E-commerce has exploded over the past decade, resulting in established brands and businesses shifting strategies to adapt to the spike in online shopping. This shift also introduced a new crop of digitally focused e-commerce brands looking to sell directly to the consumer. Whether a new brand born from consumer needs during the pandemic, or a long-established business that recently moved to selling online, building meaningful brand engagements and maintaining customer loyalty is critical to overall success.
Brands that focus on direct-to-consumer e-commerce are in a unique position because they own interactions with their customers. As research firm McKinsey explains, “building direct-to-consumer e-commerce capabilities allows [companies] to directly interact with end-consumers, which helps steer brand strategy and innovation based on real-time consumer insights.”
With an e-commerce brand, you gain an incredible amount of information from your consumers. And since dealing with intermediaries (e.g., other retailers) is minimized, conflict and data deficiencies become less of a challenge.
Digital brand building empowers you to enhance the entire consumer experience. But it’s more than promotional emails and one-off influencer campaigns—it requires constant and consistent nurturing and attention. Here are four strategies to employ while building a digitally focused e-commerce brand.
Identify And Educate The Target Audience
If you don’t have the budget to do a proper customer segmentation study, create personas and profiles of customers based on your brand positioning, already-published secondary data, and prior sales data. Don’t go after too many audiences—if you can focus, that’s important. Once you have your target audiences, you can develop your brand-building plan around them so your consumers continue to be at the center of everything you’re doing.
Remember to educate your audience. It’s essential to educate consumers on your brand, its ethos, values, and how it ultimately adds to the consumer’s lifestyle. Keep these foundational messages in mind as you create content, produce videos, and other marketing materials. You’ll be able to better connect with your audience along the journey if they are aware of the mission and values of your brand.
Personalize the customer experience with intention. Building a brand digitally gives you the chance to enhance your relationship with your audience. Personalization can be a key factor in creating that connection. Instead of sending a simple “abandoned cart” email, use that opportunity and touchpoint as a way to educate customers about your product and hit them up with a custom promo for items they have already looked at.
Always Put The Customer First
Every decision you make for your e-commerce brand should be driven by your customer’s needs. Putting your customer at the core of your brand includes prioritizing product benefits based on what your audiences want most.
This also means delivering on the benefits customers crave, and addressing their pain points. Take the time to determine the pain points your audience is experiencing with existing products, and address them.
A recent case study of customer-focused brand Zappos captures this point well: “They [Zappos] focus on what the customer wants and needs, not on what they want the customer to want or need. This is a key part to any effective digital strategy. Listen to your audience and plan accordingly.”
At ESPRO.com, we identified that coffee drinkers new to the manual brew process want to learn about the various techniques: french press, pour overs, etc., and have lots of questions about how to brew that perfect cup of coffee. So we created step-by-step “brew guides” to help our customers “crush their coffee game” using our products.
Keep Your Brand’s Values Front And Center
The overall purpose and mission of your brand should always be woven into the fabric of your messaging. The emotional appeal of your storytelling will make a powerful difference to your target audience. As you create a content and branding plan, keep your brand halo in mind.
A critical piece of this strategy is choosing the right partnerships. As you look at different partnerships and influencers, it’s incredibly important to choose the right people to collaborate with your brand. Each person or partner you work with directly reflects on your brand halo and the overall mission of your brand. Take the time to evaluate partnerships and ensure they align with the brand you’re building.
Remember to craft a holistic experience for your consumer. Building a brand doesn’t end with a stellar website. Bring that brand experience all the way through to your customer service. That means creating everything with intention from the unboxing experience of your product to your next social media post.
Think Bigger And Think Differently
Brand building is so much more than just regular digital promotions. Discount offers are an excellent way to drive short-term sales, but it’s more strategic to focus on building brand equity and loyal customers. Good promos during key months and seasons work, but creating content and a brand story that builds an emotional connection will bring far greater success in the long run.
Make sure to create and follow a content strategy. One of the early challenges of building a brand from the ground up can be a limited budget. It can be expensive and difficult to manage a number of different content flows. It’s important to take a step back, consider the content you need to produce and create it strategically. With a content plan, you’ll be able to better use that content across a variety of channels in an effective and efficient way.
Building a successful, digitally focused e-commerce brand takes time, patience and a solid content strategy. Remember to stay true to your values, listen to your customers and identify the right partnerships.
Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies.
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