The eCommerce space is a fast moving and exciting business environment where only the most reactive and aware brands will succeed. With so much competition online it can be extremely challenging to establish yourself, but the potential rewards for successfully doing so are equally compelling. Below we’re looking at some of the leading marketing trends being employed by small businesses and brands looking to cut through the noise in 2022 and make a name for themselves online.
Everyone’s Jumping on the Short-Form Video Bandwagon
Back in 2016, TikTok was just another social network amidst a sea of challenger platforms maneuvering to take a bite out Meta’s dominance in the space. Few could have imagined that in just a few years, the entire social media landscape would be pivoting to emulate this upstart platform, but that is precisely what happened.
Perhaps this shouldn’t come as too great a surprise, after all, when Snapchat rolled out its story feature, enabling users to share snippets of video and pictures in a temporary feed, it wasn’t long before Instagram and Facebook adopted their own equivalent feature. Yet TikTok’s emphasis on ultra-short form video content in portrait orientation caught Big Tech sleeping, and the platform captured the hearts and minds.
Now we’re seeing virtually every platform scrambling to regain lost ground by feverishly integrating their own take on short-form video into their apps and trying to figure out why Gen-Z loves TikTok so much. From YouTube Shorts to Instagram Reels, and even Netflix promoting clips from its shows in-app through the portrait medium, short-form video content has arrived with a bang.
It goes without saying that any brand looking to establish a presence on social media in 2022 needs to be negotiating some kind of relationship with creating portrait-orientation shorts, lest they be left by the wayside.
Beating the Algorithm through Online Comparison Platforms
Online comparison platforms, or OCPs for short, refer to websites or services that are built around collating together reputable brands from a specialist sector. You can find OCPs furnishing a wide range of sectors in fact, but the commonality they share is that they typically rank and review brands based on several factors in order to provide their patrons with a useful and accessible overview of the relevant market.
For example, Arabian Betting delivers a list of the best online casinos in Qatar for its users to peruse. Not only does this platform assess each on its individual merits, but it ranks them according to their range of features, quality of customer service, and range of promotional offers. In fact, OCPs like this is typically one of the best ways for brands to present welcome bonuses and special offers to new users, and as such, the rate of conversion for brands from such platforms is higher than through ordinary web searches.
For this reason, appearing on these platforms is a great way to get noticed, and establish yourself in a sector. These platforms also serve as marks of quality, as they carefully vet which providers to list on their websites in pursuit of publishing a trustworthy resource to their users.
Can’t Beat Them, Join Them
Nowadays, the impact of major web stores like Amazon is hard to ignore. In 2021 alone Amazon generated almost half a trillion dollars in revenue. As such, if you’re a brand seeking to increase the discoverability of a physical product you’re promoting, it’s hard to make a case for competing against this behemoth on equal footing.
Instead, seeking out a means of getting listed on such platforms could be the golden ticket you’re looking for. Listing on Amazon, for example, will give your product vital exposure that will only be boosted once you begin receiving positive reviews for it. Of course, these platforms will take their cut – with Amazon seller fees taking a percentage of anything from 7% to 15% depending on the product category you’re working in. Ultimately though, as a means to establish a foothold online, this investment may just be worth it.
It’s also worth considering whether your brand may be better served by more specialist marketplaces. For example, Etsy has established itself as the leading web store to find small businesses selling a range of craft and artisanal goods. If your product fits into this category you may want to forgo the likes of Walmart or Amazon in favor of allying yourself with the smaller but more targeted Etsy.
