44 – Ecommerce

Podcasts - ArtVersion

Show Notes:

Welcome to the Rediscover Your Brand Podcast presented by ArtVersion Creative Agency. Tune into Podcast 44 for more on e-commerce.

Transcript:

You are listening to Rediscover Your Brand Podcasts brought to you by ArtVersion Interactive Agency.

Welcome to the Rediscover Your Brand Podcasts. I’m your host Mike McCormick and, you know, for the past couple of weeks, we’ve kept down that Internet topic. We’ve gone pretty far down and talked about many different strategies. You know, it’s where we started.

And we left it for a little bit, but we decided to come back and come back and come back again and there’s so many different aspects with the Internet. It’s such a fun topic and it’s really cool. And, you know, we’ve covered everything from the mobile Internet to your desktop Internet to just websites in general and what you can really do with it, so we’ve gone really far and we’re always wondering what strategies are going to come next.

So that is the one thing that I’m always gonna talk about. I’m always going to bring those fun, exciting strategies for you and under the table so you know last week we had one of our biggest topics and it was an amazing fun topic and it was really exciting and we did a lot of you know, talking about a little different aspects with it. And I just wanted to say this before I really got in today’s topic. It’s one of those topics that’s just not going to go away, even though you know I might now be blatantly putting it out there and saying this is the content strategy you gotta use. This is the SEO strategy you gotta use. You know, they’re pretty much when it comes to the Internet.

And it comes even outside the Internet. Sometimes these are the tools and aspects that are always going to be building to everything I’m saying, so there are always going to be more about content strategies. More about what you can do with SEO and always knowing your target audience. You know it’s the biggest factor and you know you may hear it again today, so keep thinking about that.

So when it comes to those topics, you know I might not be blatantly saying it, but there will reflect because of every benefit that I talk about. Every strategy I talk about, why those are always connected in with your content strategies and with your SEO strategies. Put your website to be #1 on search engines, so to move on from there. I want to keep the same Internet focus today. You know it’s been a really cool adventure. It’s been really fun and exciting to talk about.

There’s a lot of thoughts that went into picking today’s topic, and there’s so many things out there. And when it came down to what I was gonna choose today, you know why I wasn’t going to go with something more broad? Or something more specific? Was it only going to tailor to one group was getting tailored to everybody and kind of picked a topic that I had been covered yet? We do talk about it here and there in our blogs. It’s one of the topics that we do work on a lot at ArtVersion. You know, we are proud to say that we work on this.

So when I picked this topic, I thought you know it may be appropriate, especially for the holiday season right now. I’m going to talk about e-commerce. And, you know, e-commerce is going to be fun. It’s going to be exciting, and it’s the holiday season and a lot of people are buying online. We just had Black Friday last week and now Monday yesterday was Cyber Monday which a lot of people were shopping online.

So I figured this week, since we’re in the holiday season talking about e-commerce and maybe a couple of aspects that are not for this season. But for next season implementing in four seasons does take awhile, the beginning of the year is going to be starting and a lot of people’s budgets are going to be renewed. It’s a good time to figure out what’s to be on your ecommerce site this holiday season because it’s going to take you almost full year to revamp and have the perfect website for it. So I really want to talk about ecommerce and I just think it’s the perfect time to get your mind started thinking especially with the beginning of the year. If you have any e-commerce site or if you don’t but you know you might want to have an e-commerce site, they’re really cool. They are a lot of fun, but even if you do not have any e-commerce site, this is the time where you should really be reviewing your website in general because it is the holiday season. It is where most retailers make a lot of their money. A lot of the income comes in right about now, especially with a lot of larger retailers. I’ve worked in retail in the past, and so I know how it works.

But this is usually the time, so I’m going to talk about this now so you can be reviewing your site over the next couple of weeks and then when the new year hits, you’ll be able to start planning. Start figuring out what you can do better for next year’s holiday season, and even implementing different sales throughout the rest of the year. I figured this was the perfect time to leave that door open right away through everything I talk about. I want you guys to go out and I want you to adventure. But when it comes down to it, I’m going to tell you what the converse is. I’m going to give you some brief reasons why we should utilize it and then I’m going to talk about the benefits. A couple benefits I’m not really going to go into.

