Most digital marketers will be aware that the divisions between social media, search and e-commerce have been blurring in recent years.
Indeed, people’s online activity has turned into one ongoing, giant experience – across platforms and devices – rather than many separate, smaller interactions.
As nearly every aspect of our daily lives becomes more digitally oriented, consumers are not only spending large amounts of time online, they’re also spending much more money online as well – on groceries, clothes, just about any and every household item, and much more.
It won’t be long, for example, before Amazon is America’s largest retailer, according to market research firm Packaged FactsOpens a new window , which predicts Jeff Bezos’ company will overtake Walmart in 2022.
Golden ticket
As people continue to turn to their devices for their shopping needs, the reach and potential of e-commerce sites has been expanding significantly, especially for marketers. Developments in martech and adtech have given e-tailers the ability to gather, catalogue and leverage copious volumes of consumer data, giving them unprecedented power and influence.
While it may seem odd that companies are increasingly investing their marketing dollars on online shopping sites, it makes sense when you consider that these companies can now offer the golden ticket every digital marketer wants: vast quantities of shoppers’ actual purchase data.
As such, Amazon is fast becoming one of the world’s major digital advertising playersOpens a new window .
Integrating digital marketing
Think about it: If more and more people are using a website like Amazon to shop, it is only logical that vendors would invest in on-site marketing to get their products to outshine the competition and grab more market share.
Consequently, retailers and e-tailers are catching on to the fact that they can make serious money from adding an integrated digital marketing platform to the services they offer vendors.
Shopify, one of Amazon’s major up-and-coming competitors – which has just reported year-on-year revenue growth of 45% to around $390 million – has invested substantially in making martech more accessible and affordable to its merchants. Martech Today‘s Jennifer Cannon says Shopify has been adding different marketing integrations and featuresOpens a new window for its merchants, including an integration with Microsoft Advertising that enables merchants to expand the reach of their marketing campaigns.
Walmart has also sought to overtake AmazonOpens a new window in targeting online consumers and expanding its advertising business. It acquired adtech company Polymorph Labs as a step toward its goal of developing an advanced ad platform capable of helping brands that sell through Walmart use consumers’ shopping preferences and behavior to target specific audience segments.
So what?
To me, the rapid evolution of adtech and martech in e-commerce is leading to the development of a new landscape in which marketers can compete.
Just as brands duke it out on social media to capture audience attention and consolidate market share, we are seeing the same in the e-tailer space. This trend is being especially driven by the growth of competitors to Amazon.
That’s why marketers at B2C product-selling companies need to develop dynamic and robust e-commerce marketing strategies. As brands increasingly sell on these sites, it is becoming critical to stand out from rivals.
It’s like just about any other digital marketing segment or strategy, whether it’s SEO, content marketing or social media: If everybody’s doing it, how are you going to do it better?
As more brands push their products online, we can expect etailers to invest time, resources and money into developing the best possible ad solutions their clients can use to boost sales.