How are you looking to grow your business fast? Digital marketing transforms organizations’ offline marketing activities to the online space. In your offline form, you have billboards, signage, customer service, research etc. When it comes to online, and especially in terms of marketing, it all comes down to content, communication and data.
You use data to assess content; you create content based on what your brand stands for. There is always this question; I know what my brand stands, so how do I move forward? Understanding how to grow your online business fast will help you move your company forward.
Digital marketing strategy is really a content strategy based on what your brand stands for. It is simply replacing all the marketing activities you are doing into a content strategy. Content strategy is creating the right content, disseminating it in the right places, and promoting it in the right places.
It has to be crisper and faster. If you look at communication; when someone walks into your shop, they can see a face; they can meet and talk to somebody. With the online, many of these sensual interactions are taken away, you cannot be there physically. You have to up your content to make up for the same feeling of the brand.
For example, when doing a video presentation, you need to replicate all the features and benefits that the organization has and provides. All the communication should be based on what your brand stands for. Create the content and put it in the right places. Find below strategies to grow your online presence:
1) Every online platform has a different persona.
Twitter is where people like to debate a lot and talk back at each other. LinkedIn is the part whereby everybody is a thought leader. It is common to read messages like; you know, guys, how are you doing? My name is Waldemar, I’m in data science, and the trend is this. Everybody is in leadership, and everybody is amazing. Facebook is where everything goes. Instagram is very visual; it is like a photo-shoot. Tiktok is all a stage; it’s like a movie.
You need to curate your content to fit the different online platforms in order to be able to address the different audiences and understand how to grow your online business fast.
2) Another difference between a physical and an online business is the probability of a customer purchasing your product or service.
When a customer walks into a supermarket, there is a 50% chance that he/she will buy something. For online there are between 1% to 5% chances of a client purchasing a product. Meaning, out of every 100 customers, if you have a physical shop, approximately 50 will buy. If you have an online presence, out of 100 people, only one or two buy. To have 5% of clients buying is not easy. We are talking about 1% or 0.5% depending on how you have branded and your contents.
For example, in an online training, the trainer has to work extra hard to keep the attention of the audience because it is hard for their physical presence to be felt. The trainer has to make sure the slides are brighter and simple and that his voice is audible enough to be heard.
3) You are more likely to buy a product when you touch it.
Think about when you are going to buy clothes in a boutique, once you touch a dress or trouser, you’re more likely to buy it than if you just pass it. For online the percentage is quite low, and so you have to work extra hard. You have seconds to convert your customer. To make them stop, pause and take a step. Your content has to be supported with the right visuals and video.
4) For online business you need to use digital means to replace human interaction.
Many organizations have an online presence, but how long it takes for them to respond to a message or query makes the difference. How they respond is what sets them apart from competitors. If a customer has interacted with your product or service most often, they will call your organization, but for online interaction, they will send a message or an email. How long it takes for them to get a response and the consistency will determine whether they will buy or become repeat customers.
5) Determine where your customers are and create the content.
You cannot be posting the same content you post on LinkedIn on Instagram. LinkedIn has a lot about thought leadership, sharing knowledge and articles. Instagram is sort of semi-serious and semi-casual. If you go on Twitter, the number of characters you have to write says a lot about the platform.
The question is, where is your customer? Sometimes your customer is not even on Facebook or Instagram; maybe they are on WhatsApp or TikTok or Youtube. It is important to determine where your customers are and create the right content for them. If you do Instagram stories and YouTube, the video dimensions are different. If customers feel like your content is problematic, they will move on completely.
Think of a purchase you made and those that you did not. When you bought something, you were so much convinced. They are all emotions, something that convinced you to buy. If you don’t know what convinces a buyer to purchase, you will not know what to communicate or content to share.
6) Switch Moment
When faced with a purchase situation, a buyer experiences four types of forces:
o Push; a problem with the current state.
o Pull; attraction of a new state. Vision of where they want to be.
o Anxiety; uncertainty of change.
o Habit; usual habits and norms.
As a brand in your communication and digital marketing, you want to make sure that the push and pull are higher, especially the pull, mitigate the anxiety and get the habit to be changed. Like Newton’s third law of motion; for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. When the forces of progress (push and pull) are stronger than the forces of the status quo (anxiety and habit), the customer experiences a switch moment. That is how to grow your online business fast. You must understand the forces, the one thing that will make a customer switch to your brand or decide to try a new brand. A lot of the aspects can be attributed to the tangible traits, but the most important ones are very emotional. Emotion is a big driver in customer purchases.
For example, for entrepreneurs in the hair industry the forces the customers are experiencing and remedies are
7) Attention
With the online marketing there is an infinite scroll where a person keeps on scrolling without end. You need to find a way of grabbing the attention of the customer. The infinite scroll is a nightmare but is also what keeps a customer hooked on their phone or computer.
Conclusion
How to grow your online business fast needs you to test your online content strategy continuously. There are no guaranteed results; the only way you can know if a strategy will work is by testing. From the insights of the results, you will be able to know what is working. You can run small campaigns and keep tweaking your content while observing the conversion rates.