AppreciateToday, eCommerce has created a gigantic ecosystem of traders, buyers, and sellers. Raw materials are procured digitally by the manufacturer, who then produces the goods and lists them online, either on a third-party ecommerce store or an online store of their own. The end-user can browse different products and buy them from the store itself. All of this has become a reality, thanks to internet connectivity around the world.
Types of eCommerce Models
Today’s eCommerce can be classified into four main models, based on the nature of the buyer and the seller.
eCommerce marketing is a process of promoting your online store by reaching out to your target audience via various channels. eCommerce Marketing involves many steps, such as identifying your target audience, preparing tailor-made promotional content for them, and pushing the content across several channels.
If you have an online storefront, the chances are that you’re already advertising on it. However, it’s always better to advertise on multiple fronts and not put all your eggs in one basket. A good marketer will always tell you to create a versatile eCommerce marketing strategy, one that stands the test of temporary trends and consistently delivers the results.
There are many ways to market your eCommerce store. All great marketing campaigns have two things common in them, they’re placed accurately, and the messaging is always on point.
Types of eCommerce marketing:
Social Media Marketing
If there is one arena that you cannot afford to ignore while chalking out your online store’s marketing strategy, it’s social media. This is because very few people on this planet cannot reach via social media websites.
Social media offers a wide range of ways in which you can market your products. If your products are aesthetically beautiful, you have websites and apps like Pinterest and Instagram to find people passionate about them. If you want to make a community of people who could potentially buy from you, Facebook lets you create groups and make posts in them.
Every famous social media app offers paid marketing campaigns. A great campaign on Linkedin can help you reach out to many potential job applicants. A well-crafted video campaign on Facebook is sure to fetch large donations for your charity. As an avenue, social media marketing keeps providing newer, more exciting ways to take your products and services to millions of users. And while it comes at a cost, it can turn into a great way to market your eCommerce store if done right.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a technique where brands collaborate with popular individuals among the brand’s target audience to promote their products. Influencer marketing is lately becoming one of the most commonly used means of advertising.
Facebook Marketing
Few social channels integrate and advertise businesses as robustly as Facebook. As of 2019, the company houses nearly 2.4 billion monthly active users. For nearly every retailer out there, their target audience is already on Facebook.
On top of a vast and varied audience, Facebook offers retailers and businesses the ability to create a “Shop” tab on their business page. This free feature allows the seller to list their products on their Facebook page and directly purchase the seller’s merchandise from the social networking site. Facebook Pixel is another robust feature that ensures your ads are shown to the people most likely to take action, helps with conversion optimization by creating a custom audience, and offers retailers insights around views, clicks, purchases, and much more.
Facebook Messenger is a popular messaging feature that can be leveraged for providing customer service. Facebook also offers the ability to add customer reviews to your business page.
But people generally utilize Facebook for socializing and networking, not to shop. And Facebook’s biggest downside for marketing is that you must pay to promote your posts. Otherwise, owing to the app’s algorithms, it would be challenging to reach many people, even if they “like” your page. So, as a retailer, this makes it imperative that you advertise your products to a laser-targeted audience for optimum results. A mildly receptive audience is going to be much harder to drive sales conversions consistently.
That said, Facebook is a compelling platform for advertising. It offers an extensive database of information (controversially so) that you can leverage for delivering targeted adverts to your ideal customers. But you must ensure that your content is set up to amplify engagement (likes, shares, comments). Viral videos and similarly engaging content can help you in lowering the cost of your advertising.
Take the example of Converse; their post incites an emotional response in the observer, which leads to an almost viral sharing of the said post. Individuals connecting their thought of affection with your post can also lead to a profound association with your brand.
Instagram Marketing
Instagram is a highly visual platform that allows you to market and generate a following in various ways but primarily through image and video-based content. Although owned by Facebook, Instagram is unlike its parent company in many ways, foremost of which is the possibility of getting pretty good results without the necessity of paying to promote yourself. Unlike Facebook, more than 50% of its users (59% of US millennials) are younger audiences, which makes it perfect for a brand with a target audience of people below 40, but not so much the case if your customers are generally older.
