Trends in E-Commerce Marketing

In today’s fast-paced world, keeping up with marketing trends is crucial for success in e-commerce. Let’s explore the current trends, strategies, and insights into how businesses can enhance their online presence and grow their sales effectively.

The Rise of Performance Marketing

Performance marketing is being embraced widely within the e-commerce sector. Why? Because it allows businesses to track results in real-time. Marketers can see which strategies work day by day, allowing for quick adjustments. Companies can provide immediate feedback to clients, enhancing the relationship and improving marketing efforts over time.

The Importance of Real-Time Data

Having access to real-time data lets businesses:

Analyze performance consistently
Alter marketing strategies based on what’s working
Increase efficiency in ad spending
Understanding and acting on data is key to staying competitive.
Industry Trends to Watch
While evaluating trends, some industries are poised for significant growth. For instance, the vegan industry is becoming more mainstream. Companies within this sector need to focus on building a strong online brand presence.

Emerging Sectors to Consider

Health and Wellness: More consumers are seeking natural and organic products.
Sustainability: Eco-friendly brands are gaining traction with consumers who care about the environment.
Digital Education: Online learning platforms are surging in popularity.
These sectors present opportunities for e-commerce businesses to expand effectively by adapting to market changes.

Balancing Performance and Organic Marketing

A common question businesses face is how to balance performance marketing with organic marketing. While performance marketing provides quick results, organic marketing builds lasting connections over time.

Why Both Matter

Performance Marketing: Delivers immediate returns and measurable outcomes. Ideal for short-term campaigns.
Organic Marketing: Focuses on creating valuable content and relationships, benefiting businesses long-term.
A recommended approach is to allocate about 25-30% of your budget to organic efforts. This balance can result in steady growth and sustainability.

Strategies for Offline to Online Transition
For businesses already operating offline, transitioning online can be beneficial. It’s essential to maintain consistency in pricing and branding.

Key Steps for Transitioning

Utilize Existing Customer Data: Use contact numbers from previous customers to create targeted online audiences.
Retargeting Campaigns: Show ads to customers who have engaged with your brand offline. This can help spark their interest once again.

Price Consistency: Ensure that pricing remains the same online as it does offline. This builds trust with your customers.
Effective Marketing in the Education Sector
Educational institutions also face the challenge of reaching their audience effectively. Universities can enhance their marketing strategies by focusing on both online and community engagement.

Approaches for Educational Marketing

Community Building: Establishing a strong community can be more rewarding than just running ads. Building trust is essential for long-term success.
Utilizing Student Content: Engage students in creating content for the college’s online platforms. This not only provides fresh content but also encourages student involvement.

Conclusion
Marketing trends are ever-evolving, especially in the e-commerce landscape. Embracing performance marketing while maintaining a strong organic presence is vital for long-term success.

By adapting to industry trends, balancing strategies, and efficiently transitioning from offline to online, businesses can navigate this competitive space and achieve sustained growth.

Whether you’re running an e-commerce business or an educational institution, understanding your audience and maintaining engagement will lead you to success.

Let’s break the suitable definition of marketplace:

A platform where variety of brands cater to a single set of audience. In which the brands compete in themselves to come up with the best offers and gain additional source of traffic from these marketplaces.

The purpose of this blog is to make edtech brands aware of which are teh platforms they need to be active to engage with thier crowd (students):

Few of the popular marketplaces that supports edtech brands:

GenZDealZ.ai: GenZDealZ.ai generates deals on-boarding India’s hyperlocal businesses & edtech brands specifically designed to empower the GenZ with AI/ML insights and discounts on variety of categories. By understanding the financial constraints faced by students and hence their GenAI engine churns out the best educational deals possible to make students life & college experience both affordable and enriching.

Amazon: Amazon isn’t just for shopping, rather it is also for accessing various learning materials (ebooks, books, learning software, etc.). Many Indian educators are using Amazon for distributing thier books, notes and guides for exams, due to thier amazing delivery system, Amazon becomes the 1st choice to list thier learning stuff.

Unstop: Supported by central govt. and a well funded learning platform for all kinda students. Not just focussing on internship, jobs or projects, but also hackathons, scholarships, contests, short quiz, Unstop talent, etc. You can say unstop as the total ecosystem for everything students need in thier academics.

Unstop is best for brands like Microsoft Learning, Byjus to launch various competitions, enter into teh campuses and gain some offline brand recall too.

Udemy: Though listing your courses on your own LMS has many benefits, utilising few third party platforms like Udemy helps to gain global reach. You may not list your signature course here, soemethign like a crash course/short masterclass would give students a brief taste of your teaching/delivery style.

I’ve given you the brief about the platforms popular in India. However there’re many cons of these marketplaces that may not favour your marketing strategy.

