New inventions are changing the game constantly. Opinions that where perfectly right yesterday might be wrong tomorrow.

We live in a digital world. This means for people in the promotional products market that it’s time to constantly ask yourself where the world of E-commerce is heading. What are the big trends you should focus on in order to stay ahead of the competition.

With companies like Amazon, the consumer and users of the platform are spoiled by the great customer service during the whole customer journey.
Delivering the same experience for wide variety of products is insanely hard and expensive.

In other words; Go niche, Go Big or Go Home.

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile.

The world is going faster and faster towards a mobile online environment. Don’t use the current speed of evolution in predicting how fast this will go. Every single evolution online, will grow exponentially. Mobile browsing already now has officially surpassed desktop browsing. Almost everyone these days shops and orders via their smartphone. Don’t think this will be different in the b2b environment. In the end a person is making the decisions.

The adoption of Voice Assistance is great example of how fast our environment is changing. And how fast new trends are growing.

Build an Effective Omnichannel Strategy

Sell where the attention is. In most cases this will be on platforms like Facebook, Instagram or whatever platform is populair. These platforms are evolving and are making it possible to sell directly via their apps. Make sure you are ready for this and have the right strategy in place to create a seamless shopping experience.

It’s time to see your webshop as an employee. It requires your daily attention in order to grow.

Personalise your content

Show your customers what they want to see. Get to know them better and based on this information technology can help them further. If a customer always buys something in technology sector, show them all the top power-banks right away on the homepage. Or something similar that they recently bought.

Did you ever think of showing a selection of products for a specific group? Who has time to search between 10.000 of promotional products?

Exactly, no one.

Easy ordering and reordering

Simplify pricing structure to allow easy implementation of product configuration, quoting, payment processing, recurring shipment and online reordering.

Storytelling

This is something that always has been there. When you sell, you communicate a story. Brands that figure out their unique story and know how to tell and distribute this well across all their platforms, will experience growth. People will get more interested by how a product is made and why it’s really the best one they can buy.

Create context around what you sell.

Currently, we are seeing a couple of broader themes rising in several markets where the focus is on transparency, authenticity, sustainability and focus on niche markets.

Ask your self what makes you unique and tell this story in the right way.

Take as an example the food market. Here you can clearly see those trends rising for quite some time now and grow rapidly in 2017.

Millennials are obsessed with this market and they are willing to pay for it. The Avocado toast is the daily lunch for them nowadays and on top of this trend, a lot of brands are being built. Could we have imagined the diversity in beer brands 15 years back? I guess not. Nowadays it’s not cool anymore to drink Heineken. You drink niche brand X or Y.

What those niche brands are doing extremely well is storytelling. A story which is transparent, and authentic. They really connect with their users via Social Media, Podcasts and Youtube channels etc. They start with just one product and make sure you know what’s inside, what it’s made of.

So, they don’t pay huge budgets for TV-Commercials, but interest Instagram influencers to connect with a new customer group.

Create a lot of content yourself. Yes, there is a lot of competition but the distribution of this content was never easier then it is now.

If you are not doing anything with video in 2018 you are missing out. Use videos to show the world who you are and what you stand for. Making and showing the world your content has never been easier.

Don’t be right with an earlier version of the world.

I work in a lot of online different markets before I became active in the promo world. The world needs younger people who are enthusiast and motivated to innovate in this market. We need people that think differently and that are not holding on to thoughts that were fine yesterday.

Be right tomorrow, together.