Instagram offers you 3 primary ways of posting your post images and videos, Insta Feed posts, which are discoverable through hashtags, Instagram Stories, and Instagram Live. Instagram Stories lets you put out photos and videos having a 24-hour lifespan, and Instagram Live offers the same 24-hour lifespan but allows you to share your moments in real-time or in other words, it can be used to Live stream. These latter features do not show up in your feed, hence keeping your page clean and consistent while still offering you a unique option to test out new ideas and share behind-the-scenes glimpses. Basically, content with a more casual and personal production quality compared to a highly manicured Insta feed content.
Instagram also offers eCommerce-centric features such as Shoppable Instagram posts, highlighting the product’s name, price, and the purchase link. Instagram also offers paid promotional placements, with which you can target audiences based on their location, age, sex, and interests.
Take an example of Starbucks, with a simple yet striking image; they have managed to capture the viewer’s attention, spread awareness about their brand, and incite the viewer to generate a similar kind of content with their hashtag. This gives the brand an extensive collection of user-generated content and indirectly increases sales and engagement.
LinkedIn Marketing
| Members, Million | Percentage of the global total | |
| Asia Pacific | 196 | 27% |
| US/Canada | 191 | 26% |
| Europe | 163 | 23% |
| Latin America | 107 | 15% |
| Middle East & Africa | 63 | 9% |
LinkedIn is like a professional version of Facebook, with over 722 million members(as of Q3 2020). Possibly, one of LinkedIn’s greatest strengths lies in the fact that it has positioned itself as a social network for professionals. LinkedIn is a blessing for B2B organizations. This platform allows you to target your audience by identifying a particular profession or company that may need your products or services. Apart from marketing, LinkedIn is an optimum platform for hiring talent, networking, building thought leadership, and reaching out to brands or people you would like to partner or collaborate with.
LinkedIn is primarily seen as a professional, credible, and no-nonsense trustworthy platform for networking. This means that its users are more interactive with your posts and usually quick to respond to a personal message. Relationships built via LinkedIn with other businesses often have a rippling effect and can benefit you greatly.
While LinkedIn allows you to run your ads on its platform, a more effective tactic for driving eCommerce traffic is to start a group and provide relevant individuals or companies valuable information related to your products or services. Sellers can use this portal to dole out advice regarding the usage and scope of their product, promote webinars or educational events offering free knowledge, samples, or trials. A business’ strong yet optimized Linkedin profile can help showcase your brand’s industry authority to your customers or potential collaborators.
Take the example of JetBlue’s masterfully placed advert. They chose LinkedIn, a professional networking site to offer an airfare discount solely for business travelers. Additionally, The “Two-day sale” creates a sense of urgency, compelling the audience to begin perusing JetBlue flight deals.
A successful e-commerce business requires a planned content marketing strategy to uplift your e-commerce marketing efforts. We all know that the e-commerce business is booming rapidly and will escalate more in the coming years. Content marketing is getting massive exposure because of businesses’ excessive use to promote their products in the modern digitized world. 60% B2B marketers and 80% of B2C marketers are using content marketing strategies for promoting their products and services. Today, it is not enough to have only a successful and famous e-commerce site. First and foremost, you will need to create traffic for your website and then converting that particular traffic into potential leads and sales.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is used to drive traffic, build brand awareness, get customer loyalty, and gain a competitive edge. More and more e-commerce businesses have started to understand the importance and benefit of content for getting more customers and sales. For boosting ROI, e-commerce stores need to build a unique and outstanding web presence. Here, you can see the potential of content for increasing the effectiveness of any e-commerce website.
Content Marketing to uplift eCommerce Marketing
#1 Research well before you opt for writing.
Performing in-depth research before you start writing will help you in understanding what people are looking for. Search for such topics that your potential customers might be interested in reading. Look for Google Adwords and significant search engines to look for important keywords. You can also look for customers’ personal experiences and social media accounts and tweets to know customers’ interests.
#2 Write for informing, not for selling.
People always look for truthful information, whether you are writing blogs, guest blogs, or any page sections. They don’t care about your company; they want factual information. Considering the example – suppose you are dealing with electronic products, fashion trends information is not relevant for your business and customers. Provide customers only such data that customers are looking for. You can start promoting your website, services, or products by linking them with customers’ benefits.