Cons of Various Marketplaces:

• External control & policies: Many terms are updated like payment period, commission or platform fee, watermark placement, etc. and this has a ripple effect on other platforms too.
• Students support: While mentioning doubt solving, LIVE QnA, etc. seems attractive. But if these commitments aren’t met students would lose the loyalty & won’t consider any of your future products from these 3rd party soruces.
• Leak of products/learning material: Sharing of notes/courses/any kinda recordings is common among Indian students (following our school approach – textbooks &guides sharing). So content security layers are affected when you involve external parties
• Ineffective followups: Leads are meant for instant followups. Especially students whore highly impatient needs quick communication by knowing thier want. You may not get the real time status of the leads
• Tech & uninformed updates: AI is the current change that is bringing new way to ask doubts, learning structured way and progressive analytics. Dashboard updates for students & for the vendor too becomes time consuming to learn & adapt further.

How did we run the ABCD campaign?

Here at GenZdealZ ai we had signed up for the downloads and the total engagement the app will get in the given period

Here ABCD campaign was started with the psychology:
– To remove the existing UPI players and gain a good mindshare of students as a Indian based all-in-one UPI
– To understand what India’s GenZ manage finance and curate the future products accidentally
– To know the consumption pattern and check whether any UPI player will survive in this competitive space.

The engagement was defined as app download, UPI registration and transaction of minimum 150
Here the target audience: students
Region pan-India focus and any offline space GenZ would interact at

Main challenges we faced:
– real-time transaction tracking
– contract with multiple partnerships
– non-responsive students and integration issues

Why does the target achievement take more than 4 months to achieve?

A) ABCD is a trusted brand and having that kinda all in one UPI app helps the students in their personal finance too:
– credit tracking
– fund tracking
– insurance diversity
– financial literacy education
– more sections yet to add
So while promoting the app students had the awareness for the brand and was willing to engage

B) As told above students were keen to engage, however when it comes to banking activities many feels it’s a scam and refrain from following the lengthy process of registration and receiving the cashback

C) Students exam and offline mobilization. For quick mobilization we had chosen the following areas:
– Campus canteen to paste the QR and have a volunteer to push students pay via QR after download ABCD app
– College fest was another destination to allocate a point based system which was installed by one Mumbai University campus where commissions wer given as per their activities

What move did ABCD make in the November end?

ABCD announced that the downloads via the partner will stop for a month and partners won’t see the affiliate dashboard, this was done for the following reasons:
– To see the activities and retention time of students without any external push
– To see the students behaviour and on which brands or vertical they use the most
– To analyse the pattern in the transaction frequency and for which students willing to spend the most

Why am I reviewing this event?

I’m working as a Community Coordinator at GenZDealZ.ai (side projects still going on:)) and reviewing such types of expos & events helps marketers to analyse which destination is right as per thier product & audience. So talking about Sankalp Bharat 2024…

During the recent event of Sankalp Bharat 2024, Varanasi..Akshay Shah (Founder & CEO – GenZDealZ.ai) represented on behalf of GenZDealZ.ai team.

Standees designed by me (had used for the past Govt. event too):

In aspect of GenZdealZ.ai here our audience was GenZ (college students, PHD scholars and other nearby school students who wants to see new innovation happening around India)

Overall Footfall: 500+

Students visited at our stall: 100+

Number of downloads: 20+ (via word of mouth & social media locally)

Brand Partnerships: 3

GenZs are quick in decision – if something doesn’t interest them at 1st time they wont’ consider it again.

Why GenZDealZ.ai Choose Sankalp Bharat To Promote Our App & Offerings?

• Sponsored by UP Govt. in which there was a pitch of 45 mins and a short talk to be delivered on Deep Tech by Akshay sir (gaining more reach & funding in the market)
• Interaction with North India students. Though we know some behaviour of north India GenZ crowd, having a fresh interaction would help us know their preferences in 2024 and what they expect us to bring in the application
• Onboarding more brands that are catering to students. There’re always new or upcoming brands who needs some push from a market leader to get introduce in the market and engage with the crowd. GenZDealZ.ai has a good 1 million students reach PAN India. This would help any new brand to list and give the offline + online boost from our end

Appointment With Principal/Dean:

Banaras Hindu University was near to the venue and most students from the university visited the stall and shared reels with their feedback.

Few of them were keen to help us meet with their Principal to execute the offline campaigns we’re running via thier university. So we took their contacts for future meeting

Here it was difficult to predict how the traction of students who will be visiting the stall and engaging with us. In such cases, atleast have 1 buffer day if you’re unsure of the crowd to market, if the target market brings what you want then spending an extra day is worth it.

Cons of Govt. Organised Summits:

• They won’t give you the complete information (standee size, space, posters, etc.) before the event. Most of thier team is waiting for the last day to clear the candidate’s queries
• They’ll misspell your company’s name and domain that would result in wrong brand recall by the brand and irrelevant web address
• No volunteers to assist you. Though, the brochure might contain 1 volunteer at each stall, they don’t mention for how much time and what is the backup if you don’t get one.

Overall, Sankalp Bharat gave us good brands, students’s connect & feedback in 2 days of the visit.

If have any questions, please put them below.

Im currently interning at GenZDealZ[dot]ai involved in operations & brand onboarding.

