data. Multimedia and telecommunications companies can use analytic models to make sense of mountains of customers data, helping them predict customer behavior and offer highly targeted and relevant campaigns.
Education: With unified, data-driven views of student progress, educators can predict student performance before they set foot in the classroom – and develop intervention strategies to keep them on course. Data mining helps educators access student data, predict achievement levels and pinpoint students or groups of students in need of extra attention.
Retail: Large customer databases hold hidden customer insight that can help you improve relationships, optimize marketing campaigns and forecast sales. Through more accurate data models, retail companies can offer more targeted campaigns – and find the offer that makes the biggest impact on the customer.
Learn more about industries, your consumers using this technology, come to us, we can help you.
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth Hacking is a new field and a combination of marketing, data and technology. A growth hacker runs experiments based on a process-based methodology to grow the number of customers. Growth Hacking is ideal for startups, because of the limited budgets and resources, but it also lends itself to larger companies.
Growth Hacking is a discipline that seeks, with the minimum possible expense and effort, to quickly and clearly increase the volume of users, or income, or impacts, of our company.
A growth hacker is not a replacement for a marketer. A growth hacker is not better than marketer. A growth hacker is just different than a marketer.
Every decision that a growth hacker makes is informed by growth. Every strategy, every tactic, and every initiative, is attempted in the hopes of growing. Growth is the sun that a growth hacker revolves around. Of course, traditional marketers care about growth too, but not to the same extent. Remember, the power of a growth hacker is in their obsessive focus on a singular goal. By ignoring almost everything, they can achieve the one task that matters most early on.
This absolute focus on growth has given rise to a number of methods, tools, and best practices, that simply didn’t exist in the traditional marketing repertoire, and as time passes the chasm between the two discipline deepens.
Have you heard of this term before?
Would you like to learn some more?
Share your thoughts and questions with us!
Guanajuato and Hispanic Commerce
In case you missed it, here’s a link to last Friday’s Facebook Live forum “Guanajuato and Hispanic Commerce” where our CEO John Trainor was invited.
The forum proposed the reinvention of commerce and how to do business through the Internet, take advantage of new markets in the United States, target marketplaces and the support that Guanajuato Government has through COFOCE to accompany companies to transform their business model into the digital world.
At Kreativa we have digital marketing consulting appropriate to your business model, whether it is the launch or growth of a digital sales channel, whether it is your own store or marketplace, including social networks, media buying, search engine optimization, programming, etc.
En caso de que te lo hayas perdido, aquí hay un enlace al foro de Facebook Live del viernes pasado “Guanajuato y el comercio hispano” donde nuestro CEO John Trainor fue invitado.
El foro propuso la reinvención del comercio y cómo comenzar a hacer negocios a través de Internet, aprovechar los nuevos mercados en los Estados Unidos, establecer mercados objetivos y los apoyos que el Gobierno de Guanajuato tiene a través de COFOCE para acompañar a las empresas a transformar su modelo de negocio en el mundo digital.
En Kreativa contamos con consultoría de marketing digital adecuada a tu modelo de negocio ya sea de lanzamiento o crecimiento de un canal de venta digital ya sea tienda propia o marketplace incluyendo redes sociales, compra de medios, optimización de motores de búsqueda, programática, etc.
https://www.facebook.com/MigranteGto/videos/3157093881049918/
The Myths of E-Commerce
Ecommerce has become an increasingly close option for consumers due to the increase in the penetration of the internet and mobile devices, but also due to an abundance of services and products that are currently marketed through this channel, with the aim to simplify people’s lives.
Thus, the convenience and immediacy that electronic commerce offers has been debunking some myths that were previously popular when talking about digital commerce, although there are still erroneous beliefs that contribute to slowing the growth of this type of commerce. Therefore, today we will review some of those myths and what is the reality today.
Myth 1. E-commerce is for technology experts
Of course, it requires a degree of knowledge about technology, however, it is currently possible to market from digital platforms that do not actually require a technological specialization. For example, market places such as Mercado Libre, Amazon or Linio are a useful tool for any person or business looking to distribute their product online. The great benefit is that investing in your own platform is not required, but a commission is charged for the products you sell.
Myth 2. Electronic commerce weakens traditional commerce
No economy in the world has reported so far that commerce is abandoning the traditional form of physical business to move to digital. Although eCommerce has been gaining an important place, especially in regions such as Asia and Europe, what has happened in recent years is a combination of both models, which has created a more encouraging scenario for businesses, which now have of greater exposure and the possibility of complementing the shopping experience of its customers.
Myth 3. Electronic commerce is impersonal
Just because it’s a remote transaction doesn’t mean it has to be impersonal. Of course, romantics in physical commerce value personalized attention and face-to-face treatment, however, customer service can be just as personalized and consumer-focused if you take advantage of the data provided by customers themselves. Remember that a digital commerce can count on many metrics that shed light on what consumers want, want and value more in a shopping experience. Of course, customer service can be very sophisticated if you know how to interpret these metrics and use them to improve service.
Myth 4.- Fraud for buyers is more common in electronic commerce
Ignorance of how transactions work in the digital world can generate mistrust. Many people are suspicious when asked for their bank details on an eCommerce platform, however, according to Condusef, the majority of cases in which identity theft occurs occur in person. There are other factors that can put an online purchase in check, but nowadays several security protocols have been implemented to guarantee the buyer’s trust, one of them is easy to identify by the padlock that appears at the beginning of the address bar, that indicates that it is a secure site, in addition, there is a double authentication protocol that works as an additional filter.
These are just some of the beliefs that still stop certain consumers and business owners from experimenting with online commerce, but lose sight of the fact that there are two sides to the coin and currently, the digital ecosystem is evolving, fighting misconceptions with tools. and experiences that build trust.
