5 Things to Keep in Mind while Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency

Once upon a time a brand walked into a digital marketing agency. And realised by 2025, digital ad spending will reach $800 billion!

Evidently, that isn’t a joke, but neither is hiring a digital marketing agency. Because with the rise in digital spending, more brands want a marketing partner who helps in telling their brand story to the right audience, over the right medium, at the right moment to evoke the right response and get the best ROI.

Too overwhelming? Too many metrics to measure? Too …

Worry not, Flora Fountain, the leading social media marketing agency in Ahmedabad and India shares just 5 things that can help you make a better decision while hiring a digital marketing agency.

TOP 5 FACTORS TO CONSIDER BEFORE YOUR HIRE A DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY

To hire or not to … hire a branding agency, is a question that you must answer after considering the following points:

• Identify your purpose
• Look for an agency with experience and expertise
• Understand the agency’s processes and strategies
• Evaluate the results promised
• Value for money and price play

Let’s dive into the details.

Identify your purpose

Before you venture out to hire a digital marketing agency, introspect and ask yourself:

What end goal am I trying to reach?

• Is it to increase my reach online?
• Or keep the existing audience more engaged through content?
• Do I need help creating content?
• Evaluate the results promised
• Or help enhancing conversions?

What particular service does my brand require?

• What services am I expecting the agency to deliver? (Hint: You want to hire a branding agency for things like brand strategy, identity & logo creation and an eCommerce website development company for things like website development or eCommerce management)
• Will I require one set of services like social media marketing services and then need to expand my scope beyond it? (In such cases you might want to go with a full-service digital marketing agency, which can provide multiple services)

How much am I willing to keep aside as a marketing budget?

• Will I be dedicating a percentage of my sales to marketing?
• Or do I want to invest an initial amount and decide based on the results?

By answering these three questions you will be able to pinpoint WHY you need to hire a digital marketing agency and WHAT services you require from them today or in the future.

LOOK FOR INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE AND EXPERTISE

Once your goal is set, initiate filtering to identify agencies that have an expertise in your particular industry or the services you are looking for.

It is important to make sure the digital agency has relevant expertise and experience. Inquire and research their specialities and previous successes.

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B2B Ecommerce: How Is It Different From B2C

Everyone has heard and knows about Alibaba and Amazon. One is a Chinese ecommerce giant and the other is an American multinational entity. Both are known for their digital sales, but there is one thing that makes them very different.

Alibaba is a primarily Business to Business (B2B) shopping platform whereas Amazon is a Business to Consumer (B2C) platform. They both sell, but to different audiences, with completely different business models in place. What separates the two? Let’s take a deep dive into what makes B2B ecommerce different from B2C or retail ecommerce.

THE REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN B2B AND B2C

In a B2B business model, a business, that is a manufacturer or wholesaler, sells their products to another business, usually a retailer. While in a B2C business model, the same retailer then sells these goods to the end-consumers. And there are several differences here, right from the expectations of the customers, the margins on products, down to the quantity ordered and even the method of shipping these products.

YES, THIS MEANS THEIR ECOMMERCE WEBSITES NEED TO BE DIFFERENT TOO

As both business models serve different sets of target groups, their ecommerce websites are developed differently too. As the top ecommerce website development company in Ahmedabad having provided ecommerce website solutions to some of the biggest brands across the country, we’ve listed down the top 7 differentiators between B2B and B2C websites:

CURATED HOMEPAGE

The homepage of a B2B website has a simple, clutter-free design with a focus on the products being sold, accompanied by highly informative product details, alongwith SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit) and reference images. These modules often have a quick order system for buyers who already know the product name or its SKU code.

In comparison, the homepage of a B2C website has a lot going on. The design is usually intriguing and engaging, with multiple entry points for exploring the product range. The content is quirkier to create desire for the customer to explore the products some more. Often discounts and special offers are highlighted to push the website visitors to buy.

