E-commerce could dominate marketing trends in 2015

The stage has been set for a while now, and e-commerce organisations on Saturday continue to make an impact in terms of the digital shopping experience.

As technology continues to grow rapidly, e-commerce players are adopting newer techniques to facilitate both sellers and buyers to sell and buy online more efficiently.

More recently, with the introduction of flash sales and daily deals from various companies, e-commerce has brought forward technnovation in the retail sector. Nothing has surpassed the power of innovative e-commerce companies, who have proved to be as successful.

What we are witnessing today is a metamorphosis of e-commerce into a variation of online commerce that is adaptable and flexible. And, with the ever dropping rates of internet surfing, both for web and mobile interfaces, which is complimentary to the soaring population of internet users, the e-commerce industry is shaping both online shopping and selling trends in India.

Consumers are more connected than ever before and have more information and choices at their fingertips today. They are leaving behind their preferences, behaviour and interests, which create a knowledge ground for e-commerce companies to analyse behaviour pattern and offer more interesting and competitive products.

"The rise of such digital activities and resulting data is the stimulating factor for formulating e-commerce strategies, thus affecting the business model and driving growth for e-commerce players in the Indian market," said Divyan Gupta, Founder and CEO, Artanddecors.com

He further added, "2015 is going to witness an acceleration in the shift towards inbound techniques rather than outbound. The e-commerce industry and online shopping trends in India are set to witness greater heights in the coming years, not just owing to the increasing internet population, but also due to the changing dynamics of the supporting ecosystem."

Some key trends that will amplify branding and customer growth are as follows: Firstly, content marketing Will gain prominence: The focus will be on original and informative content rather than generic content. As Google and other search engines throw more weight around original and unique content and rank them higher in search results, businesses will need to revisit their content strategy. Customers are also starting to demand more detail when purchasing and along with great navigation and ease of paying will prefer brands that give them the knowledge of the product that they seek to acquire.

Secondly, SEO and social signaling will start merging: Search engines like Google will continue their push to provide the most relevant content to the consumer. This is within their interest as well as it impacts online ad rates.

For the marketer this will mean paying a very close attention to having great content that is relevant and is shared by their consumers a brand advocacy focus that has not been really cared for till now. With most brands trying to move away from the discount-led sales model to developing consumer loyalty, content and social signaling will play an important role in attracting more customers at a lower acquisition cost.

Lastly, social media marketing will diversify: For now a majority of e-commerce brands use Facebook to drive a bulk of their potential customers. With changes in how Facebook is going to treat newsfeed pushes, marketers will have to start investing more time in other platforms while investing more money in Facebook itself to continue driving traffic that they were seeing before the changes.

This 'PayFor-Exposure' trend is likely to see a higher adoption by other social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest etc., as they start monetising their networks. For brands, it means that they won't be able to depend on just one/limited channel for traffic and will have to therefore diversify their networks.

The other advanatges of e-commerce are:

1. Mobile Marketing Will Increase: As more and more people consume information on the go, mobile moments or mobile marketing will get bigger. Seamless integration that will allow customers to click on an ad on the mobile and complete a transaction without any issues will usher in the next level of instant gratification. We have also seen some of the larger e-commerce players starting official channels on mobile chat platforms like Line and WeChat to both share promotions and content and this is expected to grow as well.

2. Remarketing Ads Will Grow: Everyone jumped on the remarketing bandwagon and this space is going to see even a higher uptake in 2015. Visit a product on a website and it's going to follow you everywhere. This ability of the product and the brand to keep itself right in front of the customer is very effective. With Facebook bringing its Atlas advertising platform into play, this is only going to become much more effective as it would enable a more accurate cross-device advertising and tracking opportunity for advertisers. Given Facebook's mobile reach and active user base, this will also lead to an increase in mobile conversions.