When e-commerce arrived on the scene in the mid-1990s, it changed everything. Business models that had been established at the turn of the 20th Century rapidly became obsolete.
Retailers around the world quickly found themselves needing to adapt to a world in which customers could come from anywhere, shopping all through the day and night. Fast-forward some 17 years and the world of e-commerce remains in constant flux.
If technology was the catalyst behind the original online shopping revolution, today we see any number of factors driving the next stage of evolution. Quantum leaps in mobile technology have given rise to a generation of ‘always-on’ shoppers. Faster internet speeds and greater accessibility have given retailers an expanded audience. Social media makes it easier for us to share and rate our purchases and buying experience than ever before.
For e-commerce retailers, it has never been more important to get this right. While technology may have given their business access to a wider audience than could ever have been possible before, it has also created fierce competition. Another online store is rarely more than a click away, and keeping shoppers loyal means more than giving them a cutting edge web store or unbeatable price - it means making it as easy as possible to pay, when and how they like.
let’s do a quick marketing history lesson. In the past, the primary way a prospect could get information about a company was by engaging directly with a sales person. Marketing focused on brand building and awareness by using mass advertising, tradeshows, PR and print media. Direct mail and cold calling made up the majority of targeted interactions, and marketers passed all new leads - hot or cold - to the sales team for follow-up. With the arrival of Google in 1998, B2B companies started to focus on search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and email marketing to drive traffic to their website.
They also created content such as whitepapers and webinars to convert traffic into leads. The best marketers realized that their leads were often sent too early to sale. As a result, they invested in lead nurturing and scoring programmes to further define hot leads and used additional methods to nurture the rest - to be sent to sales at a later date. Today, marketing through SEO, PPC, and email are still very much a part of the marketing mix, but social media sites drive a large portion of the B2B.
For a lot of organizations-including business, nonprofits, and Governmental agencies - use of social media very often begins in marketing, public communications, or a similar office or department with a direct connection to customers and stakeholders. This makes sense given that a typical driver for getting involved with social media is a slew of negative comments, a need for “virality,” or a boost to overall awareness in the marketplace and especially in the minds and hearts of those customers increasingly out of reach of interruptive media. In a word, many organizations are looking for engagement and they see social media as the way to get it.