Then you’ll know nitty gritty of the benefits, because that’s something that if I told you how to do it, you’re not going to have that full experience of learning it on your own. So I want you to go out there and be excited and get really adventurous with learning to help the new and exciting things that you can you can get from it. So I’m going to talk about some important benefits. Go through all the fun, exciting stuff about it. You know there’s a lot of basic benefits you can learn from it. But you know that’s what I’m gonna talk about and I’m really going to focus on our target audience today, because when it comes to e-commerce and knowing who your target audience is, a lot of that is covered later. So keep that in mind. So let’s get this ball rolling. Let’s start talking.

So, to start, we all want to know what is e-commerce is. For those who are listening, you know this is going to help you if you already understand e-commerce platforms. I’m just going to give you a brief review if you don’t already understand e-commerce. I’m going to tell you what you e-commerce is, so it’s going to be fun. So what is e-commerce? That’s the big thing we want to know right now.

In ecommerce, basically it’s really simple. It pretty much stands for Internet Commerce, and commerce is basically just selling services and products. E-commerce is basically creating a website where you sell your services. You sell your products to people all over the globe who can purchase your stuff.

It’s basically going online and doing online shopping and online purchasing. So e-commerce is like that? You’re able to do that?

So that’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Now, it does come down to different factors on how you are going to sell it. I mean there are larger ecommerce sites and there are smaller ecommerce sites, but pretty much utilizing an ecommerce site will grow your target audience. Let’s move on a little bit now and let’s talk about why you should utilize them. So say you have any size business, small, medium, large, extra large. You know any size business, but you know focusing really on mostly larger businesses and medium size, they kind of already used them. But the smaller businesses, you know you can become that larger business just by utilizing an e-commerce site. If you have a store location, you’re limiting your target audience to right then and there, and that’s not the reason why we want to build. Our target audience is because there’s a lot of times where we create products. Most of this create products that are completely different than anything else on the market, and we want to grow our target audience in today’s day and age. We have that perfect tool of the Internet and e-commerce that we can grow.

Put the information out there and try to have them come to us kind of way. You know with our own store locations and this and that, it can become difficult. E-commerce closes that gap. It pretty much allows us to have people purchase new items on there. And you know, kind of give back a little bit more. So the reasons are pretty much to grow our target audience, which will grow into 1000 benefits. And having all these benefits, which I’ll get to the benefits later. But really, you know, growing our name, growing our brand, and that’s why we should utilize e-commerce, especially when we have something that’s different than everybody else on the market. When we had that one unique thing and we want to push it out to people across the globe or across the nation, you know and say we only have one location or two locations and we’re kind of a small organization.

In this is kind of a way to branch out, once we branch out we can become a lot bigger. Or we can do a lot more. So that’s where it comes with e-commerce, which is kind of cool, but there are a lot of design aspects that go into why we should use them. I mean one is that they’ll always reflect our brand too when it comes down to it. When, like the design aspect and why we should really utilize it, is it kind of gives that almost similar look and feel if you plan it right and you know how, what exactly what you’re doing if you know your target audience, you know what they’re looking for and you know what they like.

Going on that website is almost like being in the store because it gives that similar look and feel. It’s got that presentation like the way you present your product. It has your logo, it’s got your color scheme. It’s got your brand built into it.

So it kind of allows people to almost feel like they’re with you through that e-commerce site, and that’s the real reason why too. And that helps a lot more than you know. Another great reason is which is also a benefit and I could go into this a little bit later, but talk about it now. It’s easier to explain things you know when it comes to you. Being in the store, a lot of people want to learn about a product before they buy. They have it in mind, but they want to learn about it.

