What is ecommerce media marketing?

Ecommerce media marketing has many parts, AR, blogging, videos, influencers, search, and more. At its core level, ecommerce media marketing can be split into three categories: 

Content: Using video, audio, and the written word to get your message across

Social media: Inviting interaction, encouraging engagement, securing shares, and more

SEO: Employing tactics to boost the ranking of your website and drive traffic to it.

Where will content marketing for ecommerce brands be in a year?

Content marketing has one of the highest ROIs of any type of ecommerce marketing, costing 62% less than traditional tactics and delivering 3x the amount of leads. Making content an important part of your strategy is not only cost-effective, but it’s also simple to do – with a range of mediums available to your company across video, audio, and the written word.

Companies continue to enjoy great success from blog posts, podcasts, case studies, explainer videos, and more. Though these tactics are far from being redundant, there are some new strategies that I expect to see more of in a year:     

More personalisation – but greater privacy expectations

Personalisation has been used in marketing for a while, but the development of AI and big data has really pushed its development forward in recent years. But the increased use of personalisation is an example of tech vanity – nearly 80% of customers say that they are more likely to buy from a business that uses personalised content.

However, while people want their content to be more personal, they are increasingly mindful of their data privacy.

What does all this mean for ecommerce media marketing? Expect brands to make their content more personal, while at the same time taking steps to advertise that they can be trusted to look after customer data – more forms for customers to sign.

Brands becoming ever more transparent

Customers today can find out a huge amount of information on companies, with social media and broad internet access meaning that there are fewer places to hide corporate secrets. The result of this is that customers are demanding greater transparency from businesses, alongside evidence that they are taking efforts to make the world a better place.

How will this impact content marketing over the next 12 months? Expect to see more content that shows brands to be socially conscious and supportive of sustainable practices – it’s what customers want to see and if there’s a suspicion a brand isn’t delivering on this it’ll be found out. 

Where is social media for online businesses gonna be next year?

66% of the UK population are active on social media, with that number only increasing generation on generation. Social media marketing is a way of reaching a huge number of engaged people while combining it with social commerce means that you can turn this engagement into revenue for your business.  

Online businesses are using live video to increase engagement, UGC continues to be an excellent way of driving up audience interaction, and some brands enjoy great success with sassy social media marketing – step forward Wendy’s. But next year I’m anticipating the following things to be commonplace in online commerce:

The rise of vertical videos

Mobile has search has long since surpassed desktop and this is having a knock-on effect on the type of content promoted by social media platforms. IGTV was released in June 2018 and while it’s yet to rival YouTube as a serious video-content format, it’s increasing in popularity. Why? Because its vertical videos are designed specifically for mobile phones.

What does this mean for ecommerce social media marketing? IGVT has already had a surge in popularity, with views increasing by 1000%. One year from now I expect that trend to lead to Instagram influencers making IGTV a vital part of their armoury, and ecommerce brands to be using IGTV as an important part of their marketing strategy.

Buffer has already predicted that this will lead to Instagram creating IG Shopping , so that it can work with ecommerce giants Shopify and Amazon and increase its social commerce offering. This means that not only will the 2020s see the rise of vertical videos, but it’ll also see the advent of vertical video shopping.

Where will SEO for ecom companies be in 12 months time?

SEO is the single biggest source of organic traffic for ecommerce website, meaning that while it sits outside of the traditional definition of marketing it’s just as crucial to your business.

Already, ecommerce companies worth their salt are using a variety of on-page and off-page tactics to increase their rankings, much of which is focused on traditional SEO. But I’m telling you now, in 12 months time ecommerce will place enormous importance on local SEO – it’s already been predicted that 50% of searches will have local intent in 2020.

Mushrooming importance of customer reviews

UGC is prized in social media marketing and in local SEO it’s a vital ranking factor, with Google using it as social proof for websites.

Ecommerce businesses already have the power to add customer reviews to their websites, with site offering a range of apps to make this a reality. With local SEO becoming increasingly important, you can expect ecommerce websites to be pasted with customer reviews – those that don’t will find themselves below rivals that do.

Voice search will be a really big deal

One of the key facets of local SEO is that it places great value on long-tail keywords, something that’s replicated in voice search. Industry influencers have long predicted the coming of voice search and 2020 is going to be that year – in 12 months time ecommerce companies in the know will be using voice search as part of their local SEO strategy.

For those businesses that have been preparing for the rise in voice search, there are already options to use it in their websites – apps like Shopify’s voice recognition tool, PHEBI, make it possible for customers to find businesses using voice search, while WordPress has publicised how to add the function.

With Search Engine Watch writing in November 2018 that local SEO requires companies to optimise for voice search, ecommerce businesses that want to protect their traffic have 12 months to add it to their websites.