B2C, B2B, D2C, Omnichannel, Social Commerce, Marketplaces – each has distinctive selling strategies and opportunities. Consider which one (or few) aligns with your business model and objectives.
B2C
Often, this is a business with several brands or categories with broad demographics for its prospective customers, aiming for sales volume even if profit margins are tight.
Ecommerce Strategy: A heavy emphasis on promotions, incentive selling, and strong market positioning. Creative campaigns that are compelling and impactful are essential to establish a unique selling proposition and a competitive advantage. The drive is to influence motivation and trigger actions. Discounts, on-site sale events, clearance, exclusive coupons, and flash price drops are used to impel transactions. Generating leads is orchestrated with contextual insight, optimized messaging, personalized experiences, and a cadence of interactions that acquire, enable, and engage.
B2B
A business selling products and/or services to other commercial businesses – either in a single sector or several different verticals.
Ecommerce Strategy: There is an emphasis on industry authority, building relationships, and tactical selling based on price points, bulk purchases, recurring orders, or a contractual buying schedule. Content marketing and a highly effective communication style are key to B2B digital sales because it’s here where information is king. The business is a partner to the customer with solution-based services and an optimal product mix. The company must be prominent in its online placement, reviews, directories, and citations. And build an empire of insights, because the customer is continually seeking knowledge and ideas to strengthen their operation and performance.
D2C
Businesses that are innovative, expedient, and principled in their selling of one or multiple product lines where need, interest, and enthusiasm are high motivators for an audience that has been segmented into specific buyer personas.
Ecommerce Strategy: Maintain a focus on agility, iterative experiments, and optimal user experiences throughout the buying journey. Whether solving a problem or sparking an interest, use of rich media and social channels are critical to achieving order placement, repeat business, loyalty, and development of ambassadors. As a business designs its strategy, the pillars must start with mobile and site performance – both of these tower above other reigning factors.
Omnichannel
This constitutes a seamless experience of the brand across many touchpoints and sales channels. The mix may include physical stores or kiosks, in-person or virtual events, website, blog, social media, customer service, chatbots, videos, podcasts, webinars, specialty retail outlets, and more.
Ecommerce Strategy: Create a coherent, immersive customer journey with recognition that each touchpoint is an asset and benefit to the buyer. Value creation requires a laser-focus on integration and coordination between all channels, utilizing a multifaceted, customer-centric approach.
Social Commerce
This avenue is the most dynamic and fastest growing of all sales models. Creating revenue through social platforms can be highly effective, if architected well. The edge is data. A business can take advantage of many data sources and statistics in order to narrow its spend and fine tune its targeting efforts.
Ecommerce Strategy: Build an inspiring or entertaining brand story. Highly potent visual experiences and persuasive messaging are used to garner attention and elicit responses. Influencer marketing is powerful for attracting Gen Z and Millennials. Purchases come through curating a brand perception which aims to resonate, tempt, shape, and instigate.
Marketplaces
For the majority of transactions that take place every minute across the globe, the motivation is to purchase the best product at the best price from a trusted source that doesn’t sacrifice quality, safety, or care. Marketplaces are designed to facilitate consumers ability to perform comparison shopping to reduce feelings of risk or missing out.
Ecommerce Strategy: A business must be savvy at blending transparency, meticulous details, and strong brand identity with clever and novel content that tenaciously captures the audience. In this instance, the ingredients for brand stickiness are exceptionally crafted content, tactical keyword bidding and search strategies, and well planned and calculated price automation.
For every digital strategy, the following applies:
(1) Utilization of analytics, predictive modeling, and forecasting vastly widen the lens of ‘business intelligence’. Companies are able to be far more precise and effective in their market penetration and conversion performance by evaluating behaviors and buying signals derived from data, trends, and machine learning.
(2) A fully executed Conversion Rate Optimization plan (macro and micro) will support upstream marketing that influences customer activation points and triggers. Across owned, paid, and earned channels, take a disciplined approach to sequences and segmenting for desired responses.
Any business, no matter the EBITDA valuation or geographical scope, can employ several models at once. To do so successfully, a company must position a seasoned leader with a sagacious digital disposition to steer the ship. Prevailing above all else, there’s a universal goal for conversions, engagement, and monetization. Be diligent in the optimization process to achieve those goals and steadfast in efforts to create a real and enduring affinity to your brand. These practices will accelerate your digital growth.