The Pattern Of Consumer Purchasing Decisions Has Changed. How Can Cross-border Corporate Marketing Cover Online Touch Points?

The global epidemic has entered its third year, and its dialectical impact on the global economy has become increasingly obvious: it has changed the consumption logic of consumers in the past, and the scale of online consumption has surged. Under the influence of the convenience of online consumption, some consumers have adapted to online consumption, while some consumers cannot give up the service experience of offline consumption. However, it can be seen from the general changes in consumption habits that consumers’ purchasing paths have correspondingly changed.

Therefore, from a brand's perspective, establishing deeper communication with consumers through marketing requires certain changes and considerations. Under this premise, whether it is for cross-border e-commerce sellers on large platforms such as Amazon and Walmart, or for DTC brands that are developing independent website building models, currently improving online consumption stickiness and effectively implementing localized marketing are the key to coping with the new market environment. The winning key.

On this road, how to effectively achieve consumer-centeredness? It is not only necessary to re-understand the consumer purchase path from the user's perspective, but also to upgrade the observation logic from the marketing perspective.

Non-linear changes in consumption paths: consumer-centered, full-link marketing layout

Typically, we divide consumers' broad purchase path into five stages: exposure to information, extensive search, research, interest, and post-purchase sharing experience. Traditional marketing practice’s understanding of this process is link-based, step-by-step, and followed one by one.

Therefore, what brands have to do is basically the same: expand exposure and complete traffic at the stage when consumers are exposed to information and search extensively; let traditional digital advertising information ferment in consumer surveys, and gradually become interested in the brand or product, and finally Reach a purchasing decision.

Obviously, this way of understanding the consumption path is no longer in line with the objective reality of current consumption behavior, and it also ignores the "ecological" nature of online consumption. In the new media communication environment, the complete consumer purchasing path is not a link type, but a cyclical type. Each stage of the purchasing process intersects at any time and continuously evolves, ultimately increasing the repurchase rate.

If marketing activities are still carried out based on the traditional understanding of the consumption path, there will be two problems that are easy for brands to ignore: First, the brand only plays a role in the exposure and drainage stage in the consumer purchase path; second, the brand cannot share the post-purchase experience. Transforming it into effective high-quality UGC content, these two points are resistance to promoting path circulation.

In the link-type consumption path, the purchase intention of online consumption is concentrated at the back end of the path; in the circular consumption path, consumers may have purchase intention at every stage, which also requires overseas companies to pay attention to every key node. All arrange appropriate marketing methods and establish purchasing channels. This is also a significant difference between the two paths. In addition, in the circular consumption path, the shared experience of consumers after purchase directly affects the information that is accessible to consumers for the first time and becomes effective UGC content.

Non-linear changes in consumer purchase paths give consumers the possibility of purchasing behavior at every stage of the entire consumption path, bringing full-link marketing challenges and opportunities to brands. At this time, the brand's large-scale marketing plan layout for full-link marketing and diversified partner marketing methods will have the effect of amplifying marketing effectiveness.

However, how to manage one-to-many large-scale partner marketing projects and analyze marketing data is difficult. This requires partner marketing management SaaS platforms like impact.com to provide technical support, allowing brands to easily deploy full-link marketing.

Make full use of marketing attribution to find key marketing nodes that influence consumer decision-making

Cross-border e-commerce has developed into a mature market. In the circular consumption path, brands need to continuously optimize partner marketing projects based on marketing data at each stage. The premise of this optimization is marketing attribution, which means to systematically attribute marketing effects based on different dimensions such as marketing, product operations, and user operations, so as to study and judge the following two issues:

1. Which stage of brand awareness do most brand consumers focus on?

2. Which cognitive stage does the brand need to guide consumers to?

In short, it is a multi-dimensional customer journey analysis.

In the three stages of attracting traffic, converting to repurchase, through marketing attribution, enterprises can observe which user behaviors consumers prefer and which marketing actions they respond to more strongly, and then adjust marketing plans and budgets accordingly. In actual operations, what can really help brands optimize partner marketing projects is real, comprehensive, and fine-grained marketing data from all stages of the consumer purchase path.

By analyzing marketing data and supplemented by appropriate marketing attribution models, companies can also evaluate consumer experience throughout the entire consumption path to improve it and find new performance growth points. In the circular consumption path, marketing is a whole. As the purchase paths of consumers in different industries change, only by allowing brand or product information to reach consumers through different marketing forms can the marketing content be non-irritating and effective.

Starting from the actual needs of cross-border e-commerce in the post-epidemic era, we can further understand the changes in consumer purchase paths and optimize the attribution capabilities of marketing methods, so that corporate marketers can have a deeper understanding and awareness of effective ROI. impact.com helps companies carry out large-scale partner marketing projects, allowing brand content to penetrate the decision-making path of target consumer groups, thereby achieving efficient conversions.