#3 Creating product guides
Thousands of shoppers are looking for various products online; creating product guides can be an excellent tool for content marketing. Guiding your users about using your products, you can show them how to buy from you. You can opt for creating how-to-guides using visuals that will cover all the steps for using your products. Don’t forget to offer details in your guides to answer all your questions that your readers want. By submitting all the details in the manual, you can get a better position in your field. You can create video tutorials for engaging your targeted customers and attracting more and more traffic.
#4 User-generated content
UGC (User Generated Content) is a vital part of your content marketing strategy used for e-commerce business. UGC is such content that is created by your customers for your brand and products. Such content can cover video clips, testimonials, reviews, images, and more. If customers post content on the e-commerce website, it will look convincing and authentic to benefit your buyers. As per the research, around 85% of customers feel user-generated content is more powerful than any brand-created content.
What to Include for a Successful Email Marketing?
Emails may seem to be very simple. You put your customer’s email address, your subject, and your message, and voila, it is done. Well, though technically, it is true, there is a lot of depth to it. Your information, subject line, and the message should be attractive, appealing, and well-curated. And not to forget the design!
#1 To and From Information
Make sure the customer’s email address is mentioned correctly. Make sure you mention the company name or your name in the From section and not just your email address. This way, the message seems more personalized, and the customer can easily relate to you. Try avoiding messages from no-reply@xyz.com because it becomes tough for the customers to reach out to you if they have to contact you for any promotional offer. Instead, send emails from hello@xyz.com. This way, the customer can immediately and easily contact you.
#2 Subject Line
‘Hey Matt, what a wonderful morning. Find your morning offer in here.’
How does this sound? It makes you want to open the email, right? Well, that is why your subject line should always be punchy and engaging. According to data collected by CrazyEgg, a subject line carries nearly 62% of an impact compared to the rest of the factors in an email marketing campaign.
Try to personalize your subject line. Keep it interactive, short, and engaging. Remember, even before opening the email, the customer will read the subject line. If that is not attractive enough, they will not even open the email. So, put in good enough time and thoughts in drafting your subject line.
#3 Main Message
What do you prefer – email full of content or email full of graphics and images or a perfect balance of both? I know it is not hard to read your mind; everyone loves balance. Everyone wants to have a perfect balance of content and images. So, don’t overload your customers with either one.
Instead, do these little things. Write the correct message. Stick to the message and be precise, to-the-point. Use fancy fonts suitable to your business (for example: for B2B, use format fonts, for an apparel or footwear email, you can use a little casual and italic fonts). Make a perfect blend of images and content. Mention your ‘Call to Action’ and put a link or tab. Lastly, personalize your message. And don’t forget, ‘Right Message, Right Time’.
#4 Design
What matters is a good design. Do you agree or not? Now, imagine you get an email with no design, only pure content. Would you be interested in it? Similarly, you too have to make sure your customers get a well-designed email from you. This is your one shot in communicating with them, showing your company. Why would you risk it by sending simple content? So, make sure you throw in the best of your colors, good-looking fonts, and a pinch of images and videos.
Types of eCommerce Email Marketing
eCommerce Email Marketing is used widely for many marketing purposes. It may create awareness, send a promotional message, introduce a new product, or update them on the new policies or new updates. To sum it up, eCommerce Emails are widely divided into three groups: Promotional Emails, Transactional Emails, and Lifecycle Emails.
#1 Promotional Emails
This type of email solely means for promotional activities. For example, the launch of a new book, adding a new product, new limited offers, discounts, or even sending warm greetings.
#2 Transactional Emails
When you complete an order, do you receive ‘Thank you for shopping with us, your order has been confirmed?’ Well, these are order confirmation emails, a type of transactional email. Also, receiving order notifications, order shipment emails, order receipts are transactional emails.
#3 Life-cycle Emails
The Lifecycle Emails are those that send the customers a reminder of an incomplete action, for example, left items in a cart. These emails are generally triggered, and with the help of eCommerce Automation, companies send a reminder email to encourage the customers to complete the activity.
Different Types of Examples of eCommerce Email Marketing
eCommerce Email Marketing is about staying connected with your customers. It also helps with customer retention and engagement. So let us see a few examples of eCommerce Email Marketing and a few emails you can send to your customers.
