Unlocking new sales channels

Hear what bestselling author and Forbes "Top 10 Marketer" Neil Patel has to say about the importance of optimizing your site and meeting your customers where they are most likely to make a purchase.

Unlocking new sales channels: Your website and current store presence alone aren’t going to cut it anymore

Global online content consumption doubled in 2020, which is good news for large online brands. Yet, most consumers spend less time performing searches or browsing brand websites. Rather, they spend the most time on social media, blog and news sites, and messaging apps to talk with coworkers and partners.

The large brand website isn’t dying, but it is no longer as effective at driving consumers to make purchases in its traditional format. This means brands relying solely on a traditional webstore need to shift gears by better optimizing their site to stay competitive.

PayPal's enterprise solutions help optimize your checkout experience and connect businesses with consumers where they are most likely to make a purchase.

This guide will help you understand how to leverage PayPal enterprise solutions on these new selling channels using contextual commerce to help meet your customers where they are.

Contextual commerce for the modern enterprise: Meet customers where they are and access new channels

The majority of customers aren't spending time online searching for products to buy. Instead, they are watching videos, chatting with friends, or scrolling their favorite social media apps. We seek to disrupt their experiences with paid ads and offers that annoy them; and it’s an increasingly expensive and unproductive strategy that businesses can no longer rely on. Moreover, in a “cookieless” world with increasingly stringent privacy regulations, marketers need to find new channels to sell their products.

Instead of focusing only on driving customers to your website (which is becoming less effective), businesses need to start selling to customers where they spend most of their online lives—and PayPal enterprise solutions can help through contextual commerce.

Contextual commerce, also called contextual marketing, is sharing seamless purchasing opportunities in everyday environments.

Imagine you could connect with customers while they're reading their favorite industry blog or looking at business news to kick their morning off. What if there was a way to place a payment button directly linked to your site so they could buy, all without ever leaving the content they are engaging with? The right payments tool provides that critical linkage between your business and the site where your customer is organically spending their time. This way, you’re not disrupting their experience with ads. Instead, you’re making it more convenient for them to buy in the context of their needs and interests.

The key to contextual marketing is to find the channels where your target audience spends their time and where they are more likely to make a purchase.

To leverage contextual marketing, consider which tools, blogs, review sites, and news sources your customers use regularly. Ask yourself a few questions: Where are your customers discovering new products and where are they conducting research when they’re interested in buying before they ever reach your site or see an ad?

Are they reading finance, enterprise, or other interest blogs? Are they using an aggregator site to compare products and vendor services? Are they looking at related products on another site that would pair perfectly with yours? Enabling them to discover and buy at those critical moments is growth strategy you can’t afford to ignore anymore as brands are pushing to differentiate themselves online.

How PayPal enterprise solutions helps with contextual marketing

Contextual marketing is powerful, and PayPal can help make it even more effective. PayPal’s innovative data-sharing tools allow you to link with potential partners, so instead of spending more on customer acquisition, you can create a commerce experience with a partner that already has the eyes and ears of the audience you want to reach. Plus, it is secure and easy to scale — which is critical for fast-growing businesses.

For example, let’s say a hypothetical enterprise business selling discount flight tickets called Business Class International wants to sell more tickets to Los Angeles from New York City. They do all their normal publicity and buy targeted ads, but they know they’re still missing out on a segment of the population that they either can’t reach or has ignored their ads due to a lot of competing advertising noise.

So they decide to partner with the business commentator publication, Business Life. Now, when a Business Life site visitor is reading about services in LA, a “Buy Now” button appears, and they can purchase their flight ticket without ever leaving the Business Life page directly from Business Class International.

These types of partnerships aren’t new, but traditionally they’ve required a ton of integration work and heavy lifting to enable on the backend. Today, PayPal has proprietary technology that allows businesses, with a few snippets of code, to connect to each other safely, securely and at scale. They don’t have to worry about sharing their customers’ personal payments data with another business (and all the infosec and compliance headaches that may come with that) because it’s shared through a secure process. It’s not every day that you can find technology that makes your developers’ and marketers’ lives easier. This makes completing more transactions across relevant platforms easier for large, enterprise businesses.

Learn more about how PayPal's enterprise solutions can help your business stay ahead of your competition and meet customers where they are with integrated payment solutions.

Biography

Neil Patel is the co-founder of NP Digital and Ubersuggest. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.