“If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will be out of business.” – Bill Gates
In this day and age, businesses must continue to evolve to survive competition. Online presence is more important than ever. To have an online presence as a business, you must not only be active, but interactive.
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Study Your Competitors
Staying competitive keeps you active, updated and innovative. Market intelligence is a crucial aspect of this, and analyzing your competition’s product range, marketing, website and even their operations gives you an insight in your own performance. Take an analytical approach on what you offer and how you offer it. You’ll gain market intelligence that gives you a leg up on the competition.
Get to know what your rivals are selling and for how much. Identify the areas where they are falling short, and find out what mistakes they are making. You can learn from these mistakes instead of making them yourself. Be ready to take action in a heartbeat to capture market interest for your advantage.
Going Hyperlocal
Hyperlocal means selling a niche product to a niche market segment in a localized area. Being hyperlocal means serving your customers with rapid delivery and immediate gratification in mind. The customer is in control of the supply chain, resulting a greater degree of trust. Start small, overcome the challenges, and then scale up.
Be sure that your offerings are clearly defined and well-focused. Build a network of local retailers and logistics companies to ensure that you can fulfill orders as efficiently as possible. The pipeline should be seamless.
Meanwhile, take care in building your in-house workforce of skilled employees. The last mile seems to be the weakest link in the hyperlocal chain, while also being the yardstick for competence. Build your team and fine-tune your operations to inspire your customers’ loyalty and confidence.
Your Website Should be Up and Running at ALL TIMES
A high quality e-commerce site must be easily accessible to all of your visitors can do the job without your active involvement. While browsing your website, visitors should be able to see that it is living and breathing, and get access to the information they need.
Customer support is one of the biggest challenges for e-commerce stores, especially since inquiries can come at any hour of the day, about anything under the sun. You may want to consider implementing live chat or round-the-clock ticketing to handle questions and concerns. Installing a conversational ai chatbot application to ensure that your customers’ questions get answers as soon as possible. Additionally, setting up a community forum for your customers, vendors and even staff to interact with transparency will inspire confidence.
Show Them What you Got!
To paraphrase Nourish With Style’s chief creative officer Elyse McNabb, “To go viral, you have to be out there…ready for the chance to go viral.” Use social media to help your e-commerce business evolve, stay relevant, and interact with your audience. As you build your rapport with the community, always be true to your brand.
Promote yourself as a self-professed business giant, even if you’re still working up to that level. Start-ups are everywhere; so if you’re just getting off the ground, establish yourself and your brand as a trusted authority and a reliable source of information. Blogging is one way to do this, and if you go this route, promote your business on social media outlets to monetize website content. Another option, provided you have extra funds for your marketing efforts, you can opt to utilize influencer marketing to your promotional strategy for added brand boost.
Get to know as much as you can, not just about the products and services you’re selling, but other things that your customers might be looking for. Convince your potential buyers that they need not look elsewhere to find what they want. Your brand will live on as long as they keep coming to you.
Is your business ready to make a splash? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