TAILORED CONTENT AND IMAGES

The content on B2B websites focuses on providing a lot of information about the product to the visitor, since the target groups here are typically business owners, purchase managers, stockists, etc. who evaluate and compare on the basis of detailed buying guides, demo videos, and in-depth articles. The idea is to give the buyer all the information they could want before placing a bulk order.

On B2C websites, the content is tailored to grab eyeballs of visitors with short, enticing and catchy headlines accompanied by multiple high resolution images of the product. Often the images for product images are highly styled and sometimes they will make use of models too, for increasing engagement and relatability. In addition, the content champions the discounts offered, favourable customer reviews and its striking features to convince the buyer to make a purchase decision pronto.

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Here’s How to UP Your Ecommerce Game!

Did you know that there are approximately 12 million – 24 million Ecommerce websites in the world? And with every passing day, more sites are being created. This shows how fierce the competition is in the current market and how starting and surviving in an Ecommerce world comes with its own set of challenges.

A brand needs much more than a beautifully designed website to stand out from the crowd. So, to make sure that your Ecommerce store is providing shoppers with a quality shopping experience, it’s crucial to know what pain points you’re likely to face as an Ecommerce business and how to solve these problems.

From audience retention to generating targeted traffic, one of Ahmedabad’s best Ecommerce website design and development agencies, Flora Fountain has identified some major Ecommerce pain points faced by brands while setting up their website and is here with some tips on how to solve them.

ABANDONMENT RATE

No one likes to be abandoned! Not even the brands!

But unfortunately, ECommerce stores have an average 69.57% abandonment rate, which means that only 3 out of 10 potential customers complete a purchase when shopping online.

Cart abandonment is when a customer picks a product they want, adds it to the cart, goes to the checkout window and leaves the website from there. There could be many reasons behind this action, like unexpected and additional costs (hidden taxes, shipping charges) calculated over and above the sale price, better prices on other websites, long and complex checkout processes, long delivery durations, confusing return policies, to name a few.

How to solve it?

While it is next to impossible for a brand to achieve zero cart abandonments, there are certain steps which could help them bring it down considerably.

– One option is to show progress bars on every step of the shopping process. Because the human mind is hardwired to follow trails and complete them. This will prompt them to finish the purchase.

– Maintaining transparency by showing the complete breakdown of the product’s pricing, including the taxes, the shipping costs, and any other fees makes the customer trust the brand more.

– Reminders are also a great way to prod customers to go back to their cart and finish their purchase. It is usually done by emailers or SMSes.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Millennials value personalization! Like having recommendations from support staff, prompt replies to solve their shipping or payment issues, etc. Because good customer service makes customers make repeat purchases with the company.

Whereas poor customer service leads to customers backing out from purchases. About 78% of customers back out of a purchase because of a poor customer experience. Customers are not able to speak to a person who can provide them with the answers they are looking for. Customers are put on hold for unreasonable lengths of time.

How to solve it?

A brand should incorporate a WhatsApp number or Facebook messenger chatbot along with other chat options for the customers which are available 24*7. A live customer support team, not robots will be a big help to the site. Encourage user-generated content that spreads the word about their customer service experience.

The brand should also add a ‘contact’ section on their Ecommerce website along with information on top of every page with clickable phone numbers and emails. This adds to a brands’ credibility.

PRODUCT SEARCH

Imagine what customers would do if they were not able to find what they are looking for on a site because they either don’t know the name or they don’t remember it. They would go on a site where the site itself helps them to find what they are looking for.

This means that if a brand is unable to show its customers what they are looking for, the brand may lose them to competitors who are actually doing what the customers want. Enter, Search Box!

How to solve it?

A brand should place a search box in a visible location like a top right hand on the page and use attention-grabbing colours to it because it matters to the customers. Ahmedabad’s Flora Fountain, with its best Ecommerce web development services, developed Falguni Gruh Udhyog’s ( Falguni Vastrapur) website and added the search the same way to help its local customers.

