The Process For Launching And Growing A Business Online.

This post is intended to help business owners and individuals understand the process that will empower business success online. This information will empower you to act independently or to get help. It will also reassure you that you have control when dealing with difficult situations that will eventually arise when trying to grow your business online. 

Achieving success online has never been more difficult. No matter the industry, there is fierce competition, market saturation, and more than ever, customers demanding convenience and personalization. According to many sources, 90% of all new online businesses fail within their first 120 days.

There are several reasons for this high failure rate, but there are 2 reasons that are most common. 

1. Being uninformed
2. Failing to plan

For those wanting to be in the winning 10%, success can still happen if you follow the process. A successful business is not an accident! Success happens when people learn the process, how it works and properly executes. As a person who helps businesses grow online, I have seen this process work over and over again for my clients. There are no magic tricks involved, whatsoever! This is realistic. This is a proven way to increase your possibility of success online and it will take time, patience and investment. In the end, this process will help boost your business performance and create a roadmap for the future that will bring more customers, increase revenues and drive results for your business for years to come. 

Let’s walk through the process, its role and importance in business and how to use it to your benefit.

The Process

1. Strategy 

2. Design

3. Marketing

4. Repeat 

Before you begin the process, you must ask an important question: 

Should you do this in-house or outsource to an agency?

There’s no right or wrong answer, but you need a group of individuals, that can understand your industry, its challenges, your competition, and knows what it takes to implement and launch the process. None of this works without the collaboration of a group of people who are creative experts, that can execute.

Let’s dive into each part of the process. 

Part 1. Strategy

No magic button will ever drive massive amounts of traffic to your website with customers ready to give to you their debit or credit cards. If you want to earn money online, you need to have a plan. Before you can design the website or think of marketing, you need to make sense of your situation. Once you make sense of your situation, it will help inform you about other decisions that you will make like branding, web design, marketing, loyalty programs, shipping and fulfillment, and more. Don’t leave your strategy to chance. If you have a trusted advisor or executive team, this would be the time to share your strategy with them. They should confirm that you have addressed all of the challenges and solutions that are most important to your business. 

Question examples:

What are the right sales processes and conversion funnels for the industry?

Which paths are our target customers taking to find solutions to their problems and needs?

How are we going to reach them and present our product or service?

How much time and money will it take to reach them?

And much more.

Start with your customers

Think of customers as groups and not as individuals. Even simple businesses have different types of customers, and you need to understand their differences, needs and journeys. Technologies and markets are always changing, but the jobs that customers want their products and services to do are much more enduring. If you understand this, you can imagine how their needs are going to evolve in the future. They will also define who your competitors are.

Plan for the future

Online businesses don’t run on autopilot, nor do they achieve success overnight. The purpose of planning for the future is to allow you to make better decisions today. Don’t be blindsided when there’s a shift in your industry. To win in the future, you will need to plan today. 

Commit

You have to imagine all of the ways you could grow your business online. When you choose a strategy, you are choosing your future. Examine different alternatives, and after weighing your options, you need to commit to a strategy. One that can be described specifically and aligns with your target customers. Your strategy should be innovative and future-focused, while dealing with your industry in the now. You want clear purpose and direction, clear outcomes, an ongoing process to manage results, and a high-performing team that delivers on the intent. 

Part 2. Design

Most people think that success online is as easy as getting a domain name, having a website made, or even just having a social media profile. This is far from the truth. If you approach building a website or marketing your business online as an easy task, you started out on the wrong foot. You have to put some serious thought into what your business needs for its online presence. This includes logos and branding elements, yes, but most importantly, it includes the need for a website design strategy. Most people do research online before making a purchase, even if to buy something locally. Without a website, people will assume that your business is closed or not interested in finding new customers. With 75% of online users judging credibility by website design only, this is your chance to control how your company presents itself to the world. 

Building a website is not easy. 

You have to conduct different activities and functionalities, systematically to build a website that search engines and your customers will love. It is a time-consuming task that takes many steps to finalize. When properly built, your website design will bring you desired results, help you attract the attention of your target audience and generate business day after day. Consider what actions you want visitors to take on your website. Think about how your content will be structured, search engine optimization (SEO), conversion optimizations, and call to action placements, as well as who will optimize and maintain the site regularly. You will need to implement tracking tools so that you know how your site is performing. The data from the website will give you valuable insights that can be used to inform sales and marketing decisions and how to increase business performance.

A social media profile is not enough. 

If you believe that having a free profile on social media is enough, then you will always be dependent on the social media platforms you choose. Trends change, algorithms change, rules change, and what’s working one day might not work tomorrow. If your customers are on Instagram, Facebook or Snapchat today, they might be on a new platform tomorrow. As people switch from one platform to the next, your website will be an anchor. The site belongs to you, and you control the content, the messaging and how you want to be perceived. Creating a long-term relationship that works with your audience, and for your business.

