Make the Most of Owned Media in Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Here's a staggering fact: by 2025, mobile e-commerce shopping (called mcommerce) will account for 44.2% of retail e-commerce in the US. Mobile apps are powerful because you own the content and branding completely. So if you're an e-commerce retailer, now's the time to take control of your owned marketing channels like your mobile app.

In this episode, Ramin Ramhormozi and Sina Mobasser talk about owned media which are digital marketing channels that a company exercises complete control over, such as a branded website, social media channels, and mobile apps. They discuss e-commerce strategies and how to increase sales using owned marketing channels.

Why Owned Media Channels Are Golden Opportunities

I think a lot of merchants think it's faster. It's going to convert better. It's seamless with all those animations and trends. It's a better shopping experience, and yeah, there's some truth to that. It helps you create a seamless flow. It will convert better, but that's not the biggest benefit.

The biggest benefit is that it lets you grow and own a marketing channel of push notifications and subscribers. That's the biggest benefit. Everything else to me is a distant second because that's the one thing that every brand needs is a community. Ultimately, it's a way to connect with your customers and engage them in the most optimal way possible.

And we strongly encourage every brand to grow their owned media channels and subscriber base as much as possible.

Owned marketing or owned media means any channel where you have subscribers, but not necessarily followers

So you think – where do I have followers? I have followers on Instagram. What does that mean? Who owns that audience? Well, on Instagram, Facebook monetizes the audience. So they own the audience. You and I are all subscribers.

It's funny because people create content that they put on Instagram exclusively, and they generate some ancillary benefits from that. It gets seen by 1% of their organic reach. But you're actually creating content that Facebook directly monetizes.

You want to take as much ownership as possible of your sales and marketing channel and not rely on these tech giants that ultimately are for-profit companies. They've got a duty to their shareholders to maximize their profits. Their profits are just going to continue to maximize and grow astronomically, whether you're an ad buyer. Ad prices have gone up two X in the last 12 months. What's to say that it's not going to continue to do so?

Getting Buyers to Download Your E-Commerce Mobile App

We had a conversation, and you were sharing the details of Tapcart. What I found fascinating were the brands that were doing it well. So they spun up an app, and then they were pushing specific products out to the app and making them exclusively available on the app.

And I thought that was a simple but genius way to get people to start adopting and using their app instead of buying it through desktop. Is that still a thing?

I see it month after month. It's increasing. We're seeing it now more than ever because it's a great way to get people to download your app in the first place. Because of the friction, we often encourage you to offer a specific reason to download the app, whether it's download our app and save 20% on your first order: very simple but very effective.

MCommerce Mobile Apps Build Content-Driven Community

Tell me about it. The content gets consumed on Instagram. Okay, it's great. You get some free marketing from your organic reach. Hopefully, it's better than 1%, but probably not. So people consume the content. It could be great. It could be. Regardless, they're going to keep scrolling cause it's an infinite feed. And two seconds later, they're going to completely forget about you no matter how good it is. Cause there are another million other people vying for their attention.

So that's just the reality of it. It's like if you have a store and you're just sending all this traffic into the mall. If there are a hundred other stores in the mall, too, what's the point of driving traffic to the mall? You have to get traffic to your store.

In this case, the analogy is with the mobile app, you own the entire mall, and now you own all the content. So when they scroll down two seconds later, they're not going to forget about you because guess what – there's more content from you.