We asked Eric Jan van Putten, VP Marketing at Dynamicweb about the theme for this month; should we build our content strategy and audience on rented land (social media channels, LinkedIn, Medium, and all the others)? Eric gives us a great perspective through an eCommerce lens.
Build both on rented land, and have a strategy to get them into your own community
Building upon rented channels like Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, and WeChat is a key part of many companies marketing mixes. These channels get you access to highly targeted audiences, build awareness with content, and offer the ability to convert and get the audience in your own community. From there on, you have the ability to engage further and be less dependent on the rented land.
Keeping within the metaphor of rented land vs. building your own environment, this also goes for eCommerce strategies that can accelerate an eCommerce business or having it dwindle in the background of the internets. Choosing to go via rented land, aka marketplaces, and connect to the front runners in Ecommerce can make a difference in growing double, even triple digits or struggling for customers.
But there are significant downsides to consider before you completely base your company success on marketplaces. Not only are you not in control of the channel, but the merchant can also easily change the rules of engagements, leaving you in the dust, or even worse, they can see how successful you are and decide to build their own competing offer under their behemoth brand with all the resources to their disposal.
The upsides, however, are easy to explain; it’s probably better to get a lower percentage from a much larger amount of sales than to have a bigger cut from little sales. Going through rented land will instantly offer you a bigger audience, reduce technology dependencies (as they will take care of this for the bigger part), and can even handle the (drop)shipping for you.
You can learn more about Eric and his work at Dynamicweb when we went backstage with him.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
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