Part 3. Marketing

Before digital marketing, radio, television and print were the three advertisement channels used to get the word out about a specific product or service. Lead generation and engagement were expensive, and many marketing teams would spend a lot of time developing and refining their plans before going to market. Think of when you bake a cake. You mix all of your ingredients together, then you bake it in an oven. Once baking, there’s no way to add ingredients, unless you quit and start over. You have to wait until it's done baking and cooled before you can test it. That’s traditional marketing. 

Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is measurable. Today, you can think of digital marketing as making a soup. You can constantly taste and add ingredients as you go. With digital marketing, you can adjust and improve your plan until you reach your goals or targets. A good approach would be to start small, do some experimenting and evaluate the results. 

Being online is a visual business

If no one sees you exist, then how will you sell products or services? To be seen, you need to understand that audiences want experiences catered to them. They want it to be to the point, exciting, personalized, shareable, and on the platforms they use. The best way to meet these demands is to understand the process and techniques that drive connections. It is best to proceed with a specific budget in mind. Include a budget for graphic design, videography, advertisement spends, copywriting, and software for tracking results. A good portion should be for ad spending. Businesses will not reach a significant number of potential customers, especially on platforms like Facebook or Google, without spending money. Even spending a few hundred dollars a month can reach thousands of potential customers. 

Data-driven campaigns have proven their effectiveness

With analytics, you can uncover opportunities to improve and optimize your campaigns, evaluate your online business health and gain insight into new content and ideas that connects with your audience. Using data can give you a significant advantage over competitors and allow you to deliver campaigns to the right channels, to the right people, at the right time. 

Marketing practice examples:

SEO - Search Engine Optimization

SEO uses an organic, non paid strategy to appear in searches. With SEO, you don’t pay for placement on search engines. Instead, you can use tactics that prompt search engines to show your content because it’s valuable and authoritative. SEO trends keep changing from time-to-time. So whatever is valid today, will not be tomorrow following just one of Google’s updates. Always keep a close eye on the changing SEO rules, website optimizations, latest SEO tricks, and other activities. When focusing on SEO to increase your search rankings, the two areas of focus are: 

On-Page SEO: Targets technical elements of a webpage to increase rankings on search engines.

Activity examples: 

• Page titles
• Headings
• Images
• Meta tags
• Fast loading pages

Off-Page SEO: Builds your website’s reputation and authority by connecting with other high-quality websites and content. 

Activity examples:

• Blogging
• Being active on social media
• Influencer marketing
• Creating valuable and sharable content

SEM - Search Engine Marketing 

SEM, also referred to as pay-per-click (PPC), uses a paid strategy to appear in searches. 

Allowing your business to:

• Increase its search visibility
• Improve its search rankings
• Drive more website traffic via search

The most commonly used search provider is Google Ads. You can set up and optimize ads, as well as set a budget to pay for the placements of those ads. With SEM, you can conduct keyword research and create campaigns that target the best keywords for your industry, products or services. You will only be charged for ads when a person searching for the keywords you set in place are clicked.

Social Media 

With social media, you can connect with large numbers of people. You will need to be specific on social media when it comes to sharing, engaging and communicating with your target audience. It rarely works to sell your products or services to everyone on social media, so use social media to build relationships, discover and connect with your target audiences. The more specific you can get in targeting an audience, the more success you will have in the long run. The end goal should be to move people to your website and present an offer. 

Your social media efforts should consist of:

• Attracting your target audience
• Engaging with them 
• Presenting knowledge and offers of high value
• Driving them to a specific lead capture on your website

Email Marketing

Audience subscriptions are critical for online success and are 40 times more effective than social media. Soft value offers like discounts, videos or ebooks are a great way to grow your list. Subscriptions are best captured on your website. Nurture your audience and build a personal connection with them. Take their differences into account, and manage that relationship through personalized email automation. The goal is to build trust through regular emails over time, ending with a sales offer. 

Examples of practices:

• Keep it simple and relevant 
• Create sales funnels
• Sell products
• Provide special offers and discounts
• Use high-quality images
• Keep mobile-friendliness in mind
• Use email analytics 
• Encourage repeat business 

Part 4. Repeat 

Change is inevitable and often is necessary. To be successful, you will need to continuously improve everything. Think of your strategy like a loop instead of a straight line. Be ready to make revisions in light of interactions between your target audiences and shifting environments. In an ideal world, you would create a long-term strategy, implement it, drive tons of traffic and customers to your online business, and fend off any competitors. But that is not reality. Technologies evolve, algorithms change, customers make surprising choices, and competitors find new ways to compete. The goal is to support the continuous improvement of the strategy by better understanding your situations, making smart choices and making revisions based on new information.

Question examples:

• What’s new, good, and different? 
• How can we redesign our strategy while running it?
• Are our strategic goals on track?
• What is evolving differently than expected?
• What assumptions were proved wrong by our experiments?
• If we are off track, is the strategy flawed or, is it poor execution?

Conclusion 

Taking a leap of faith and trusting the process, will create a blueprint that you can easily duplicate when it comes time to expand your business. If you are thinking of starting up this year, refreshing your current marketing approach or are working hard to pivot your business, feel free to contact me directly for advice. Use the link below to schedule a free consultation or email me at [email protected]

Good Luck!