Tag Archives: advertising

Building a viable e-commerce business model

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For the last week I’ve spent my time on helping produce a viable e-commerce business model using latest enterprise class commerce platforms, a well informed seo and media strategy and a decent runway to break even. This is not the first time may I add, but it does take into account some new challenges.

The saas world, e-commerce 2, global markets and the improved use of pay per click have made it even more a numbers game to make the business model work. Obviously your product needs to be good, but if it is and you have the right partners in place and the right technology it is simply a case of playing the numbers to get a return on investment? Sounds easy? Not quiet that easy. Its a fine art, where you need to apply your skills and know how to finally tune your system to get the most out of it. Its only through experience and through having the right partners can you guarantee the numbers game will work.

To get it right depends on your conversion path and this starts by having a coordinated approach between brand, traditional advertising, pay per click, social channels and traditional product channels. All need to be identified and a strategy developed to create a buying conveyor belt to your e-commerce cart. It doesn’t start with just your site its starts a lot earlier.

Choosing the right platform and partner to route this conveyor belt through the buying process will lead to successful conversion.

The platform needs to be able to take the feeds of potential customers from all these conveyor belts. It then needs to show case the product well, display options and link to other products to engage the user and stimulate their buying emotions. This is where saas platforms that have one model to fit all fail to deliver. They fail to capture the channels and trigger the buying responses. A wholly owned platform tailored to your product, brand and customer will win hands down when it comes to maximising conversion. It requires multi channelled approach to commerce and there are only a few platforms out there that do this well.

So if you are looking to play the numbers conversion game you need to be in full control of the whole engine from advertising spend, ppc, seo to platform and design. You need to control it all in order to fine tune the animal. This I believe is critical to achieving your business plan. However think SasS when you implement.  Build the As A Service element for your global markets but own the technology yourself.

Can social really predict the future?

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With the London mayoral contest being accurately predicted by social network sentiment analysis, should business really start to rely on the intelligence collected from social networks to help plan their business models?

I for sometime have taken a balanced view of key trends emerging from social networks to predict what’s going to be hot in the technology space. Most of the time its been accurate even though most of the time its been predicting the rise of social networks.

The key thing though is blending the intelligence gathered with authentic sources to get the balance right.

Analysis of intelligence from the social graph can help inform your thinking, but if you are doing something new you need to lead the pack. You could follow Steve Job’s mantra and tell your customers what they need. But to do this you need to be brave.

Its important to get the right tools setup to give you the necessary intelligence gathering capability from the social graph and the wider internet so you can bring all the information together in one clear dashboard for you to study and make your own decisions.

Another advantage for using the right tools is to amplify your message to back you up as an authority in your world. Amplify the positive statistics in realtime backs up your messaging. What the social graph can give us is an instant poll of a large targeted constituency without actually polling them. Doing this enables you to get realtime assurance around your decision making process. Social graphs will never make the decision for you but they will give confidence and backing to your ideas.