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The pandemic forced many businesses to move online and shut their offline operations!
As much of an eye-opening phase that was, it’s no surprise that moving a business online has been, in fact, a fruitful choice for many.
About 86% of Indian customers have gotten used to online shopping since the pandemic, which means your customer-base is probably doing most of their shopping online too.
And what’s better than offering them what they want exactly where they wish to find it?
By leveraging both offline and online mediums, brands have the power to offer even more touch points to their customers, which drives greater engagement and sales.
Not just that, it also open doors to multiple revenue streams, offering multiple opportunities to explore.
Excited to make this shift from your brick-and-mortar office to an online workplace?
But first, let’s get you prepped up about a few factors you NEED to take into account.
Analyze competitor activities and performance
Competitor analysis helps you shape your online strategy by understanding what you can do differently from your competitors or how you fill the gaps on their existing strategies for a stronger online presence.
You may have gathered some information about your competitors from offline sources, like industry reports, news articles or even from talking with clients, but now it’s time to really dig into what they are doing online.
First look at their websites to get an idea of their goals and strategies. Check out their social media accounts (if they have any) to see what kind of content they are putting up there. If they have an e-newsletter, consider signing up to it as well so that you get an idea on what kinds of things they write about in their emails, when they send them out etc.
Know your current marketing efforts
The key is to understand what you’re doing right and what needs to be improved.
If you don’t know where to start, try asking yourself these questions:
What offline marketing tactics do we use?
How successful are they at increasing sales?
Look at the data and find out which market research strategies have been most effective, and see if you can replicate the strategy online too.
Based on this analysis, allocate a greater proportion of your budget and time to those activities.
Once you have analyzed your current marketing efforts and found some room for improvement, it’s time to develop a plan that will help meet your goals and milestones.
Create a Digital Strategy
A digital strategy serves as a road map for your business. It helps you break down the steps you need to getting your business online to running a successful, profitable online business.
When developing your digital strategy and preparing to launch your business online, there are several elements to consider.
Budget
Based on your budget and data from past campaigns, you can pick which marketing channels to currently focus on.
Market Research
An effective way to conduct Market Research is to do a thorough competitor research and connect with your offline customers online. Understand their mindset when they shop online and what makes an offer tempting to them.
There's a lot to consider in this case - from personalised recommendations for clients to selling on social media to keeping your blog updated with current, compelling content.
So, take good time researching that.
Marking your digital presence
To establish yourself as a trusted brand on the Internet, ask yourself these questions:
What are your values as a business?
What’s your ideal brand voice?
What your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?
What kind of vibe would you like to project to your prospects?
Do you REALLY need to invest in building a website for now?
Starting on which platform(s) would bring you the most ROI?
Client case study - Trip Organiser
Transforming your business from offline to digital gets easier when you know your audience inside-out.
With so many changes you do on the operations front, it is easy to get swayed by vanity metrics or spread the efforts out onto multiple platforms.
But what hasn't changed is WHO your audience is. In fact, it's just a matter of mapping that to where they are most active. A travel client of mine has been in the business for many years.
His knowledge was based on decades of interaction with his customers. He knew which trip worked for what audience and in which city, so he wanted to target only those.
And he was confident that converting the lead into a customer was his forte, which could not be replaced with any digital asset.
With several months of lead campaigns under our belt, we are confident that this insight into his customers is crucial to growing his business.
Now, as they know what they’re able to achieve, they can look into scaling their business by covering more channels to be present on!
Conclusion
Online marketing is not something that you can set up once and then forget about — it's an ongoing process that requires constant attention, tweaking and planning to succeed.
The more you scale, the more baskets you can pick to keep your eggs on!
If you liked this post and would like more tips on other tools, then read more articles like this here or you can listen to the podcast.
Want to brainstorm a marketing strategy to grow your business? Book a free consultation with me here.
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