#1 Welcome Email
Hey, let us make an impression. You know how the saying goes, ‘First Impression is the Last Impression’. According to the email marketing statistics conducted by Oberlo, roughly 82% of customers open an email with a welcome email.
One of the best examples of a Welcome Email is Gopuff.com.
#2 Order Confirmation
eCommerce businesses need to send emails to their customers upon confirmation of orders. This way, customers always feel that they are valued and noticeable. This email need not be wordy, so don’t overdo it by writing too much. All you need to include is the order name, order number, contact information, and order value.
For example GILT.
#3 Order Shipment Email
Yes, we all like to be updated and stay in the loop. So, you need to offer the same to your customers. Always keep them updated with the latest information on their orders. It may be confirmation, shipment, or out for delivery. Keep them in the loop as this helps in building trust over your brand.
For example FitBit.
#4 Cart Abandonment Email
Customers need to be reminded of their orders. Many customers leave the shopping page before completing the purchase due to many reasons. Maybe they were in a hurry or got interrupted due to a call or meeting, or they just lost interest in the purchase or felt the prices were too high. There can be many reasons! But understand, if the customer came to the purchase page, they did find something interesting about the product. So, you need to keep the spark on by sending them emails. According to Oberlo, if you send three (3) cart abandonment emails, the chances of order completion rise to 69% compared to one (1) email.
For example AWAY.
#5 Discount Email
Everyone enjoys a good discount or a reason to visit back on a website. Well, even like a discount, if someone offered you a discount, wouldn’t you take it? So, offer your customers too! Keep them engaged, give them a reason to visit you once again. Also, by offering discounts, you are boosting your sales.
For example Tarte.
#6 Thank You Email
When someone visits your store, you do say ‘Thank You’, right? Or when you have a guest at your residence, then also, you say, ‘Thank You for Visiting Us’. So, how will you thank your customers when they shop online? Well, send them a thank you note. Make them feel special and let them know that you are grateful for them stopping by your eCommerce store.
For example Amazon.
eCommerce businesses keep evolving, and they have to bring in new practices to market their products. In such cases, you keep trying new ways to keep up with the latest marketing trends. One such topic that has made its rounds is Influence Marketing. Influence Marketing is a way to increase your brand awareness, boost sales, and engage the crowd towards a particular product. These days, influencers are the key to giving reviews, feedback, or product descriptions to the larger crowd. Many buyers or consumers rely on their input before making a purchase. This itself shows the importance of Influencers and Influence Marketing.
What is Influence Marketing?
Influence Marketing is a form of Social Media Marketing and Advertising where individuals and businesses are widely known as influencers publically speak about a product or service in the form of feedback, testimonials, reviews, and expert knowledge of the product or service. Through their influential testimonials or reviews, they showcase the product to their best possible knowledge and play a vital role in influencing buying activities.
How to Identify the Right eCommerce Influencers or Influencer Marketing?
There are several influencers out there, and according to statistics, there are roughly 5,00,000 influencers and counting. In order to simplify the process, the influencers are broadly divided into three categories: Nano Influencers (also known as Micro-Influencers), Macro Influencers, and Mega Influencers (also known as Celebrity Influencers).
Nano Influencers
The Nano Influencers are getting highly popular and receiving significant attention and appreciation. They have as little as thousands to a maximum of fifty thousand followers (50,000) followers. Though they have fewer followers, they are valued because of their niche audience. The reason being they can easily relate to each audience and deal with authenticity as they have a small size of followers, and it is crucial to involve them with actual content. Thus, the possibility of the desired action enhances as compared to the rest.
For example Bronte King. She speaks openly and acts as an advocate for women’s empowerment, body positivity, and girl power. She has nearly 46,000 followers and the founder of Gals Who Graduate.
Macro Influencers
Macro Influencers have already set a good number of followers and are relatively popular amongst their audience. They have a higher number of followers and believe in creating engaging content. They have an audience of 100,000 to nearly a million followers. They mostly charge specific Influencer fees from the brands for their promotion and work towards creating a story in the form of product awareness or brand recognition. This is how they engage their followers through creativity and storytelling attributes. They can be bloggers, influential podcasters, social media-recognized influencers (top stars), and bloggers.