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Upselling & Cross-Selling To Increase Sales on Your Ecommerce Website

Indians spend close to 6 hours every day on the internet. And 50% of the overall online traffic is on online shopping websites looking for products and services. While this trend has gotten a lot of small businesses to start selling online too, many still lack the marketing strategy to capitalize on this trend. And to stand out amongst the multitudes selling online.

As a digital agency in Ahmedabad, focusing as an ecommerce website development company in Ahmedabad, Flora Fountain, always suggests its clients to start upselling and cross-selling online as a part of their digital sales strategy. In short, this means building features on ecommerce websites that encourage customers to add more products to their cart during or even post checkout. But, what is the difference between upselling and cross-selling? And how can they be used more effectively to increase the size of each transaction and retain customers? Read on…

Upselling and cross-selling are commonly confused, but there is a key difference. While upselling focuses on increasing order value, cross-selling involves making a recommendation adjacent to the original product. So an upsell is more of an upgrade, whereas a cross-sell is a whole other purchase.

Wait, wait… Let’s try it with a more relatable example. When a hungry customer orders a burger at a McDonald’s, the guy on the other side of the counter says, “Would you like some fries to go with it?”

That’s a cross-selling pitch. Now, if the counter guy had said, “You can make this a Big Mac for just X rupees/dollars”. That is an upselling pitch. With the world going digital (yes, we’re not going to stop saying it!), brands can implement the same sales strategy on their websites too… Here’s how!

SHOP THE LOOK

This technique works well for fashion and lifestyle brands. When a visitor selects a product, say a shirt or a kurta, then the display page will show a small module right below the description, where a high definition picture of a model wearing the said shirt/kurta, along with a jacket, trousers, shoes and sunglasses. Now, this technique should be used when all the products in question are available on the website.

Brands like FabIndia, Ray Ethnic and major ecommerce players like Amazon and Myntra use this method of cross selling heavily to increase the cart value of the visitors on their page. Plus, the customers benefit from this, as they get their desired outfit ready to pick and delivered to them for a flat rate of shipping.

USE SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPARISONS

This is a great method of upselling, mostly used by brands that sell electronics and electrical products, where upgrades matter a lot. Let’s take an example of a mobile phone purchase here. When a customer selects a mobile phone model by Samsung, with specific features involving storage, processor speed, camera quality, etc, he/she is shown a module with a slider consisting of similar mobile phones from the same and different brands, but a slightly upgraded version with an increased price.

Since the placement of these products are such that the viewer can immediately compare the look and feel, and the features of the phone with the price difference, there are high chances of him/her picking the upgraded model as they won’t mind shelling out a few extra bucks for a better model.

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How to Turn Blog Traffic into Sales on Your Ecommerce Website

The first-ever blog on the internet is believed to have appeared in 1994, and as of 2020, the Growth Badger reported that there were over 600 million blogs globally. Over 60% of internet users engage with some of the other kinds of blogs daily and an average person spends up to 37 seconds reading a blog.

Yes, every figure mentioned here is true and shows how important it is to publish blogs regularly to draw traffic to a website. And when the website in question is an ecommerce platform, there are surefire ways to convert this blog traffic into sales. And 86% of companies produce blog content compared to other formats.

Flora Fountain, an ecommerce website development and design company in Ahmedabad, India has compiled a list of to-dos and tips on how to convert the website traffic from the blogs into leads and paying customers.

PLAN THE SALES FUNNEL

A sales funnel the path a visitor on the website takes, from reading the blog to eventually purchasing the product. If there is not sales funnel planned out for every blog being published on the website, then it is nothing but just some reading material for the website visitor.

