Businesses of all sizes can now leverage digital channels to reach a larger audience worldwide. And thanks to emerging innovation with cloud technology, speed and efficiency are increasing daily across all functions – prompting higher engagement in real-time and 24/7 sales cycles across channels.
And with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the adoption of eCommerce has been accelerated even further, bringing about a huge change in consumer behavior and business operations. Due to high numbers of in-store business closings and social distancing practices, consumers have prioritized convenience over availability when it comes to buying – increasing the need for efficiency and urgency for those businesses who want to keep loyal customers and grab new ones.
Here are our top 3 tips on how brands can succeed in 2022:
- Be Where Your Customers Are
Brands should implement a variety of in-person, e-commerce, online marketplaces, department stores, live-streaming events, and social channels to reach customers in multiple ways. And while in-person shopping continues to remain limited around the world, it’s even more important to have more than one e-commerce store. Using a combination of social media, online marketplaces, and department stores will help you reach more potential customers online.
- Recreate Digital Customer Experiences
Here’s the thing about today’s digital customers – their experiences and attention spans are not confined to just one brand. Shocking, we know, but customers always want more. This means businesses need to up the ante by delivering excellent customer experiences.
Using one brand-centric platform to optimize the entire customer journey is a scalable way to keep up with customer demand while providing a personalized and convenient experience for each customer. For example, leveraging cloud-based eCommerce platforms can be an easy way for sellers to work with the technology integrations needed to sell on multiple drop ship and marketplace retailers – automating product data, imagery, mapping, inventory syncing, taxonomy, orders, billing, tracking, returns, reports and more.
- Digitize Operations
When businesses start to grow, operations that were once easily managed tend to gain in complexity. In order to efficiently scale growth, operations should be digitized and automated, removing friction, reducing burdens, and enabling growth.
Putting the Past Behind and Moving Forward
The pandemic definitely disrupted how we make purchases and accelerated the adoption of digital-first strategies and channels. And thanks to eCommerce, consumers now have increased access to whatever they need more than ever before. And the bottom line is that businesses have even more power to reach and sell on a global scale.
2022 will require businesses to lean on technology and provide the customer journey, scalability, and data needed to keep up with the increasing changes made in the past couple of years. And while rules are always evolving, in order to continue growing and moving forward, businesses need to create a firm foundation in place today.