Types of eCommerce Consulting
As someone who might be looking to drive success through online channels, it’s essential to bring on help from those that have done it in the past and invest in firms, consultants, and agencies to streamline and deliver results quickly. This way, you get to elevate your company's output, sales, and the general standard of your organization. There are several focus areas outlined that serve various purposes. Some organizations may only have one offering while others may have multiple.
Website Design and Development
When you enter a space and see the curated paintings of an alphabet, toy bins full of balls and action figures, a playground, classrooms, and small cubbies it’s easy to tell you’re in a school. The same applies to every good website. A quick glance at any website should resonate volumes about the purpose of the website along with any products sold or services rendered by it. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his sensational book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking,
“There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis”.
Attention to intention and purpose is the beginning of creating a mindful web space for visitors, customers, and others to share the space in a way that drives the overall objective.
The framework and processes on which the user experience is built and is managed is the key. A coordinated website has its customer journeys mapped and planned to drive the optimal outcomes. Starting off with a basic design style as a baseline and selecting colors, fonts, texts, images that resonate with the audience will help keep visitors on the site. Creating curated experiences that personalize will help drive objectives even better. It’s all easier said than done and oftentimes ends up second in priority due to the efforts involved or upfront work needed. It’s easy to take on and project a view of the site that is from the perspective of the company when it should always be about the customer.
Mobile traffic is on the rise and not going away any time soon. Many websites and apps are taking a mobile-first approach building the majority of their functionality to be optimized for mobile before thinking about desktop.
There are lots of digital agencies well trained in designing and building websites. Their services should be called upon to give your company the web design touch needed. A good web design and development consultant should be able to maintain a website and also the relationship between the web users and the company. A good rule of thumb to navigate these agencies is “you get what you pay for”. You’re almost better off working with a team that understands your purpose and communicates back to you excessively as they will understand what you’re trying to bring to life.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A search engine optimization consultant sees to the formulation, management, and running of a company's search engine optimization structures. For the eCommerce sector of every organization to excel, an SEO consultant will take the lead in shaping or reshaping the top of the funnel optimization structures around the organization.
In-depth knowledge of search engines like Google and Bing tops amongst the requirements of the consultant. Understanding how their engines function and rank websites is critical. The combination of technological know-how and calculative skills helps to boost ROI.
Like a really good traffic driver and controller, the SEO consultant should know where and when to spread the word of the company that will bring the firm a good harvest. Search engine optimization consultants are gurus in the art of keyword strategies. Keywords are meant to be developed and expanded by the consultant through the means of research and discoveries.
Whilst the company's website is being managed, the structure of the contents that are dished to the public and the links around the websites are brought under scrutiny by the consultant here. The site must be user-friendly and the users must navigate through it with the utmost ease.
SEO increases the quality and quantity of traffic from search engines to a firm's website. Good and quality content is an expressway to drive traffic. The consultation paves way for the company's website to create great content that will generate the desired outcome whether it’s leads or conversions or quality clients. The specialist or consultant should be able to harness new trends to benefit the firm and see that the referrals, clickthrough rates, and sales perform well.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Increasing the visibility of a website in a search engine results page is through paid advertisement on search engines. Sometimes SEM is also referred to as “paid search”. Organizations pay, and sometimes a lot of money, to appear at the top of a search engine’s result pages. The work here will direct the company on how to go about their advertising on search engines. This is one of the most efficient ways of driving traffic and increasing digital commerce. What makes SEM different from SEO is that SEM is driven through paid advertisement while SEO uses organic non-paid search strategies to increase rankings and increase visibility.
As the advertising appears on the page, the user may click on it and get directed to the firm's website where buying and selling may take place. SEM usually goes along with keyword selection and PPC (pay-per-click). This not only generates income for the organization but also the search engines. A good SEM consultant will direct an organization on how to generate profit through pay-per-click. The strategic adverts, cost-efficiency, and a host of strategies should be according to the direction of the consultant for the best results.
Social Media
Social media uses an interesting model to surface websites, products and services. Whereas traditional websites are focused on people finding products, social media flips that model and provides an opportunity for products to find people. Usually your intention to go to a retail website might be to browse, learn about, and potentially purchase products. On social media you’re typically there to be engaged with the world and what’s happening and from there advertising and media now presents brands, products, services, and more on what is deemed relevant to you.
Hootsuite has found that
“52% of all online brand discovery still happens in public social feeds”
The likes of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, now take on roles in the business of digital marketing. Usually, an organization will be directed on how to create their social media pages, promote brand awareness, gain followers, and build an online community on various platforms.
The services of celebrities and social media influencers are also engaged to garner as many promotions and awareness as possible. Referrals, invitations, giveaways, promos, and limited offers are (in)direct digital strategies for promoting products and brand popularity.
Just as traditional media and advertising on magazines, billboards and commercials used to, a brand's copy and visuals usually carry the spotlight. A continuous, steady flow of top-quality content put in alluring styles, sometimes, laced with the right humor makes prospective clients enticed to your brand. The better that content resonates with potential customers, the more likely they are to engage with the transactional side of the brand.
All thanks to the digital marketing seen on social media, various platforms have been put in place to make e-commerce easier. Facebook's Marketplace and Twitter's Analytics, which is used to track the rate of content's engagements are amongst the said platforms.
Digital Marketing Agency
These agencies are the one-stop shop for many digital marketing needs which may include one or multiple areas mentioned earlier. While they can start with doing SEO, SEM, and Social Media marketing, they may also focus more on lead generation, analytics, web design, and other creative asset development.
Their overarching goal is to help you be successful as possible in whatever ways I can. Oftentimes they’re building on new capabilities and offerings to support whatever that might be for you.
Information Technology (IT)
A bit removed from the front end customer facing side of things comes understanding the technology and optimizing the stack. While this has a baseline of covering security across systems, encryption, PII, and more this is also focused on creating synergies between various tools on hand to create a system that allows data, information, products and services to flow fluidly. Many fall into the trap of finding services at the cheapest price in this realm and may fail to realize that a depth of knowledge and experience to understand true intention may not be seen directly from the outcomes of these services.
Fixing faulty hardware and software systems, handling of high tech projects, management of brand's networks, troubleshooting are all handled by this team but are only technical skills. The consultant must discover potential technological risks in a timely fashion and solve them before things go south or to help prevent any technology related bottlenecks that might prevent future growth of the organization.
Digital and Business Strategy
These folks are the ones that are there to guide and provide direction on how to grow your business from multiple aspects. They may not have any tangible outputs other than advice, experiences, and slides to bounce ideas and thoughts off of, however, they are imperative to being mindful on why and how to go about generating solutions instead of succumbing to whatever solutions are presented to you from marketing.
The depth to their involvement is based on what you’re looking for them to do. It can stem from guidance on how to improve the functionality of existing eCommerce platforms or how to effectively utilize a digital marketing tool all the way to developing a business case and execution plan for various channels and market segments.
They’ll spend time looking at current KPIs and metrics that are related to your goals and objectives to find ways to achieve them through tactics and increase customer satisfaction. Their plan and roadmap is the north star that everything should tie back to in order to achieve those big dreams.
Oftentimes experiences in digital transformations through change management, organizational change, customer experience, marketing and more are great backgrounds to accelerate growth. They’ll help you stay on a path that’s relevant, competitive, and profitable.
Finding the right eCommerce or digital commerce consultant and advisor for your digital growth is just as important as taking the first step. In this new journey, partnerships are the replacement model for employees, and this holds especially true for a space that is quickly evolving and expertise in new areas is desired quickly to deliver.
Reach out to me if you have any questions or would like to talk about what services I have to offer.