Ideally, this is how a Sales Funnel Looks like:

Visitors – Blog Post – Call to Action – Landing Page – Thank You page or pop-up

Now, these visitors can be people who directly clicked and reached the blog, or got drawn to it through other means like social media. From these blog posts, the visitors are prompted to engage with the website through strategically placed Call to Action (CTA) links and buttons. These CTAs can be either a data collection module or a link that leads to a product page. Once the customer makes the purchase or provides his/her data, they are greeted with a Thank You page or a pop-up. This link of sales funnel helps the blogs to be utilised to its full potential.

CREATE VALUABLE CONTENT THAT THE CUSTOMERS WANT

One of the best ways to convert visitors into a regular readers and eventually, paying customers of the business, is by providing them with content that addresses their pain-points, solves their problems and gives something worth the 5 minutes spent reading the blog.

Ahmedabad-based ethnic fashion brand Ray Ethnic writes blogs which provide their readers with tips and styling tricks for various seasons and occasions, and smartly plugs their products within their content.

This way, the chances of their regular blog readers clicking on the call to action links smartly embedded in the images and on the names of their outfits are increased. These links lead to their product pages with an option to buy online. Check out their blogs here.

ENSURE THAT THE BLOG IS READABLE AND ACCESSIBLE ON ALL TYPES OF DEVICES

According to a Statista report, in the year 2020, close to 4.28 billion people were accessing the internet using their mobile phones. And it will take hardly 2 seconds for any of this user to abandon a website or a link if it doesn’t open properly on their handheld devices.

Hence, it is necessary to have a responsive ecommerce website in the first place, one which opens seamlessly and runs smoothly on all kinds of mobile devices and browsers too. Secondly, the blogs shouldn’t be too long, otherwise the reader will abandon the blog halfway and leave the sales funnel.

Ideally, a blog should be of minimum 800 words. Because it contains enough word-space plus at least 5 products in it, it takes hardly 3 minutes to read a blog of this size, and that it can be optimized for SEO with the right keywords too.

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Increase your online sales through these ecommerce marketing strategies

Marketing plays an important role in driving sales for a business, whether they are offline or online. But the strategies that drive traffic to ecommerce platforms and further convert them into sales are completely different from traditional practices.

Here’s a look into some interesting and proven ecommerce strategies that can help brands sell more through their ecommerce websites. You’re welcome!

CROSS SELLING

One of the most effective ways to increase the cart value of the customer is to cross sell. Cross selling means selling a different product to the customer, either as an alternative or an addition to the product that’s already added to the cart. Ecommerce websites like Myntra and Amazon usually have a section called “Frequently Bought Together” where they show combos of products that complement each other.

Amazon.in cross selling multiple shirts on their product page

For instance, if a customer is looking to purchase a mobile phone online and as they scroll down, it will show a combined price window with a pair of earphones and power bank. It lures the customers into thinking he/she is getting a great deal in purchasing all of three products together.

BUILD UP A SENSE OF URGENCY

Another great ecommerce marketing strategy to encourage customers to purchase a product is by creating a sense of urgency in their minds, of missing out on buying the said product if they don’t act now or. The idea is to offer the customer a short window to make the decision and have a feeling of getting a great deal out of it.

There are various ways to do it. One of the most commonly practiced methods is to entice them by showing the quickly running out stock levels. When a customer sees that the product they just liked might go out of stock soon, chances are, he/she will end up buying it.

Rayethnic.com creating a sense of urgency by highlighting high demand of their products

Another way to create a sense of urgency is to offer a limited period discount or benefit. For instance, Amazon displays a pop-up under many of its products which offers either an attractive price deduction or a free overnight shipping if the customer places an order within X number of hours.

BLOGS

Now, this is a long-term strategy which requires quality content and consistency over a period of time, but the benefits are many. Blogging is an effective and proven strategy used by major ecommerce marketing companies in India.

But, how do blogs help?

Blogs are among the best ways to boost an ecommerce website’s organic SEO reach. Blogs give businesses a channel to engage with their regular customers through well written blogs that offer value to them. Just like how Ray Ethnic does with their blogs. They offer fashion tips and product suggestions and promote ethnic fashion through their well written articles.

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