Trying to talk to someone or getting to talk to somebody trying to get all their questions, answers, and it’s usually always simple questions that is going to take up a lot more time than when you can just post in bullet points or small paragraphs on each product, which will take a lot less time for them to read it, understand it really quickly. Purchase that product and move on to another product they can purchase. Then rather than the store where they spend their whole amount of time that they planned on being in the store. Learning about a single product and at that point you know they might have spent too much time. They don’t even buy the product in or you know. If they do buy the product, sometimes that’s the only product they’re going to buy, so we have to look at it like that. You know, we can explain more, have more advantages, and you can even set up question and answer on there for them to even learn more to get past further questions that they might have had. But they might not have been able to ask in the store because of the time aspect.

So we can sell more. We can learn more inches, simpler, and it’s a lot faster and it really, you know we gotta keep expanding our target audience. So let’s get into some of the great benefits here. We’ll cover the benefits. I’d love to tell you every single benefit, but honestly I want to leave that door open one because you should go out and venture for yourself. Second, we would be sitting here all day. Just listen to me talk and I could go on for hours. I can even go on for days of the thousands of benefits and you know everybody has a different benefit. From all the success stories, I’ve heard having e-commerce sites we could go on for awhile but I want you to go out and see the benefits that are out there for yourself. Choose the ones that really reflect your brand in your organization will help you guys strive forward.

So when it comes to the benefits, I’m really going to talk about a couple. Let’s start with the target audience. Knowing your target audience. This is the best benefit of all, because if you know what your target audience is, you know what they’re looking for. You know how I talked about this couple of minutes ago, but I’m going to bring it up again. They’re going to spend more money on their site. You’re going to come back more and more again, they’re going to spend less time purchasing one item than they would in your store, so they’re going to purchase more.

You know all that in general is that’s one huge benefit, but we also have to look at if we know our target audience and we know what they’re looking for when they’re going to purchase stuff. They’re going to tell their friends, they’re going to tell their families, they’re going to tell their coworkers, they’re going to go out and tell people about this, and that’s going to expand our target audience. So when we expand our target audience, we open an array of doors that we never thought would be possible.

Pretty much just, you know, go out and how do I put it on? We can go out and expand our audience, expand them to new individuals who we never thought would come to us and we can gain more people. We can gain more return on our investments and pretty much we can build our brand and build our name. And we can then go on and build sub-brands and create more products. Create even better products. Expand our product line. So all of these are just massive huge benefits. Now the second one is we create more employment for workers within our country. Now I know a lot of you are like well this now with the economy. But we’re building our economy and when we build our economy, people spend more money.

And when people spend more money, we bring in more business. We employ more people and it’s just to keep cycle. So if we can build an e-commerce site and we can expand our target audience, we’ll have to hire more people by hiring more people. We’re building on the economy so it ends up becoming a huge benefit for us and we will get a larger return on our investment. It also builds up another benefit. It builds up our email lists. The one thing about email lists is it helps us reach out to other people who purchased once or twice before, you know, and within those we could send them greeting cards. We could sell them e-blasts. We could send up a ton of stuff through email, bringing them in. So if we build up our email sites and we push, you know, different email blasts with advertising in them which don’t take as long. They’re pretty cost-effective, so they’re not going to cost much. They’re going to come back and bring more money.

So all of these right there. Those are the simple benefits that we can improve. And then secondly, we can almost create our own virtual store location on the Internet. Having our own virtual store location helps people out a lot because people like to have that look and feel of a brand when they’re in a store and reflecting that on the Internet is almost a benefit because people are willing to buy more because they are, you know getting that feeling from it, even if they’re not there now. Thirdly, if we build our online e-commerce, we can build more store locations because we’ll have such a larger target audience.

