According to the 2019 ARD/ZDF online study, there were around 64.8 million internet users in Germany. No other medium is used more frequently. Do you already take these statistics into account in your sales process? If you are interested in marketing, you want to reach these people.
Digital sales – What it actually means and why every management is doing its company a favor by investing in this area.
What is digital distribution?
Sales in general deals with the sale of goods. The benefit arises from the fact that answers can be found to the following questions:
- As a company, how do you get customers to buy your own product and not that of a competitor?
- How can it be ensured that the products reach potential customers?
- How can customers be acquired and retained and how can management ensure that customers are dealt with in the best possible way?
"Digital distribution is not worthwhile in our industry"
For a long time, a widespread thought in digitalization marketing was that only products from certain industries were suitable for sale over the Internet. However, it turned out that the sale of things such as electronic devices, books, software products, clothing or even food is not only possible, but is even preferred by customers.
The internet infrastructure offers sales opportunities for products and services from all sectors. For some products, there may be hurdles in the digitalization of sales processes. However, if your company does not solve these problems, it is almost certain that other companies will.
Here are some examples of companies that have lost their role as market leaders or even gone bankrupt because they failed to digitize their products and sales processes:
- Kodak (Missed conversion from analog cameras to digital cameras)
- Karstadt/Kaufhof (too late entry into online retail)
- Blockbuster (holding on to stationary film distribution for too long, neglecting the innovation of streaming, rejecting a possible takeover of Netflix in 2000)
Marketing in digital sales
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes: how would you proceed if you wanted to buy a product or use a service? It is very likely that the first step for most consumers is researching on the Internet.
When informed customers enter a traditional retail store or enter into a conversation with old-school sales staff, they already have a knowledge advantage. This is something that the recipients of advertising and marketing did not have in the past. This changes the relationship between customers and companies.
During this research, customers are usually already in contact with various companies. This is because knowledge is often imparted through blog posts in digital sales. Customers receive information and trust the company as a result.
Due to the ranking algorithm, well-researched, well-founded blog posts receive more visibility.
This approach is called pull marketing, as customers search for something on their own initiative and are lured to the company’s offer by information.
In sales outside the Internet, advertisements are often placed in print, on TV, in newspapers or on advertising pillars. Everyone sees this advertising. The aim is to turn people into customers who did not yet know that you might like a product. This is why this approach is also known as push marketing.
This approach also exists in digital sales in the form of banner ads on websites, ads in front of videos and paid advertising posts on social media.
The advantage here is that by analyzing user data, customers can already be sorted out so that only people with suitable interests or age groups see your ads.
Usability - Customers want to feel comfortable in digital sales too!
The practice of digitalization shows that consumers in both the business-to-business and business-to-customer sectors use the internet for research and are prepared to order a wide range of products online. They are spoiled by extremely user-friendly online stores such as Ebay, Amazon and Zalando.
User-friendliness (or usability) means that users want things to be easy. They want to quickly understand what they can do on a website. That’s why they prefer simple and familiar structures to complicated and creative new approaches.
According to the statistics company Nielsen, customers spend an average of around 40 seconds on each website. This means that they have to understand and like the product and company in 40 seconds, otherwise they will leave. Truly no easy task for marketing and digital sales!
If they don’t understand the content, customers will leave faster than we web developers can measure. Google considers every visit to just one page (e.g. the homepage of the website) without a click to be a bounce, i.e. a negative user signal with 0 seconds dwell time. This means that Google is unlikely to display your page higher than those of your competitors.
In order to ensure that customers feel comfortable on your website, stay and ideally buy there, it must therefore provide a benefit. Things such as information and images about products and the company, offers and references as well as reviews have a benefit for customers. They make the purchase decision easier. Simplicity and benefits for customers have therefore been the order of the day since the digitalization of sales.
Optimization of the website/SEO
Homepage, search engine optimization or SEO refers to all measures that are useful to work on the position of a website in the natural index lists of web search tools and thus increase traffic.
From one perspective, the exceptional component of this advertising procedure lies in the high value of web search engine traffic caused by the mission environment. On the other hand, SEO is the main advertising system that can pass traffic for quite a while without putting in more.