Find more info about GenZDealZ.ai:

Target: 500 downloads via QR

Plus, collab with a few brands helped us to diversify our offerings to GenZ

There’re many opportunities for offline promotion I got & still getting at GenZDealZ[dot]ai. I’ll list here few of them and what were my learnings here you can understand.

1st Booth at World Trade Centre (Mumbai)

This was backed by Maharashtra Innovation Society – GenZDealZ[dot]ai has participated in Maharashtra Startup Funding program and thus this opportunity was offered to them.

This was a 4 day event (inauguration was to be done by Maharashtra Chief Minister – but it didn’t happen). It was a fintech event where all the PAN India fintech startups were invited to showcase thier products & services.

Click here to know more about this group photo

Stall size: 5 feet long & 4 feet wide

Here the majority were students (mostly from my college :)) many of them came for preparing a field visit report.

Therefore the TG was perfect and day 1 & 2 were the prime days for promotion (initial hype).

(Smit Lakhani Full Stack Developer speaking to one student & I standing in the middle)

On Day 4 too we utilised the opportunity as many startups left. Our team shifted the duties in different time period.

Problems we faced:

a) Low internet connection (took much time to download & browse the website)

b) Less space for the booth (hardly 3 people could adequately stand in the booth so one of them need to stand outside of the booth for attracting the crowd)

c) Unavailability of monitor (our own laptops need to be used with a autoloop video)

Metrics We Met:

a) Total 40 downloads and medium engagement level

b) Thousands of impressions

c) Got 12 – 15 internship inquiries to work as student influencer for our campaigns and few interested in full time roles.

2nd Booth at MIT WPU Startup Event

This was an outreach event were the last year was highly successful and received a lot of engagement. MIT WPU student representative showed us highly lucrative numbers  but those sounded too much hyped.

Investment: ₹5,000 for 4 days
You can go through their different plans here:

Target: 1000 downloads

Campus Strength: 10,000 student across MIT WPU departments

Visits at the event: 2000+

Here we saw a diverse crowd from non technical to highly technicals who understands deep tech & machine learning.

Problems we faced:

a) No support of volunteers

B) Destination too far from our main office (so a lot of trouble in setting up standees)

c) Not much effective lights to show the products well.

D) In effective coordination between volunteers (won’t provide you resources on time)

e) No internet connection at all

Metrics We Met:

A) 50+ downloads and medium engagement level

b) 1000+ stall visits

c) 10+ internship inquiries to join as student influencer

It totally depends on your startup nature and what type of audience you’re targeting. B2B audience can work for large & medium size expos. For B2C, you need some targeted audience who’ll be visiting the exhibition.

How much worth the Awaken The Passionpreneur Within Mumbai, 2024 Connect Was?

The 1st time I hear about this event, I was curious to know what will happen and will this be the same as other networking events (PP Meetup or PP Connect 2022 & 2023) of Passionpreneur?

But this is totally different (you can say it is networking with ‘yourself’)

The seminar was divided into 2 days and this was the first spiritual healing event I attended of Dev Gadhvi Sir.

First day was filled with most healing with 4 spiritual guides and removing the past traumas with different exercises.

I thought I’ll meet fellow PP members & meet them again, however, in this event you will see many new faces to exchange the energetic vibes and continue to grow together.

Dev Gadhvi sir had a surprising look with a non business suite. You’ll see a lot of change in him after you see him in person.

In this event the focus is not mainly on ‘Business Networking’ but instead healing yourself by knowing which of your 7 chakras are open and which are close.

Upgrading To VIP:

If you want to upgrade to VIP, just because to get food and network with other members just buy a food coupon to be in the environment by paying ₹500 extra in the lunch break.

But if you don’t want to be in the VIP because you’ve already taken many programs of Dev sir and has enough material pending to implement, that’s completely fine. Food coupon of ₹500 will save you 🙂

Selling Part:

There’s always something to offer for continuous improvements of PP members. However, this time the offer was mainly for non PP members (family & friends of PP members who’re open to open with the registered ticket). Your freinds/ family will likely enroll into PP 4 Month Mentorship to transform themselves holistically.

After investing ₹1,18,000 into Hight Ticket Entrepreneur Mastermind in 2022, I’ve attended various events of Passionpreneur (PP Connect 2022, Mumbai Meetup, APW 2024). All of them are worth the investment (you’ll have endless returns from the community & the business lessons if you implement thoroughly).

Here’re some glimpses of the Passionpreneur Programs I’ve been part of:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shreyas-karade09_passionpreneur-meetup-activity-7073528873807679488-Xb6c?utm_source=combined_share_message&utm_medium=member_desktop

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shreyas-karade09_passionpreneurconnect2022-activity-6969854066273214464-WVmz?utm_source=combined_share_message&utm_medium=member_desktop

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shreyas-karade09_passionpreneurconnect2022-ecosystem-activity-6970354148969992192-i7w7?utm_source=combined_share_message&utm_medium=member_desktop

I didn’t attend the 2nd day of this APW Connect because of clients pending work as I get only 1 holiday to complete backlogs 🙂

I thought to implement all the learnings of day 1 and see the amazing results.

If have any doubts about APW Connect 2024, put them below I’ll answer them all.