The COVID 19 pandemic took the world by storm and it affected millions of businesses all over the world. Many offline stores had to close due to the lack of customers. That’s why it’s important to think about moving your business online as fast as you can.
Pushing your business towards online customers is a very good idea. It’s important now to take your business online and you will have another revenue source. It’s a great opportunity and something that you do not want to miss.
Acquiring new skills so you can take your business online. You need a proper plan to make it work. These 5 steps help you to take your business online.
1. Create Your Brand
One of the most important aspects, when you want to push your business towards the online world, is having the right strategy. You must study the market and see what people are buying online.
Not all products that sell well offline will sell very well online. That’s why you need to study your potential customers and see what they like the most. If you visit competitor websites, this can give a good insight into what sells and what’s not a great investment.
These things will offer a good set of eyes in regards to what you would need to do and how to enjoy the entire process.
When you establish a brand strategy, you must think about design. This defines the first interaction people have with your business and you do want to make that experience special. Doing that is not always going to be simple.
But it will provide with a good insight into the approach you need to pursue. You need to establish your brand message, ideas, colours you want to use and even the right logo.
It’s also important to note that you have many choices here. You can have your online business as a different entity or you can use it as an extension of your regular store.
You can sell stuff that you can’t have in your store, and which you get directly from suppliers. Omit, you also have the option to sell offline products online. Each brand strategy works, you have to define that before you go onward.
2. Build a Professional Website with WordPress
Once you know what type of store you want and what products you will sell there, it’s important to start creating your website. Picking the best web design NZ is not an easy thing to do especially in the beginning.
The idea is to have something appealing, simple and easy to use, but which also integrates all the features you need. It works great and it has the potential to work. Remember, your website is the first thing that people will notice when they go online.
The way you create a WordPress website is very simple:
- Select the desired domain name and a hosting service where you will store all website content.
- Then you will have to install WordPress from the hosting service’s cPanel. Most hosting services will have a one-click install solution for this.
- After WordPress is installed, you can start implementing a theme, a few plugins and any other custom features you want.
People love it when they see new products and features added to a store, so that’s something to keep in mind. Gradual growth is the right way to go, and it will offer you the type of results you want.
3. Setup SEO for your website
One of the first things you want to do is to identify the best keywords through keyword research. The keywords in your content should match the ones you want to start ranking for. It’s crucial to make sure that all your product descriptions, category descriptions or website content are SEO optimized.
Working with a dedicated article and blog writer will help you create guides, articles with tips and tricks or blog posts. It’s important to have a blog section, as it helps you generate many entries in search engine results.
Optimizing the website structure is also very important. if you have a website created from scratch, you should consider adding SEO optimized metadata. You should also consider making the website structure as simple as possible.
Optimizing image size is to prevent slow loading pages. As you already know, if your website pages are slow loading, people will visit other websites. This is the type of thing you want to avoid.
4. Promote your business
Once the system is set up and you are prepared to take orders from online customers, then you need to think about promoting your business. This is the best way to gain the attention of new leads and potential customers.
One of the top things to focus on is establishing a reliable social media presence. The way you present your company online is how you can get more attention from customers. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are great examples, but you can create profiles on niche platforms too. Make sure that you get social asset designs and write outstanding social copy.
It’s also imperative to think about video ads. These are going to bring in a lot of exposure online since most people prefer to watch videos anyways. Adding your video ads on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube will help make your new content viral. This will also bring in more attention to what you have on offer.
Working with a professional market strategist will help you establish a great strategy from the beginning. Always focus on content marketing, because it’s a crucial tool when you promote any kind of business.
Of course, you can’t stop here. You can find a variety of new methods you can use to promote your business, such as:
- Guest blogging helps you create great content that will be posted on the blog of another person.
- Use local listing services like Google My Business and Bing.
- Create a YouTube channel where you share helpful content very often.
- Enter business communities and forums, share your expertise and promote your website there.
- Publish press releases for your new products or services. It will bring in yet another way to promote your business.
5. Build a better online customer support
If you want to move to the online world with your business, it’s very important to offer online customer support. Here you can hire a dedicated company which handles this type of task, or you can have a few support professionals hired. That’s up to you, but the most important aspect is to have someone online at all times, ready to assist people with their problems.
This also means you must invest in some solutions to improve your customer support interactions.
Live chat is handy because it helps customers connect with one of your support professionals in real-time. Email support sounds great, but it usually leads to a lot of back and forth. Live chat is way better and more reliable.
On top of that, you should also consider using solutions like Zoom. These video conferencing apps can be used to offer video help to your customers.
It might not seem like a lot at first, but it’s this kind of stuff that can make a huge difference for your clients. Video help is something that not a lot of companies provide, so you will stand out if you do it.
Conclusion
It’s a great idea to expand your business to the online world. Or, in some cases, you can shift your company from offline to online. That’s up to you, but the most important aspect is to offer customers the best value and quality you can find out there.
Once you go online with your business, you can access new clients and more ways to sell your products. It’s the best way to grow your business and it can be a plan B in case your offline business stops getting clients.
So, don’t hesitate and use the SEO Christchurch services, We will help you expand your business to the online world with great success!
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