For example Amy Jackson. Also known as Fashion Jackson. Her Instagram page is colorful, and being a fashion blogger, she promotes new styles, fashion trends, beauty, and lifestyle trends. With over 700,000 followers, she also promotes her own fashion designs on her website called www.fashionjackson.com.
Mega Influencers
Mega Influencers are having the highest number of followers and are widely popular worldwide. They have over a million followers, and they keep them engaged and connected by sharing new updates or showcasing their involvement in a brand. They may or may not lead the audience to take the desired action, but, the possibility of brand awareness goes high exponentially because of their large audience. Mega Influencers are mainly a range of celebrities and the highest paid social media stars.
For example, Selena Gomez. A megastar in the eCommerce Influencer Marketing industry, Selena Gomez is a singer, actor, and promoter. They are suitable for companies having large marketing budgets as the mega influencers have extremely high promotional fees because of their fame and influence amongst their followers. Thus, companies who want to create brand awareness and boost traffic contact the mega influencers to make this happen.
Benefits of Influencer Marketing for eCommerce Success
Even before companies work on hiring an influencer, they consider specific goals for the better outreach of the influence marketing strategies. The most common goals and eCommerce objectives that the companies want to achieve and the Influencers help them achieve are as follows:
#1 Brand Awareness
Every company wants to create awareness or recognition for its brand. In fact, many companies’ primary focus is to build brand awareness. Influencers help them achieve this goal by promoting their brand through social media and showcasing their features and benefits. For brand awareness, companies mainly target macro or mega influencers as they have higher audiences. Through their continuous posts and uploads, the audience seems to take a better interest in the brand.
#2 Boosts Traffic and Sales
The company’s other main objective is to increase sales and website traffic. For this, they hire influencers to advertise their products and services so that the product gets noticed by their audience and intrigues them to purchase the product. Product placement is the key in this type of influencer marketing, and it is vital to place the product to motivate the audiences for purchases tactfully.
#3 New Product Launch and Updates
It is crucial to spread the word before the launch of a new product; this way, the customers are aware of the new launch, and the companies can build excitement and enthusiasm amongst the audience before the launch. Influencers use their platform to post updates about the product regularly, and this way, the audience eagerly starts waiting for the product’s launch.
For example, eCommerce Automation has been the ‘talk of the town’ since its addition to the eCommerce industry. Thus, Influencers who promote eCommerce subjects surely emphasize the importance of eCommerce automation for the upliftment of the eCommerce industry.
#4 Reviews and Feedback
Who doesn’t enjoy a good review? In fact, these days, most people purchase a product after checking out its review. How many times have you shopped from Amazon without checking the product reviews? Let me take a wild guess, and say, hardly! According to a survey conducted by BrightLocal, ‘Local Consumer Review Survey 2020’, nearly 87% of the consumers read online reviews for the local businesses before making a decision. Also, only 48% of consumers prefer engaging with a company having less than four (4) stars. Reviews and Feedbacks are very important, and influencers help to create a better review and better brand image. This, in return, builds customer’s trust and brand reliability.
Use Content Marketing
Content marketing is a process of creating online material such as blog posts, infographics, videos, images to attract your target audience. This isn’t a direct sell, but rather an indirect one where you plug your product and raise awareness about your brand while providing entertaining and/or educational content to your potential customers.
Your blog shouldn’t just be talking about the new products you have. Instead, if you were to promote a new type of cheese, you can write a post or create a video recipe on “how to make a pizza at home” and calculate the bake time as your cheese and subtly plug how your cheese is better than the rest.
You’d be amazed by the number of people that Google things like “how to bake pizza at home” or “how to make a New York-style pizza at home” Not only are these people looking for recipes, they’re also likely to buy ingredients they see in those recipes.
Long-form content-based blog posts with informational guides can boost your organic SEO by as much as 2 to 3 times over the course of a year. Although blogging seems like a natural choice for eCommerce content marketing, you can also include lead magnets such as ebooks to attract customers to your site. Now whether they purchase it or sign-up for your email list creates a win-win scenario for your business.
Guest blogging is another efficient and cost-effective strategy to increase your reach and position your brand as an expert on a given subject. This, in turn, gives potential customers all the more reason to shop with your brand or, at the very least, visit your site. Ensure that you only submit posts of the utmost quality to high authority and engaged readership publications associated with your business.
