The 5 C’s of Ecommerce Marketing

Agunlejika adeoluwa
8 min readDec 21, 2020

Digital marketing uses digital technologies to strengthen company-customer relationships, amplify communication & to drive revenue growth… The 5c’s modules Consumer, Context, Competition, Collaboration, and Company make up the structure of today’s ecommerce marketing technique. These 5 C’s is imperative for companies, and if they follow this method, then the chances of growth rate are high.

Successful ecommerce implementation is about getting five elements or ingredients right. When you get them in the right mix, that is when you get the best output. Let us call it the ‘5-C Framework.’
The 5C marketing framework offers a predictive evaluation and structural analysis of a business standing in a targeted market.
What the 5C’s are

 Company
 Collaboration
 Context
 Competition
 Customers

Company

The company, as the very first ‘C,’ is vital. It captured the main essence of business. To sell a product or service, you need a business name to be identified with, a business profile that explains who you are, what you do, and where you are located. This is a crucial factor when analyzing a company using the 5C marketing framework. The key issue is to identify the Sustainable Competitive Advantage that belongs to the focal company.
This can be in the form of brand equity, economies of scale, technological development, etc. Customers want to know if the focal company has a sustainable competitive advantage over other close competitors.
Note: The VRIO (Variable Rare Imitable Organized) model can be utilized to distinguish if a company’s assets offer a temporary or sustainable advantage.

Context

Context is all about knowing consumers what they want and why they buy. It is needed to add value through contextual experiences that meet consumer’s emotional and functional needs. In context, it is essential to know consumers’ behavior. This means what they want, why they need a product or service, where they want it, and when they want it, and where. Overall, In e-commerce marketing, you have to know all types of problems facing the consumers to provide the best services and deliver the same thing at the right time.
Competition

Competition is just part of discovering your own sweet spot for better branding yourself and your products. Making the best business plan for your eCommerce means adapting to show your strengths and stand out in competition. You should be able to persuade your target customers that you are ideally suited to them.
From the SWOT analysis to the maturity of the market, competition must not be taken lightly by any means whatsoever. As competition is a challenge to your market, it also provides sufficient opportunity for you to copy and add a little spark to your competitor’s strategy to get ahead of them.
You have to cross those extra miles in a short time to get into the race if you started late. E-commerce competition is intense, but it isn’t impossible to get ahead in this race.
Learn from your competitors and provide better quality products, services, price, quantity, after-sales service, incentives, and everything to your customers. Spend your time searching for those particular areas that your competitors haven’t discovered yet, and start the ball rolling.

Search marketing focuses on getting more quality backlinks, quality content, better UI/UX, better after-sales service, and again focus on those areas that your competitors haven’t discovered yet, and eventually, your determination will let you win the race one day.

Consumer

Consumer Is the key to all marketing strategies. It has to be present in both strategy & execution. The consumer is necessary for business, and the vital part for the companies is to understand customers’ needs, what requirements, and expectations they look for in the companies. The customer always wants the best product and services at the best price; that’s why it is essential in 5c’s modern internet marketing modules. You can also increase the customer by learning how to use social media in internet marketing to get the right consumer.
The potential customers a company can reach with its products or services can be broken down into three main sizes: Total Available Market, Serviceable Available Market, and the Serviceable Obtainable Market. The market segments may be further segmented through demographics, psychographics, geography, and other distinguishing factors.
The Total Available Market (TAM) is the most generalized customer segment that includes every possible customer that demands a particular product or service. The Serviceable Available Market (SAM) would be a subset of the TAM categorized by the potential use of a company’s product or service. The Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) sub-segment of the market is the narrowest definition that specifies a market segment that a company could realistically capture.

Collaboration

Better business relationships are essential for growth. Unless you have chosen the right partners and collaborators, your eCommerce plans may not go as expected. Collaborations are becoming a common trend in online business for advertisers looking to reach new audiences through social media networks and blogs. In short, partnership or influencer marketing is achieved with the aid of a person who recommends your products/services to their audience and followers.
Collaboration with influencers may entail a brand awareness campaign that gives new people a chance to learn about your business. A successful influencer marketing strategy takes a lot of time and effort, but at the end of the day it will cost you twice as much.
While finding influencers, you must go with quality rather than quantity. You can get this right by;
 Check their engagement with the audience, read comments, check likes, either they are real or are generated by any auto bot system.
 List all influencers with respect to your market e.g. Instagram Fitness Models for Supplements/Gym Business).
 Check their engagement with the audience, read comments, check likes, either they are real or are generated by any auto bot system.
 Check their blogs, their value through Google whether some other blogs mention them or not.
 Calculate ROI hypothetically before cracking any deal with that person.
 Crack the deal and wait for the results.
Collaborations with influencers must never be avoided, as 75% of marketers allocate some of their budget for influencer marketing and provide marketing through social media in today’s fast-paced world where people avoid watching million dollars television advertisements.
The current market conditions become incredibly challenging for all companies independent from their size and market positions due to the increasing competitive pressures, diminishing margins, and difficulties to effectively reach the consumers via marketing communication activities. This trio of challenges raises a serious accountability issue for marketing managers. It pushes them to generate alternative and practical tools to attract target consumers’ attention and boost demand for the brand’s products.

Techniques, actions, and adaptation are essential for a company to develop and market the products and services where necessary. The production and commercialization of consumer needs have evolved, and eCommerce marketing is considered the first creative link leading to high sales and conversion.
The advantages of the framework
In a rapidly evolving climate, the marketing strategy is being mobilized to maintain concentrated and solvent clients by offering economies of scale that are crucial for their success. By advertising through marketing, a portfolio of new customers is created to speed up the conversion rate.
The marketing plan aims to place the business at the forefront of the tacit and explicit requirements of the eCommerce industry in which it operates.
The foundations of the strategy are discovered and embedded in the 5 C’s of Ecommerce Marketing.
The ‘5C Framework’ serves as a compass to help us navigate the connected world, anchored to our worldwide web for Digital marketing and trade.
How to implement them in your own business
Marketing in digital space has grown enormously over time. The proliferation of new processes is common these days, new communication technology and new marketing platforms to support and promote the business. It’s a big improvement now! All uses digital marketing techniques to reach out to their clients. You’ve got to re-invent your plan to succeed in the ultimate digital battlefield. A well-planned collection of digital marketing objectives will help you evaluate the success of your marketing efforts and achieve real results. Implement the ‘5Cs’ approach in your digital marketing mix to get closer to your company marketing objectives:
CREATE :
Be clear about the product and how you want your audience to connect with it, then only you will be able to create what your audience wants. Create here hold the creation of the idea of connecting to your audience.

CONNECT :
After creating the idea and creatives, it’s time to connect with your target audience through your posts, ads, and website. A stage where you will make them aware of the product or brand.
CONVINCE :
In this stage, you need to put strong messages up of your product or brand and make them more authentic and authoritative to convince your audience about its authenticity, eventually building their trust.

CONVERT :
This is the last stage where the main motto after winning our customer’s trust is to convert them to our services or products.
CONTROL:
The control stage is the most crucial stage for observing all the stages and concluding what is working and not? Thus, it will eventually lead to updating and altering your strategies to get higher results.

Conclusion
The main marketing concepts are valid irrespective of channels, online or offline. Consumers are still in the true north. As marketers in the connected world, our task is to find out how to harness the complexities of the web to better engage customers and create stronger brands.

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Agunlejika adeoluwa
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I’m a professional freelance writer with special focus in tech, SaaS and scalable businesses. You can reach me on https://www.linkedin.com/in/agunlejikaadeoluwa