It is never too late to move your business online. Start thinking about your business strategy and what you can do to become more profitable. Moving your business online means you will need to have a digital marketing strategy and digitalization process in place.
In the world we live today, digitalization is changing the buying behavior of the customers. That makes it essential for a business to go online.
Moving your business online is a daunting task if you are not entirely comfortable with building a website or get creative in terms of design. Luckily, Rome was not built in a day, neither does your online business have to be.
Despite the current covid-19 crisis, a lot of businesses have already moved online. There are a large number of companies out there that have successfully moved their business online. If you are a food producer or a pub owner, you can still run your business with the help of digitalization. Why not start organizing pub trivia nights hosted on your website through an online video system. You can also begin delivering your cupcakes and set up a webshop to help manage the orders.
Below you will find our guide on how to move your business online and what you need before you start.
Marketing Research
You should always start with why. Understanding why you are in this business and why your clients choose your product is a very good start of marketing research. In the digital world, every customer you have is already present online. You just have to find a way of reaching them online. Before you begin with your digital marketing strategy, you need to learn what the options are and what is most suitable for your business.
There are many online options for your business. This includes social media combined with email marketing or a completely new website. Social Media Marketing includes sharing information and engaging your followers to promote your products.
Email marketing is proven to be one of the best converting marketing channels in the business. By sending regular updates and information to your subscribers, you can nurture your relationship with your clients. You may already have a whole bunch of business cards that you can import to your newsletter list of subscribers. You should remember that the best way to nurture your contacts is with quality content. In other words, you should not buy a list of contacts and bombard them with emails. Instead, grow your audience and subscribers that will eventually become your clients.
Build your website
When moving your business online, you should consider building your website to promote your business. Before you start, you should seek for the hosting provider and secure a domain name. These two make sure that your website is functional and accessible to others. When you are all set, you can then install a WordPress or other CMS that will help you to build and easily manage your website.
You can also search for online tutorials to help you through this process.
When all is ready, you can start with the design process and search for your competitor’s website to get a better idea. Finding a perfect design for your website is a creative process where you understand your customers’ interactions with the website.
If this process gets overwhelming, you can always ask for advice from experts in website design and development.
Choose a Payment System
If you want to sell your products online, you will need to set up a payment system that will help you with money transfer between you and your customers. The system you choose for your eCommerce website can make or break your business. Therefore, you should again do some research before you make a decision. Some of the global online payment gateways available for WordPress are Stripe, PayPal, and AmazonPay. Depending on your location and local legislation, other gateways options may be available and more convenient!
Here you can find more information on payment gateways.
Social Media Strategy
Social Media Strategy includes interactions with your followers or customers. Social listening is a term commonly used in digital marketing, which includes listening to what is trending in your community. With hashtags, you can easily follow what others are posting and include them in your posts. Find ways to grab the attention of your current followers. This means experimenting with messaging and content. For example, does your brand promote user-generated content and hashtags?
Even something as simple as asking a question can increase your engagement rate. Your customers can be your best funs, but only if you’re giving them something to do.
There are numerous ways to increase the engagement of your brand. There are numerous ways to increase the engagement of your brand. Try with asking your followers a simple question to engage them. Even a simple question can lead to an increase in engagement.
SEO
As a small business owner, you will need an efficient way to connect with your customers. Long-tail search terms are what users who are ready to buy a product or engage your service type into Google.
If you know how to use them, then, you can rest assured that you’ll drive highly targeted leads and customers to your small business.
To really get higher ranking, why not research other long-tail keywords that are not too obvious? More about that in other articles. Right now, it is important to understand why keyword are important for your business. Basically, you want to rank on the first page of Google so people could find you. There’s an important aspect of long-tail search queries.
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content. The meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s source code. Meta tags are essentially small content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.
The only difference between tags you can see (on a blogpost) and tags you can’t see is the location. Meta tags only exist in HTML, usually at the “head” of the page and, so are only visible to search engines.
To sum up, there are numerous ways to move your business online. We outlined a few crucial steps to get your business going. The process of digitalization will bring new ways of doing business for your company. During uncertain times, the business should look for advice from digital marketing agencies for the easiest way of moving online.