Include Reviews on Product Pages
While strategizing, we often underestimate the importance of product reviews. As many as 84% of people shopping online trust online reviews as much as they trust their friends. There are many WordPress plugins and Shopify apps that allow you and make it easy for you to upload customer reviews, including pictures and videos to your product pages.
Market on Social Media
Social media marketing is entirely free and an excellent way to build and nurture relationships with either new or pre-existing customers thanks to content sharing, Facebook recommendations, and algorithms that share what your friends are up to.
In my opinion, for any product-based eCommerce business, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are the three key social media platforms that a business owner should be focusing on. Each platform offers its unique set of features and advantages, but the general rule of thumb in using social media to advance your business is to make sure that you’re focusing on customer relationships more than promoting your products. You need regular and quick responses and interactions to avoid abandoned carts.
Tap into UGC and Put Influencers to Work for You
Various Digital and Content marketing agencies recommend brands encourage their users to produce their own content in exchange for an incentive. This incentive can either be in the form of a discount code or the UGC (user-generated content), be it a picture or a video being shared on the brand’s own social media handle, offering the user’s content exposure. Since other users generate this form of content, it seems more believable and evokes more trust for potential customers than content generated by brands. UGC can increase engagement and conversions, along with building trust and a loyal community. The enormously famous camera brand GoPro is an excellent example of this strategy. Its YouTube channel has 10 million subscribers, 17.6 Million Instagram followers, and a library of high-quality videos, many of which are created by their customers. All these interactions, engagements, and viewership draw attention to the brand and then the product which translates to increased sales.
Now, unlike UGC, where you give users an incentive to generate content, influencer marketing works by paying influencers (social media personalities with a certain amount of fan following) to market or promote your product. Depending on what category or size of influencers you go with, this one might not be as low cost as others. Some influencers may ask for a payment, while others (especially micro-influencers) may just want a set of free products. Instagram particularly is a platform where users and influencers alike are thrilled to engage with brands, so it forms the ideal platform for eCommerce businesses selling products, especially related to the fashion or travel industry.
To judiciously capitalize on this strategy, you’ll have to do your due homework in reaching out only to those influencers that your target audience follows. Micro-influencers or people with localized/niche influence can be just as effective, even if they only have 12,000 followers instead of 12 billion. That’s good news for you, since dealing with a Kardashian might just be more pain than pleasure!
Facebook & Instagram Promotions
Instagram is a highly visual and artistic platform emphasizing images and videos. And you can make the most out of the platform by making your Instagram shoppable. Certain select brands and Shopify stores can create actual Shoppable posts, where you tag products in your Insta feed posts or stories and users click on them to see the basic information like price. They can also click again to purchase the displayed product. This is especially useful when you’re using Instagram ads and promoted posts.
Now since Instagram is owned by Facebook, and both Facebook and Instagram Promotion/Ads operate under the same interface, we’re clumping them together in this article. These ads do not work like Google AdWords. Instead of targeting users by their search intent and showing them ads when they’re looking for you, with Instagram and Facebook ads you get to target the users based on different factors such as their age, location, and interests to introduce them to your product. This is inbound marketing at its finest and is a great way to create demand.
Mail letters, Catalogs, and Discount Coupons
Postal mail is one marketing channel that even the most prominent eCommerce companies leverage. Not everyone in your target group is tech-savvy. These people are likely to miss out on your latest email newsletters and offer. Hence, it’s never a bad idea to send them a yearly or a bi-yearly update of what you’ve been up to, along with a shiny new product catalog and some exclusive offers for them.
This adds a layer of personalization, which the customers always have a huge affinity for, and hence are much more likely to convert into some form of sale.
Fun Fact: A whopping 61% of people overwhelmingly voted for discount coupons as a sure-shot way to drive customer loyalty.
Sponsorships
eCommerce companies often spend a lot of their revenue on sponsorships for different events. All around the world, we see award nights, sporting events, charities, etc., being sponsored by some of the biggest names. This increases brand visibility dramatically and intrigues those who attend the events, thereby driving awareness.
Case Study: BYJU’S, which is an online learning platform, recently started sponsoring the Indian Men’s cricket team. The team’s uniform sports a huge logo of the brand and hence has added to a lot of buzz around the brand.
