What do people say about you when you can’t hear them? Are you a kind, caring person? Or are you hard to be around?
Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. To build an ecommerce brand, you need to stay in their minds and stay in the times.
So, how do you achieve those things? How do you optimise for the future of ecommerce and build your brand with sustainable growth in mind? Let’s look at some new and emerging ecommerce trends.
Some of the top trends in ecommerce at the moment include:
Taken as a collective, current ecommerce trends show that it’s harder and increasingly more expensive to be found via ads, to track that your ads are working, and to differentiate your company from the competition.
Within that landscape, the best way to create a business that’s going to achieve lasting success and stay ahead of the competition is to get people to invest emotionally in your brand. You need to build relationships with customers to encourage loyalty and increase customer retention. The strength of the emotion and loyalty you stir in your customers will be reflected in the strength of your brand. So, how do you embrace that approach and build a strong ecommerce brand?
Building a brand means sharing your story, communicating your values and, to some extent, justifying your existence. As it becomes harder than ever to stand out from a crowd, you need to demonstrate your brand values and differentiators everywhere you encounter potential customers.
You need to get into people’s heads to change shopping behaviours. According to Les Binet, Group Head of Effectiveness at adamandeveDDB, long-term brand growth is dependent on changing people’s minds in a way that will bias their future behaviour. “Brand building is about building up these mental structures [and] getting a long-term flow of sales, revenue and profit, now and into the future,” he explains.
Footwear brand Allbirds successfully built those mental structures in its customers by consistently reinforcing itself as a sustainable alternative to its competitors. This brand building process helped the company quickly rise from humble beginnings to going public, despite operating in a very crowded market.
The most successful ecommerce brands go beyond being brands and become an identity. Building a brand community converts customers into advocates and loyal supporters. Brand communities:
The ultimate ecommerce community-building success story is Gymshark. In PPC’s heyday, the gym wear brand was way ahead of the curve by:
It's not enough to just create a community. Your audience needs to connect over a common purpose and feel like they belong to something greater than themselves.
What should your community achieve and how does this help your brand?
Give community members access to parts of your brand that are not available to the wider public.
Find the habit-forming quirks and perks that you can embed into your community culture and keep your customers coming back to you time and time again. What can you offer that will get people thinking about your brand every day?
Behind any successful community is an effective facilitator, communicator and instigator. Find someone who can ‘be’ your brand and entice others to join them.
Personalisation is an emerging but underutilised ecommerce trend. 85% of businesses believe they offer personalised experiences; 60% of consumers agree with that assessment. The personal data and intimacy generated within a community make it the ideal place to deliver truly personalised experiences to your customers. Using AI and data science, monitoring consumption patterns, and improving upselling recommendations are some of the ways to achieve this.
Think old-school shopping channel as seen through the prism of your brand and its values. Use live videos, shoppable videos and clickable user-generated content to create live shopping experiences for your community. The content will serve as a gathering point for community members, as well as a driver for sales.
There’s obvious overlap between community and advocacy, but we’re making the differentiation here that a community can be something built around your brand while brand advocates go out into the world on your behalf.
Brands don’t come much stronger than Adidas. As far back (in the fast-paced world of ecommerce) as 2016, the sportswear giant declared: “Our goal is that 30% of shared content on our brands through social media and other channels is user-generated content.”
The same report says: “We firmly believe that advocacy will create sustained growth for our brands, underpinned by the fact that brand advocates on average buy more than non-advocates.”
In short, even the brands with the deepest pockets and the richest heritage believe this is the way to go.
Remember that the scope of brand advocacy spans from the highest profile influencers to two mates chatting. Word of mouth referrals are a key part of brand advocacy. That Adidas report discusses the importance of key promotion partners like Lionel Messi and fitness advocate Gigi Hadid in one breath and in the next notes that "a large part of our consumers rely on referrals by friend or family when making purchase decisions”.
Building a strong ecommerce brand isn’t easy. With all of the investment of time and effort needed to achieve the things we’ve discussed above, many brands still lean too heavily on the certainty and instant results of paid media. But as PPC attribution becomes more challenging, measuring brand performance and striking a balance between long-term and short-term marketing is increasingly important.
An over-reliance on short-term data has distracted ecommerce brands from achieving long-term growth, says Les Binet. The answer is to include measurement of long-term impact within your data.
Clothing brand tentree worked with marketing agency Northern and Facebook to measure long-term brand impact alongside the usual Facebook Ads metrics. The performance branding study showed the focus on brand ultimately increased purchases, unaided brand awareness, and brand familiarity.
Generate long-term data to measure your brand using these methods outlined by Qualtrics:
Distil your brand down to a monetary asset that can be included on your balance sheet. This could be based on:
Use emotional data from consumer surveys to measure how your brand’s value grows during multiple interactions with someone over time. Models for conducting these surveys include:
Use focus groups, sales data, customer feedback and reviews, brand searches and surveys to measure awareness of your brand. Ask questions about:
See whether your customers agree that your brand provides unique value by fulfilling its specific purpose to its target audience. Measure this using:
Analyse brand messaging to measure the impact on performance. Do this by:
Compare current sales figures with historical data to determine:
See how your brand measures in the market by comparing various metrics with your competitors. Use things like:
Brand is absolutely vital in the future of ecommerce. There’s no point wishing you’d got up and running in the days of the PPC gold rush. Find the balance between the short-term growth offered by ads and the long-term growth that comes from creating a brand that stirs powerful emotions.
Get started on that today by:
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