E-commerce battleground in 2020 – Smart home assistants and voice recognition systems
Increasingly, we are using voice assistants on smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home and on our smartphones to carry out interactions with the internet. This is undoubtedly convenient for our daily lives, but as we move towards carrying out transactions and actually buying things on these devices, what is going to be the effect on e-commerce web development?
E-commerce and voice
Searching for and buying something online via voice commands rather than using a keyboard and mouse is becoming increasingly common. Consumers like it because it’s fast and it’s possible to multi-task.
You can tell your voice assistant to ‘order’ something and it will check your previous purchase history to suggest products based on your tastes. If it’s something you haven’t bought before then suggestions will be based on popular options bought by other people. Once you’ve chosen a product, the assistant will confirm the price and ask if you’d like to place the order.
The process doesn’t end there, however, you can also ask the assistant when your order is arriving and it will check with the retailer to confirm the delivery date.
Voice and businesses
Voice makes things much easier for the consumer, but what does it mean for e-commerce businesses? In the here and now, anything that makes the buying process easier is going to be good for business. In the longer term as voice assistants move into your car, your workplace and other areas, there’s an opportunity for businesses to build up a more accurate profile of their consumer’s daily lives and therefore be able to offer them a more tailored choice of products.
There are of course some key challenges here. The first is one of trust. Currently, fewer than half of consumers trust the product recommendations they get from digital assistants. [1] When people are looking for something new, they are more likely to opt for more traditional routes where they can see images and read reviews from other shoppers. There’s a privacy issue too, with people worried that the smart assistant is constantly listening and what they say may be getting recorded.
There’s also the issue of accuracy. When we speak, we express things differently from when we type. This means that businesses need to adjust their SEO strategy to better cope with these natural language queries rather than just focusing on keywords.
Voice technology may still be in its early stages, but adoption is growing and the accuracy and usability of devices is improving. People are still learning what the technology can do for them but are starting to adapt. Businesses need to make sure they are ahead of the game and that their online strategy makes their e-commerce voice-friendly or they will risk getting left behind by their competitors who do.
Does consumer empowerment help in the growth and success of digital advertising?
As a leading digital advertising agency, we use innovative techniques to harness consumer empowerment for the benefit of our clients. We are constantly developing new digital psychological techniques to drive sales on behalf of clients.
Today’s empowered consumers are online 24 hours a day, wherever they are, and on any connected device. The Internet fulfils multiple, disparate needs, from online shopping to chatting with friends, from playing games to reading the news. This has created opportunity and challenge for advertisers as they can now reach consumers throughout the day (and night) with appealing and exciting advertising formats.
Through digital advertising, marketers can now interact with consumers who are no longer just passive recipients of advertising content, but active contributors; they share, comment and like communications that appeal to them. The consumer now has a very active role in the advertising process and is empowered to influence others.
Some consumers have taken this to the next level by becoming “influencers”. Whether micro-influencers with a small but highly engaged audience or high-profile influencers with a larger but less clearly defined audience, influencer marketing has become an important element in today’s marketing mix and reflects the presence of empowered and evolved buyers who are influencing others on social media platforms.
Smarter digital advertising agencies are now utilising digital psychology to drive sales. We fully embrace this approach; with machine learning techniques which add a psychological layer to our Engage Engine™; we enable brands to truly empathise with their customers.
Our framework includes:
Care: Learn, Rework, Loyalty/Recency
See: Data Analysis, Customer feedback, Web Search
Think: Roadmap, Outcomes and Objectives
Do: Analyse, Measure, Strategy
Our techniques are contributing to the evolution of digital advertising:
Mobile and web e-commerce development: our work is focused around the user, driving enhanced customer engagement. Whether you have a radical new idea for your website or you would simply like to take advantage of our years of digital experience and insight, we are ready to help.
Data Migration, Marketing Automation and CRM: whether you need to migrate a modest number of customer records, your entire CRM database or thousands of product pages, we will help you to relocate your data to its new home safely and securely, maintaining its integrity.
Digital strategy: the output from any meaningful strategy exercise will be a clear and concise set of actions. We make tangible, actionable recommendations which can be delivered by you, your in-house team or by our experts.
Social Reach Advertising: for clients that aim to reach their target audience through the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
So the answer is yes. Consumer empowerment can drive digital success. Why not contact a member of our friendly team to discuss your requirements and we will be happy to propose tailored guidance. You are just one step away from your new digital advertising strategy.
6 Best Social Networks for Ecommerce Advertising
There’s really one marketing strategy for ad agencies to use in the 21st century: social media advertising. Social networks display adverts based on user data. A social media ad agency can use this data to connect with the target audience for brands. Social media’s ease and ability to bring in new customers is powerful when used correctly. These are the 6 best social networks for e-commerce advertising.
Used by over 2 billion people, Facebook is more influential than any other platform. It offers a full targeted ad service for companies, generating leads and crunching the data for you, creating a high-conversion rate for clicks and views. It’s easy for agencies to use the demographics to create copy to meet specific target markets.
With 500 million monthly users and the highest engagement rate of any social media platform (60% higher than Facebook), Instagram is key for the millennial market. The platform is ideal for agencies who are able to produce visual media. Ads can link straight to a website or a landing page, meaning that users can directly engage with products.
With 328 million monthly users, Twitter is the best network for organic engagement. Twitter has a promote mode, where agencies can pay a monthly fee to boost their reach, but the most effective way to connect with users is to get involved in the fun aspects of the platform. Interacting with other brands, posting content to tie-in with recent events, or joining in with popular hashtags are ways to build organic engagement.
Pinterest has 175 million monthly users that are over 81% female, showing high engagement. Users primarily use this platform to find and develop creative ideas, so agencies that can appeal to this market do very well with its ad platform. Promoted pins can build a strong engagement with Pinterest’s highly targeted search engine.
LinkedIn has 227 million monthly users, evenly split between men and women. As a platform for working professionals, B2B products find their audience better than on other networks. Their integrated ad targeting can focus on company, job title, education, and skills, creating highly customisable marketing in finding target audiences.
Snapchat
Snapchat has 301 million monthly users. Snapchat offers interactive video ads that have five times more click-through than other platforms, but these can be expensive. However, geofilters (creative overlays that users can add to their stories) can cost less with a high level of engagement; at least 20,000 views per ad.
Advertising on social media networks is one of the easiest ways to reach out to customers and find new ones. But even the best social network will not achieve what you want unless you know what you’re doing and there is a good social media ad agency. Take the first step today and contact our expert team. You’ll save countless hours experimenting with the platforms discussed in this article.