There is no denying that having more money offers more utility than having less of it. Money, as a store of wealth, establishes financial certainty, and it affords us (pun intended) purchasing power in a modernising world that is exponentially becoming more expensive. For ecommerce platforms, profit maximisation is their primary vehicle for achieving business-security and future scalability. Hence, ecommerce businesses are encouraged to produce and sell nothing short of perfection! However, the ecommerce arena constitutes thousands of corporations clamouring for the diminishing attention-span of urban consumers online; strong brand visibility is what separates the big players from the small ones.
How do you situate yourself as the market-leader, if your target audience is not even wary of your existence? To let your voice be heard, ecommerce brands must engage in the following profit producing opportunities to not only establish brand dominance, but enlarge one’s pool of prospective customers to yield maximal profit:
Profit Producing Opportunity #1: Short, but Sweet: Twitter
With an extensive reach of over 186 million users, Twitter is an excellent platform to directly engage with a huge pool of prospective customers. Given its 280-character limit, why is Twitter so unwaveringly popular? With so many pieces of media struggling for our undivided attention, Twitter promotes “short-and-sweet” correspondence that takes less than 10 seconds to digest.
For ecommerce businesses, Twitter is a communicative forum to promote one’s products or offerings succinctly, or to briefly answer any questions posed by potential prospects. Any form of back-and-forth engagement fosters a sense-of-belonging with your company’s audience; we’re here to listen and serve you. Positive impressions matter: if customers enjoyed satisfactory experiences with your brand on twitter, positive digital word-of-mouth is likely to follow in the form of shares, retweets, and tags. Fundamentally, positive buzz is the online equivalent of “word-of-mouth” or free advertising.
Most importantly, each tweet has the imbued potential for spontaneous virality; the volume of retweets and shares determines what goes on the trending-topics tab. American Fast-Food Chain, Wendy’s, is widely lauded for its “tongue-in-cheek” banter with its ardent fans, with many of tweets reaching “trending status” over the years. Your marketing department should not take itself too seriously; at the end of the day, we’re all human too! Live a little and unwind!
Profit Producing Opportunity #2: Influencers on Instagram
As the name implies, influencers are meant to influence! Formally, influencers are individuals with a cult-like following on social media platforms such as Instagram. Their photographic feeds are deliberately curated to visually spotlight products and services from their sponsors to their diehard fanbase. Should followers express interest in any of the advertised products, users may tap on the hyperlinks embedded within the image, redirecting them to the sponsors’ official websites.
This presents a wonderful opportunity for ecommerce companies to showcase their products through influencer talent. If you’re a bag company centred on everyday carry (EDC), sponsoring renowned EDC influencers would be a noteworthy way to build up your pool of prospective customers. Always focus on sponsoring influencers that specialise in your industry to maximise customer retention.
Websites such as AspireIQ and Heepsy are wonderful recruitment databases for finding and selecting the influencers that best match your company’s ambitions.
Profit Producing Opportunity #3: Affiliate Marketing: Beyond Instagram.
We had mentioned Instagram as the go-to platform for influencers. Instagram is a wholly visceral experience that focuses on what consumers can “see” through an assembly line of images. But what about services? How does one market or advertise an intangible offering? The beauty of affiliate programs lies in its adaptability. Crafting an affiliate program allows you to spread the gospel that is your products and services across multiple platforms like Youtube, Facebook, websites, and blogs.
Here’s how an affiliate program works: companies pay its affiliates a commission for sending them traffic via customised hyperlinks. A generous program rewards its affiliates for driving more organic traffic. Therefore, they are strongly incentivised to extol the virtues of your company’s product or service in the hopes of increasing the size of their commission. Popular methods include explicit shoutouts on Youtube, and lengthy written features on industry-specific blogs. As long as your affiliates are driving traffic to your brand’s website through the provided hyperlinks, the same ends are being achieved!
Profit Producing Opportunity #4: Hiring a Virtual Assistant
There are only 24 hours within a day. As a budding business-owner, time is of the essence; every minute should be spent on scaling your ecommerce business, mapping the next steps forward. According to the HIPPO Bullseye, the opportunities discussed above fall under the purview of “dispassionate tasks”. Their importance cannot be understated, but these timely opportunities should be delegated to employees within your business.
As the business-owner, your duty is to determine where your ship is sailing towards, the sailing itself conducted by the sailors on deck. Moreover, digital marketing is a highly specialised realm that requires the expertise of trained professionals; mastering such a challenging field would erase months, or even years of productivity that could be invested elsewhere. Therefore, profit-producing opportunity 4 is arguably the most important step for unfettered, long-term growth: hiring a virtual assistant (VA).
Leveraging Hippo’s tried-and-tested S.O.S process, we cautiously traverse through a database of highly trained, and highly educated VAs. Every single profit-producing opportunity listed above, is a need that can be effortlessly met by a VA with the necessary skills. The best part? We assume the opportunity and search costs associated with finding a VA that best satisfies your criteria. Take a step out of the operator’s seat, and be the business-owner you were meant to be. Contact us for more details, and we will respond as soon as possible.