If you have any doubts about ecommerce, please feel free to drop us a line so we can work together in finding what’s the best tool for you.
Have a great weekend!
Why should my business
have a website?
Nowadays it is of utmost importance to have a website, since it is our letter of introduction and our second location open 24/7 for customers, playing an important role in increasing sales.
That is why having an enabled, attractive and concise web page will open the way to a sea of potential customers who will begin to build your database of contacts and will begin to position you in search engines.
But let’s start with the essential, what is a web page?
It is a means of communication within the Internet that offers information through its different web pages. Its operation is based on user action to navigate between them.
With this out of the way, let’s continue with another very essential aspect, what is a web domain?
It is the address that your website has online, it is the phrase (so to speak) that will take your customers and visitors to your web pages through a browser and is made up of two elements:
The name of your company (for example, mybusinees), and an extension that indicates the type of domain (.com), thus creating the web address mybusinees.com. The “.com” is used for commercial purposes while the others known as “.net” or “.org” are used for technological purposes or for organizations respectively.
With almost 1,300 million websites in force by 2020, it is typical that if you try to acquire a domain for your brand, it will be a little difficult for you to register just the one you want, so the other extensions open the door to generate the closest combination to what you want.
For example, if the domain “mybusinees” could not have been mixed with “.com”, another extension such as “.mx” could have been chosen, to locate us in Mexico. Domain extensions can also be geographic (“.mx” for Spain, “.us” for the United States, “.la” for Latin America), so there are still many options to obtain the most accurate domain.
It is recommended that your domain has the full name of your brand to give it seriousness, remember that your website is the online business card par excellence, it opens the way for visitors and buyers so keep in mind that it will be easier for you to remember yourself for the facilities you offer them and the online experience to which you direct them to perceive. That is why you need a digital marketing strategy to carry out this experience.
What is a hosting?
In order for your website to stay current and online seven days a week, 24 hours a day, you need to stay connected to the WWW (World Wide Web or Internet) through a web server.
This means that hosting is a space in the virtual world, which has the mission of keeping and hosting your website active and available so that users can access it at any time from anywhere in the world. It also ensures that your information is protected as well as that of your potential customers and that it prevents malicious attacks.
Think of it as your own computer which houses your files, music and photos, you must keep it on when you want to have access to all of it and you can only see them when you are connected to a power source or your battery is recharged. Well, with web hosting, the server must be broadly powerful to keep all your information hosted so that the system never falls and your visitors can see what you offer at all hours.
Have you ever visited a website at 3 in the morning thanks to insomnia seeing what useful and beautiful things to buy? Well, a hosting makes that possible and allows the sale of products of all kinds with your website at all times, very useful isn’t it ?.
How can a website for my business help me?
As we mentioned before, it is the quintessential business card. I know that you may be thinking that keeping your social networks active (like Facebook and Instagram) and with frequent and aesthetic posts will make you a great attraction online, but it is not so simple.
Although that is true, remember that having your own website shows seriousness, highlights that you are a trustworthy business which people can realize that if they enter their bank details, they will receive just what they expect: an accurate background of who you are and what you offer, an increased taste for your brand, and therefore, a secure transaction.
It is also a digital marketing tool that opens the way to compete with modern companies, if you do not have a well-made website, you are lagging far behind in terms of competitiveness and sales reach, as well as visualization.
What elements should my website have?
Make sure it’s flashy. There are various techniques that you can use depending on the type of service or product you offer, but if you are not sure, a website with limited text and striking images that highlight the aesthetics and quality of your product or service, can take you very far.
All this encompasses web design, an aspect of web pages that must be considered primarily to capture the exact image you want to convey.
“Web design is a creative function that focuses on the visible configuration of a site and the user experience. It consists of planning through artistic concepts that aim to capture the image of a company or a project through implementation and regular updating. ” – HubSpot
Do not complicate the life of your visitors! Keep in mind that a web page full of text and little organization will send them running away from you. The point is to keep them interested with a clean but eye-catching design so that they know directly what you offer.
Here are 3 basic principles:
- Functionality
- Shape
- Compatibility
Functionality refers to making the interface comfortable for the visitor, keep everything simple and organized to reach the final phase: a quick transaction.
The shape is the mold you are implementing to the site, what shape are you molding your business card? I am referring to visual art: figures, abstract images, real photographs of your team members, etc. In short, how you explain what you do with graphics (with fonts, colors and interactive elements).
Compatibility is that your platform is available for all browsers and mobile and desktop devices, so that you capture the largest possible audience, do not lose prospects! Stay up to date.
Remember that flexibility is an essential element to take into account, make your website responsive: this means that you must be visible to all types of devices and screens.
Today’s user searches for everything on their smartphone or tablet (not only desktops or laptops are handled anymore), making a responsive website has the mission of having your content distributed to all these platforms to achieve uniformity for your website.
E-commerce to boost your business
Your website will take you directly to the practice of E-commerce, which points to the sales or contracting of an online service. Take advantage of your corporate image and direct your visitors to complete a purchase and more in these moments of contingency.
Selling by all means, whether physical or online, allows you to enhance your brand from all sides. Remember that digital marketing encapsulates all of these terms to unify a strong online and physical presence.
According to the Markeging4eCommerce website, there are 5.19 billion smartphone users as of early 2020, making up 59 percent of the world’s population. Can you imagine what you can earn if you take advantage of e-commerce these days?
To boost your business and follow the right steps so that all of this design and online commerce goes perfectly, we recommend hiring a marketing agency ready to take action at the bases of your company.
It can sound, feel overwhelming, believe me I know, but here at Kreativa we have a great team, ready to listen at your needs and help you take that step into the digital world.
Feel free to drop a line, I’d love to hear your comments, doubts, insights, experiences.
Have a great weekend!