Author: Andrea Leiser
What are the challenges within e-commerce in designing and implementing global marketing campaigns? Is it cultural differences in values, poor translations, trust issues or product availability? As a senior campaign manager for an online distributor, I face all these challenges, and more.
Speaking of e-commerce – is this just managing an online webshop? No, that is just the tip of the iceberg – there is definitely more to it than that. The key success factor is a multi-channel marketing and sales strategy (in this case B2B = B2C): Connecting countries and product categories whilst using a wide variety of off-/ and online communication channels (e.g. website, email, telesales, social media, PR, SEM, advertising, webinars, events).
By trying to ensure a consistent performance across all channels and identifying, monitoring and promoting cross-channel marketing campaigns, several internal and external obstacles appear:
- Centralization. At our company the marketing function and thus campaign management is centralized. That said, the challenge with a centralized marketing model is to create and implement global campaigns on a local level including and understanding country specifics and cultural peculiarities. Not only translations but also pricing, product selection and availability, positioning and brand touch points are often not easy to leverage on a global basis.
- Customer Journey. In some of our target countries such as the Netherlands and Finland, trust issues occur towards buying products online or common payment methods differ. Even though we are an online distributor, some of our German customers still order products using a fax machine. We are less and less able to influence the customer behavior and journey with regard to the various channels they combine when shopping for products or services.
- Cooperation. Last but not least good interdisciplinary cooperation between sales, category management and marketing is the key to success of every planned marketing campaign. But sometimes “silo” thinking and lack of teamwork stand in the way and pose a serious threat in trying to align everybody as a team – even if all our hearts are beating for electronics!
What are the challenges you face in global campaign management? And how are you resolving them?
Further challenges in campaign management and e-commerce:
http://blog.techmarketing360.com/marketing-automation-the-challenge-of-campaign-management-at-scale-omsummit/
http://www.ecommerce-manager.com/en/item/new-challenges-in-e-commerce-in-the-high-tech-industry-mastering-complexity-and-enhancing-business-performance