What’s your technical IQ when it comes to e-Commerce marketing? It had better be high, or you’re unlikely to achieve success, or at least the kind of success you probably dream of. These days, the field of e-Commerce technology is developing so rapidly that you can’t really sell your products effectively without constant re-education.
It’s a challenge even to keep up with the names and acronyms of all the newly evolving phenomena, and Googling a list of acronyms may not help unless the one you find has been posted within the past year, or more likely within the past few months.
The field of e-Commerce technology is changing so rapidly that you must update constantly.
How does SEO fit into Online Marketing?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) used to be enough to drive website traffic, but now the wide range of techniques under the umbrella of online marketing is required, including Analytics (monitoring the hits you get, and also the “click throughs,” and the “conversions” or sales), social media, and even proper server hosting.
Keywords must be not only placed in your meta tags, but must also populate your site strategically for the search engines to take notice of your site. Saturation (the number of pages at your site that are cataloged by a search engine) and backlinks are crucial for driving traffic. Fortunately, a host of SEM agencies can take care of these complicated details for you.
How is this affecting marketing strategies? First, it is narrowing the range of e-Commerce entrepreneurs. Individuals without the technical skill or knowledge to take advantage of commercial opportunities on the web are simply being left out when it come to the rewards of those opportunities. Along with that comes the growth of the burgeoning industry of SEM agencies.
A few decades ago, the Internet seemed a wonderland where everyone could expand personal opportunities almost without limit. Now limitations have appeared and they are technical in nature. Learn or die has become the normative rule in e-Commerce.
Fortunately, a host of learning programs have appeared, of course. This is e-Commerce, after all, so a demand results in someone showing up to supply it. Adam Smith was right, even in a cyber world context. Are you ready to take advantage of the most up to date changes in the world of web marketing? Well, if not, it’s easy enough to change that!
Understanding The Technical Intricacies of Social Media
Of course, the biggest change in the past few years has been the growth in importance of social media marketing as a tool for selling online and driving website traffic, while also building your brand. Most major sellers have networking sites, and hire professionals to spend time directing and managing that side of their marketing efforts.
Facebook is the largest, so of course at this stage it has the highest volume of users. But it does not offer live help. In fact, it’s rather difficult to get answers from Facebook. One has to sift through page after page of “Knowledge bases,” or wait an eternity for a submitted question to be answered. You may never get an answer.
Some of the other sites may have live help of a chat room or phone variety, but those sites are more likely to charge a fee for your site (as opposed to Facebook, where it’s free), since it’s expensive to staff a help desk in real time, or even an e-mail response capability. Furthermore, those other sites don’t have the gargantuan customer base that Facebook possesses. So most folks go with Facebook, despite the frustrations of using it.
Twitter is becoming an essential tool for the e-Commerce marketer, and it’s easier to use. The site is exceptionally user friendly, and all you really need to know is how to make a tiny URL, and you should also learn how to distill your message to 140 characters. A challenge, but hey, brevity is the soul of wit, so maybe it’s worth it.
Other sites abound, Pinterest, for instance, and with its more business-oriented clientele, LinkedIn. Sometimes it seems that a new social networking site appears every month or so. But these sites are technically easy. They don’t pose the challenges so widespread on the technological side of the e-Commerce field generally.
The appearance of the Smart Phone several years ago has had a tremendous impact on e-Commerce. At this point, a significant proportion of online customers are accessing e-Commerce sites not on their computers, but through mobile devices. This makes a big difference, and a marketer who is not up to date on smart phone technology stands at a great disadvantage.
The profusion of “apps” in recent years has added to the complexity of the field. It is possible to enhance your sales potential with the introduction of an app, but it involves some savvy about the world of apps, or else some financial outlay to hire experts on the matter.
Other essentials include online transaction processing and electronic funds transfer, both now essentials for e-Commerce success.
Another obvious process is internationalization. In a word, China. The Chinese have gotten into the act during the past decade or so, perhaps belatedly, but with genuine force. Chinese marketers are not to be ignored in the equations of the future, not just in terms of corporate entities, but in terms of workers willing to free lance for low remuneration levels.
The same is true of India, which is flooding the markets for technological services with cheap labor. It is now essential, not just to understand technologies, but to understand the technological workforce, in all of its current changes.
Technology is a two-edged sword. It offers tremendous benefits, but only for those with the expertise to understand and employ those benefits. Technology today, more than ever before, is changing rapidly, at a pace that is daunting even for the most energetic of entrepreneurs. Are you up to the task? If you are, the rewards can be superlative!