When, for instance, if somebody needs something really quickly, they can run out to one of our store locations instead of ordering online, which could help if you have more store locations. It’s kind of just a huge cycle of everything. That kind of just pulls out from having such a useful tool like e-commerce. Now all these benefits are pretty amazing and they always refer back to how much we’re going to put ourselves out there. If we want to fully put ourselves out there, expand our target audience and everything we do, we can. There’s so many more benefits you can take. But if you want to limit yourself and you don’t think you’re going to have, you know too much that you’re going to be doing, then you know you’re going to limit your target audience and things can be limited. So if you want to expand, you can expand to the limits. You can expand past the limit. Now if you’re going to limit yourself, you’re cutting yourself off whatever you’ve limited yourself, so that’s how you have to look at it when it comes with benefits. And there’s just so many more out there and there’s just so many more things, but e-commerce is kind of cool, and it’s really important to be successful by always knowing your target audience. Because your target audience, if they like what they see, they like their experience, they’re going to come back and they’re going to purchase more. So really to get all these benefits, you know, research your target audience, figure out exactly what they’re looking for, and you know as things change. Update with them. Kind of keep following current trends, have it applied to your e-commerce site.

And that’s how you can grow and evolve, especially in this holiday season. You’ll be able to see what you’re doing right and see what you’re doing wrong. But when it comes to it, if you know you didn’t have that great of a holiday season as you had in the past, but you haven’t really changed anything, look to see what people are looking for today and then look to see what they’re looking for tomorrow. Especially tomorrow, because if you can look ahead and you find out what’s going to be trending in the future, you can tailor your site to that when that point comes. So always try to stay one step ahead of the game. Stay a step ahead of your target audience by knowing what they’re like and knowing what their patterns and what that pattern scheme is they’re going to be liking.

This is the perfect time now because it is the holiday season, where you can fully judge on what you’re looking for and you know we. At ArtVersion, we’ve done plenty of sites and we’ve offered many benefits to people. We’ve done e-commerce sites, we’ve done catalog sites, so even if you do a catalog site and refer back this all applies to that too. When it comes to catalog websites which are really similar to e-commerce, when you press a buy button, I know some of you out there may have them, but for those who don’t, basically when you would press buy it would send you or to the website of the company could buy it from.

Like the vendor, you can buy from or it’ll send you to a page with a bunch of vendors on it which is really cool and exciting. And for a lot of manufacturing companies where you have your products being sent out to vendors. Catalog sites will help you a lot more than e-commerce sites because then you know they can pick the vendor that they like buying it from. It’s kind of like a win-win situation. So if you were just strictly manufacturing, you work with a ton of vendors. You might want to be thinking about using the catalog site, but within those catalog sites, all these benefits refer back. But it really comes down to knowing your target audience and what they’re going to be looking for so we stay a step ahead of them.

Because you know the one thing about trends is: they are here today and gone tomorrow. And sometimes what people call for doesn’t always work out in everyone’s favor. So that’s the one thing you really have to look forward to. If they are here today, they can be gone tomorrow. So you always gotta stay on top of that and just know what people are looking for. Then expand your target audience and create those mailing lists with email advertising. You know the stuff that you can have that only reward people who are on your mailing list. You know if you do say today, 10% off every purchase your whole purchase, if you click here and make you know gives you a promo code to put in and then you know with those you’ll end up building your target audience, because they’ll tell their friends, they’ll tell their families, and they’ll tell their coworkers “Hey I got 10% off at so and so today because I got an email blast from it” and they’ll be like oh, “how do you do that?” and be like yeah all the time you just have to sign up.

And people end up spending money. It’s kind of a loss leader, but it ends up working out in the end because, you know, you give someone 10% off today. But they saw something they liked and they don’t have that 10% off. They’re going to come back tomorrow and they’re going to buy it because they missed out on their own. But you know if they still wanted it, so that’s kind of a huge benefit right there. So when it comes to e-commerce, just know your target audience know what they’re looking for. Provide the benefits that you feel are right for them, and provide them with the right information so you can get the benefits that you feel are right for you.

Well that’s about it. I just want you guys to go out, invent, and find the right aspects for your commerce. The time is right now. The holiday season is the time for you to be researching your own e-commerce sites. So next year you can be 10 times better than you were this year for the holiday season.

Well that’s about it for episode 44 of the Rediscover Your Brand Podcast. I’m your host Mike McCormick and this has been brought to you by ArtVersion Interactive Agency. You may contact us on Facebook, Twitter or our website. Thanks for listening!

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