DECEMBER - 2020retailtechinsights.com8What a fascinating space to be in right now. We've spent years waiting for technology to come and disrupt and, well, it looks like we're more or less here. Data and devices are now more or less ubiquitous across the globe - technology access has won the day; there are around 5.3 billion adults on the planet over 15 and, according to data from the GSMA, around 5 billion smartphones. This poses a fascinating question for ecommerce businesses; it's no longer a question of `when will online behaviour shift to mobile?', but a question of `what now?'.There might be a collective shudder upon reading that statistic - more devices and more access has too often led to more metrics, more KPIs, more confusion and more complexity. Counterintuitively however, this proliferation of access, devices and data is forcing focus and a return to core and vital marketing principles: what are consumers doing, how do your current customers and potential customers find you, your products and your brand, what questions are they asking, what are they viewing, how long are they spending doing it?So rather than the shudder, this should herald a collective sigh of relief across the ecommerce community - market leadership is looking more and more like a return to the back to basics, simplification and humanisation of language that many have yearned for and advocated.If that sounds too reductive and simple to be true, it probably is. Simple and clear is rarely easy and in the world of constant access and availability consumers exist in the `messy middle' of the conversion funnel - constantly oscillating between action and discovery ready to tap the button to purchase or equally move away to something else vying for their attention in that moment. So, as an ecommerce community, what to focus on? I'd boil it down to three key principles. Speed, data and discovery.The first is the importance of speed. Consumer expectations around load time as well as concentration and patience levels dictate that getting to the point and giving people a reason to stick around and listen has never been more important. Utilise the tools available from Google and others to understand how you might improve your page speed and become more usable across devices. This brings me to the second principle of discovery-- being there in the moments when your audience is looking for and need you. This means on Search but equally across video, social, blogs, `how-to's' and comparisons - there are fewer and fewer excuses not to understand and react to what consumers are looking for. This brings us to the final and underpinning principle of the three; data. As ecommerce businesses at the end of the 21st century's teenage years, we need to shake off data preconceptions and set up to understand and objectively review the data we have on our customers. Your website and Google Trends are a live market research study going on all around you - invest your and your teams' time in understanding this, listening to the signals you're getting By Anthony Jones, Head of eCommerce, Mid-Market Sales UKI, GoogleIf your Customers are a Step Ahead, How Can you Catch Up?Anthony JonesIN MY OPINION
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