Top 5 Trends in Internet and Online Business

Philip Siegel

· 27 Aug 2021

Top 5 Trends in Internet and Online Business

No one can overrule the power of the web. The fact that every business today needs some kind of an online presence, just shows how long we’ve come from the brick-and-mortar stores. Innovation in technology is booming at a rapid pace and therefore, finding newer ways of engaging and sharing information can be quite a challenge. In this article, we’ll be looking at five most significant trends currently defining the internet and online business.

1. Big Data

The ever expanding data is a direct result of digitization and companies (by themselves) are often at a disadvantage if left to uncover hidden patterns from such volumes of data.

Enter Big Data, hailed as a one-stop solution for an organization’s analytical needs. Big Data encompasses several aspects of business intelligence such as data capture, storage, search, sharing, analytics and visualization. By integrating it with an existing data warehouse, a company stands to gain valuable insights on customer behavior, lead conversion, security threats, social media marketing, product management and supply chain optimization among others.

Big Data analytics has been slowly replacing the traditional web analytics, with a majority of the companies favoring it for its highly advanced business analysis. Already the platform’s growing popularity has made it technically and economically viable for various industries. Recent academic research has indicated that companies using Big Data analytics show productivity rates 5 – 6 percent higher than those of their peers and that marketers spend an estimated $50 billion on it alone (BMO Capital Markets report).

2. Gamification of services

Countless users have at some point, redeemed points, collected virtual currency or availed badges during the course of a gaming activity. If the same concept is applied to a non-gaming context, we can actually transform menial or routine tasks into being more fun and engaging or in other words, ‘gamify’. Simply put, gamification is “the application of concepts and techniques from games to other areas of activity”.

The concept of gamification is not entirely new and has been around for some time; for example, frequent flier programs, hotel loyalty clubs et al. But companies are now turning to gamification to substantially boost their marketing activities. With the help of some well laid out tasks and rules to achieve certain goals, they are looking at creating engaging experiences for their customers, reward them for their patronage and also create awareness about their products and offerings. It is not hard to imagine why gamification is being popularized as the next big thing in marketing. According to the Gartner report covered in Mashable, by 2020, 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes, and that by 2019 more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application.

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3. Social commerce

Facebook has recently launched a self-serve User ID matching system and cookie-dropping ads to tell online retailers whether members have bought a purchase via their adverts on the social network. Companies can also target their ads to that segment of (Facebook’s) audience sharing similar tastes with members who’ve responded well to a particular ad in the past. Twitter too, gives its advertisers the option of tracking users who’ve clicked straight to their website via the Promoted Tweets. These are a few examples of downstream conversion attribution where companies are given better returns for their advertising costs on the social media.

In this era, social commerce is the de facto way of doing business online. This is also noticeable from a survey conducted by HubSpot, where the number of companies who say Facebook is “critical” or “important” to their business has increased to 83 pecent in just 2 years. As GigaOm editor, Om Malik, puts it, “If the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce is about recreational shopping where the merger of social and interest graphs would drive buying decisions.” By partaking in all aspects of the customer life cycle, social commerce offers many opportunities to the expectant marketer.

4. Mobile

The mobile market and its major components – devices, wireless networks and applications – are progressing at staggering rates. The wide-scale adoption of smartphones, mobile payment options and the innumerable apps has made mobile commerce (or m-commerce) a force to be reckoned with. In this article featured on TIME, Forrester has predicted that by 2016, one billion consumers will have smartphones and the total amount consumers and businesses spend on mobile devices, software and services related to the mobile ecosystem, will reach an astonishing $1.3 trillion; mobile apps alone will account for $55 billion.

The technology is reaching such scaling heights especially with the development of mobile payments and card reader plug-ins at the point-of-sale, that it is safe to say that mobiles can be a driver of both online and in-store sales.The possibilities are limitless; for companies the challenge is to create a mobile customer experience strategy that revolves around m-commerce enabled advertising, loyalty building programs, mobile social media and customer service.

5. Local Discovery

A 2019 survey from Harris Interactive (sponsored by CityGrid Media) revealed that 59 percent of respondents opted for search engines when searching for local businesses and only less than 10 percent visited the merchant’s site directly.

Local SEO is a strategy to optimize a company’s online presence for local-based search queries that are otherwise known as ‘local searches’. Any business that gets some or all of their clients locally can greatly benefit from a local SEO. While factors such as on-page, links, indexing, etc. are similar to that of a national one, local SEOs require businesses to have a local profile on Google (and on other platforms) and a ‘citation’ (name, address, phone number on the same page); the local citation and listing must be relatively similar for better visibility.

Nowadays, the trend is moving towards ‘discovery’ rather than ‘search’. When ‘discovering’ users are presented with pre-filtered results based on their preferences, location, etc. This means a substantially reduced effort for the user and more curation/content development for the site owners. Apart from an effective SEO operation, local businesses can also look at other ways of expanding their reach such as niche-industry apps or local applications.