Cultivating a strong online presence is perhaps one of the easiest ways to expand your business. After all, this means that you can connect with international customers instead of those who may happen upon your store locally. However, if you want to succeed online, there are certain steps you need to take to make it happen – you can’t just set up a basic website and hope for the best.
With that in mind, here are some important things that you need to think about when you take your brand online.
The user experience. From your perspective, your website’s purpose is mainly to bring in extra income through a compelling sales page. However, if you want this to work in your favour, you need to focus on the customer experience – ensuring that your website is the perfect blend of entertaining and informative. This can be achieved by providing them with access to a variety of content – from blogs to product descriptions. Remember that when it comes to creating content, you should focus on quality as opposed to quantity. This can help you avoid common blogging mistakes and website errors that would push customers away as opposed to reeling them in.
You also need to ensure that your website is suitably designed for purpose. For example, you may post a specific blog aiming to encourage customers to buy a particular product by including links and useful info. To test whether this will work (i.e. whether or not reading the blog encouraged them to make a purchase), you can use a usabilty testing framework to observe customer behaviour and implement real changes.
Communication is key. When you’re working with customers face-to-face, you’re able to communicate with them more clearly and can gain an understanding of how they are feeling. This scenario can be hard to replicate online – but you must find a way to build a relationship with your online customers if you want to succeed. One way you can continue to communicate the right way with customers is by providing them with different ways to contact you. For example, this could include adding a chat function to your site or simply encouraging them to give you a call.
You’ll need a PAO. When you first launched your business, it’s highly likely that you put together a strong business plan. While you may have been around for a while before you decide to get online – you have to treat it almost as though you are starting from scratch and put a new plan in place to ensure that your transition to the digital market is a smooth one. One way you can do this is by understanding the most common challenges that online businesses face so that you know how to avoid them yourself. Furthermore, you should begin by testing the waters and offering only a handful of your products online before slowly expanding your offerings – so that you can start building up a customer base and generating hype for your products gradually.