Fun Fact: We at Orderhive have played a significant role in powering Byju’s rapid growth with our backend centralization and shipping management tool. Learn more about it here.
Print and Media Ads
Conventional advertising never goes out of style. Even as the internet has gripped the entire world, traditional ads still hold a large chunk of the masses. This is why you’re always likely to see the intersectionality of both mediums, As likely as you are to come across an Ad for your favorite TV show while browsing through the internet, you’re also going to be shown an Ad for a leading eCommerce company while watching the Super bowl or a Boxing Day test match. What this shows is that companies are aware of their target audience being present across different marketing channels, and want to leverage it fully.
Some of the best avenues for businesses to market themselves in the traditional advertising field are:
#1 In-Flight Magazines
These have some of the highest conversion rates as far as offline marketing is concerned. The primary reason for that is that these ads are likely to get the readers’ undivided attention since there isn’t much to do during the flights.
#2 Radios and TV Ads
Radio and TV Ads are how most of us got our first understanding of what advertisements are. We started speaking of Ads before we even fully knew what the word meant, thanks to some TV commercial that just stuck in our heads. This is also the reason why it’s still such a popular offline advertising medium. The impressions of TV and radio ads last much longer than any other form, simply because they’re repeated again and again until they stick.
#3 Billboards
Billboards are the giant spaces in the sky that a company can rent to write audacious sentences. But of course, they do much more than that. The entire idea of Billboards is to be in your face without you feeling they’re in your face. They don’t have to work hard to capture your attention. Due to their sheer enormity, and smart placement in crowded areas, right by a flyover or right in front of multi-storey buildings, illuminated by countless perennial sources of bright light, billboards grab eyeballs naturally. This is why they’re such amazing marketing avenues.
#4 Public Participation Campaigns
Another exciting way to gamify your offline marketing is by making the customers part of your campaign. Brands often find a way to create campaigns that involve their customers to perform certain actions, like take selfies with a mascot, or record a video of them using the brand, etc. The customers invest their time and energy into the campaign and become the ambassadors of the brand, thereby creating a marketing chain that translates into a lot of buzz around the brand. Some of the best ways to create public participation campaigns are:
#5 Collectibles and Contests
Since time immemorial, brands have understood the value of peaking customers’ interests by gamification of their sales. They achieve this by designing a campaign where the customers receive a seemingly common item like a toy, but as a collectible. The gamification lies in the customer being eager to complete the full set and hence buying more. Brands then create a contest out of it and award prizes to those who manage to collect the full set.
Case Study: Google Pay India recently launched a Diwali stamp collection campaign where they gave different stamps to people who sent or received money via the UPI app. This drove people crazy who went on a wild goose chase to collect all the stamps and win prizes. Very few actually got it, but the number of transactions on the app skyrocketed.
#6 QR Codes
While sharing links may be easy when you’re marketing online, it doesn’t work as seamlessly when you share links offline as it can be a cumbersome task for someone to manually type them. Enter, QR codes. Each QR code is unique and works as a link to the page that is attached to it. Companies can create different QR codes for different landing pages, and print them on their product catalogs. You can create a QR code to the app store page from where users can download your app, and easily boost your downloads. The leads that come through these QR codes can be mapped by deploying a powerful order management system, and the effectiveness of the campaign can be easily measured.
This is yet another offline campaigning tactic that many e-retailers are increasingly corporating into their marketing plans.
Brand Collaborations for Social Good
Brands have often collaborated with each other when their products complement each other. E.g. A pizza brand may join forces with a soft drink brand and only serve that soft drink in all of their outlets. Such deals are very common and hence nobody bats an eye. However, brands that are competing for the same space in the market often collaborate for social good. Such collaborations gather a lot of attention and are a great way of humanizing the brand. These campaigns serve the twin purpose of fulfilling the role of good samaritans and gathering a reputation of being a brand that is empathetic.
Case Study: Burger King created a campaign called Day without a Whopper where they stopped selling their most successful product “Whopper” and asked the customers to buy a Big Mac from McDonald’s instead. This was because MacDonald’s had decided to donate all the earnings from that day to a children’s charity. On any given day, you’d find both these brands fighting each other tooth and nail through huge PR campaigns. But for this campaign, they decided to come together for social good. This was one of the best collaborations in recent history.
