The size of an enterprise not only changes the dynamics of marketing, by its sheer volume, but it also brings in multiple other considerations that probably wouldn’t be as critical in a smaller enterprise with limited inventory.
Why enterprise marketing is more than just big budgets
It’s not right to think that if you are spending X amount of money on marketing for a small enterprise, you will end up incurring, let’s say, 5X the money for a company that is 5 times bigger. Things are not as simple as that. In a large enterprise with hundreds and thousands of products, not only will you need to be more strategic in planning your marketing campaigns, but several other considerations become equally crucial.
The fulfillment factor: critical consideration for a large enterprise
In a typical large B2C E-commerce retail company with a combination of order fulfillment systems, when planning marketing for a brand(s), one has to ensure that all the brands being promoted have immaculate fulfillment setup.
Here is an example. When you promote/advertise 1000 products, and usually 10 of those get ordered, it gives you a conversion rate of 1%. So, for instance, if you are promoting wristwatches and have allocated 1000 watches under 10 brands (making it an average of 100 watches for each of the 10 brands), you want to ensure that all those products will get fulfilled.
If one or more brands have shown lower fulfillment rates lately, you either avoid them completely or if that is something you don’t want to do, then you reduce the number of products in those brands and instead allocate more products for brands that show good fulfillment rates. The moral of the story is, you do not want to throw in money (even if you have enough to throw around) because then there are chances that you are pissing off customers when order fulfillment fails and money is something that you can control but once the customer is unhappy, you don’t have much control left.
Strategic marketing for different enterprise goals
Here is another example. If your goal is conversion, you may want to focus on lower ticket-value products like running a deal or an offer like buy 2 get 1 or buy 2 get 2.
However, if your goal is to increase the average ticket value (ATV), you need to focus on high ticket-value items. In this case, how you market and on which platform will help you reach your pre-defined goals (or not).
Even in a price-conscious world, it is worth noticing that neither is every product good to be offered on a deal nor is every customer looking for a deal or discount. A lot of the time, customers need valuable information. Think content marketing. Content marketing helps you craft stories around the products you wish to promote, and helps share relevant and high value information about them to the customers.
Category selection for successful marketing in e-commerce
Again, if the goal is conversion without impacting margins, you might want to focus on products that are relatively lower ticket items but as a category, they are high-margin. Think beauty. This is also why, the beauty industry keeps pushing more and more makeup, skincare, hair care, wellness, etc., products because the margins are so high. And that’s also why the insane profits. But that’s for another time. Essentially, you want to focus on a category that is high-margin and not very expensive and, therefore, will convert more easily. Besides, beauty has the added advantage of limited returns because a lot of the companies do not allow returns on beauty products. So in the context of returns, beauty is a low-risk category.
Let’s talk enterprise marketing (and coffee)
If you are a retail enterprise and want higher conversions with additional objectives, like higher margins or an increase in the order value, please connect with us. I’m sure we can help you navigate the e-commerce landscape with a better perspective and create some really interesting marketing campaigns that will surely get your business the desired results. And the coffee is on us!
