How to Build a Long-Term E-commerce Strategy as Advertising Costs Rise?

Advertising costs are steadily increasing year after year—from the growing competition on platforms like Shopee, TikTok, Facebook, and Google, to constant changes in algorithms and data policies. 

The Vietnamese e-commerce market is no exception: every ad auction is more expensive, every click is worth more, and ROI from ads is increasingly difficult to sustain if you only rely on higher budgets.

For brands operating in e-commerce, this means “buying growth” is no longer sustainable. If your business still depends entirely on paid advertising, your marketing strategy becomes fragile—a single price hike or algorithm change can collapse the entire funnel.

So, how can businesses escape this cycle? The answer isn’t in cutting budgets or finding the next quick optimization trick. It lies in shifting your mindset from “running campaigns” to “building capabilities” —from relying on ads to building a sustainable marketing system that grows on its own.

1. From Short-Term Results to Long-Term Capabilities

Most e-commerce businesses measure success by asking: “How many orders did this campaign bring?”  It’s a reasonable question—but it only looks at results , not capabilities.

A long-term strategy isn’t simply extending your marketing plan from 3 months to 12. It’s about shifting focus from outcomes to capabilities —from “Did this campaign perform well?”  to “What did this system help our team learn, maintain, and scale?”

As ad costs rise, businesses with strong internal capabilities will always outperform those with only large budgets. There are three core capabilities to build:

Data capability:  Understand and leverage first-party data—from your website, CRM, and even learner behavior on your Elearning platform. This is your “capital,” allowing for more precise targeting, effective remarketing, and, most importantly, reduced dependence on ad platform data.

Content capability:  Create valuable, useful content that brings customers back without ads. When your content is strong enough, it becomes an organic marketing channel—users come to you instead of you paying to reach them.

Omnichannel capability:  Reduce reliance on a single platform. When Facebook becomes expensive, you have TikTok. When TikTok changes its algorithm, you have SEO and email marketing. When paid channels become costly, your community and owned ecosystem sustain you.

2. Omnichannel – When Ad Costs Rise, Data Becomes Capital

Here’s a truth many businesses overlook: brands with omnichannel data always acquire customers more cheaply than those without it.

Why? Because a customer who came from TikTok doesn’t just buy once. If you have an omnichannel system, that customer can be remarketed on your website, nurtured through email, reactivated via free Elearning content, or engaged in your community. Every touchpoint is an opportunity to increase lifetime value without additional ad spend.

An omnichannel strategy allows you to turn ad spend into data assets  instead of one-time expenses. That’s why, in times of rising ad costs, brands with strong data and internal learning systems recover faster—they don’t need to “buy back” old customers; they simply reactivate existing ones.

3. Elearning – Strengthening Internal Capabilities to Reduce the Cost of Mistakes

There’s a hidden cost many businesses fail to calculate: the cost of operational mistakes.  And when ad costs are high, every mistake becomes even more expensive.

A team that misreads KPIs or doesn’t understand data can make each advertising dollar 20–30% less effective. That means if you spend 100 million VND on ads, up to 30 million could be wasted simply due to misunderstanding.

That’s why Elearning isn’t just a training tool—it’s a cost-reduction mechanism. When your marketing, operations, and customer service teams all understand how the system works, how to read data, and how to optimize campaigns, every dollar spent becomes more valuable.

Elearning for e-commerce teams helps:

• Standardize knowledge  across departments, avoiding disconnects between marketing and operations.
• Shorten the learning curve and reduce trial-and-error , helping teams quickly adapt to changes in algorithms, policies, and consumer behavior.
• Build competency-driven efficiency , not budget-driven performance. A skilled team will always outperform one that just spends more.

4. Strategic Mindset: From Ads Funnel to Value Ecosystem

Most e-commerce brands still operate within the ads funnel  model: invest in ads → drive traffic → convert to orders. This works when ads are cheap. But as costs rise, it becomes a vicious loop: the more you want to grow, the more you must spend.

Instead of pouring everything into the advertising funnel (reach → click → convert), brands should build a value ecosystem —where users are naturally attracted, educated, and retained without constant paid exposure.

A sustainable growth system often includes four layers:

1. Owned traffic  (SEO, content, community, data)

This is the traffic you truly own. Every high-ranking SEO article, every community member, every email subscriber—they are traffic sources you don’t need to pay for every time.

2. Paid traffic  (ads, KOLs, partnerships)

Ads still matter, but they shouldn’t be the foundation. Once your owned traffic is strong enough, paid channels become accelerators, not the core engine.

3. Learning layer  (Elearning, internal materials, workshops)

This is what keeps both customers and teams engaged and improving. When customers learn something valuable from you, they come back. When teams learn to operate better, every campaign yields higher ROI.

4. Operational backbone  (ERP, CRM, automation)

Your operational systems are the spine that keeps all other layers running smoothly. Without solid systems, data becomes fragmented, processes stay manual, and scaling becomes chaotic.

Long-term growth is sustainable only when these four layers are connected by data, not separated silos. When your ecosystem works as one, ad cost fluctuations stop being a survival threat—they simply become part of the game.

Learn from Every Dollar Spent

What matters isn’t how much ad costs have increased , but what your business learns from every dollar spent.

A business that runs ads without building data, training teams, or creating valuable content is merely renting growth. When the money stops, so does growth.

But a business that runs ads while building data systems, training teams through Elearning, and developing an omnichannel network is owning growth. Each campaign doesn’t just generate orders—it leaves behind data, knowledge, and capability.

A long-term strategy isn’t built by big budgets. It’s built through accumulated capabilities: data – people – systems.

And in an era of rising ad costs, only those who build these capabilities can achieve sustainable growth.

This article is part of the “Brand Growth & Strategy” series by LMC, created to share insights and case studies that help e-commerce businesses build sustainable brand systems.

Next article:  “3 Case Studies: How E-commerce Businesses Recovered After a Crisis”.

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