DIGITIZING YOUR BUSINESS
Shile Ismaila
For many people that have multiple streams of income, a 9-5 job and a business on the side, or you have business(es) that you run, you definitely need this.
This period most people can’t go to work or be physically present with their business, for one reason or the other, but want to effectively run their business, it is possible.
Digitizing your business is operating your business, without physically being there on a daily basis. This when you take your store online. It is also teaching others to do how you do what you do online, for a price.
This is an opportunity to diversify what you’re doing.
Look at your current structure and improve on how you can have an online presence. Create a website if you don’t have one, build up a remote team if you can. As you build your online presence and you grow bigger in business, you would not want to keep your customers waiting for a reply or getting a reply hours after they made inquiries, here is why a team can come in.
The team can help with your customer service, updating your products on the website, or your social media platforms.
If you need to work on your own, make sure you get training on how you can effectively run an online business. If you’re outsourcing, make sure you work closely with the person/agency you’re outsourcing it to. If you have a team, get them trained to understand your business, your audience, and your online business.
This training is important because you don’t want anything done to harm your business in any way.
Stay consistent and continuously improve the system/structure you have put in place. Get on new trends, try out new features, explore new templates. Make sure whatever structure you’re working on works for you, you can always review it and make it better.
Being online opens you up to a larger influence, you’re out there and the world can now see you. You have more brand awareness basically.
When you already have all these things in place, the next thing for you to do is to optimize it. You have a social media platform that you want to grow, you want to ensure you’re targeting the right customers. Or you have a website and you have many people coming on your website, enquiring and buying from you. One way to optimize that is by creating more brand awareness; connecting with your existing customers and getting new ones.
Connecting with your Existing customers and gaining new ones; Email marketing is still one of the effective ways of connecting and retaining your existing customers. Currently, email marketing has over 4,044 retention rates. If you’re a small business and you don’t have an email list, you need to start thinking about how you can build your database. Email is one way to touch base with your customers, share insights into your brand, your products, what’s coming, and how they can connect with you as well.
Email Marketing is also an amazing tool for getting new customers especially if you offer value and you’re able to give relevant information from time to time.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are a good time to sending out emails. To ensure people open your emails and respond to them, you need to get creative with your subject and the body of the mail.
Social Media Platforms are also a place you retain your existing customers and get new ones. This is where you interact with your customers in a friendly way. Most people like to see the face of the brand, they like being personal with the brand. Social media helps you show the personality of the brand, you are able to show the ‘Behind the scenes’, how a day in your business looks like, your team, your relationship with your customers, etc.
It is really good to create a social media presence. Which involves you posting educating, entertaining, informative, and helpful content around your niche. Your content should be focused on improving your customers and not just collect their money. When people get comfortable with people who give them value, they easily give them their money.
Website is a very important tool you can have as a business, Social media can go down or crash at any time, your website is like your estate. It is all yours, your estate. To improve your brand, you need a website that has as much information about you and your business as possible.
You also have to optimize your website, you want people to be able to find you and reach you easily. You have to do a lot of SEO, where you are able to optimize your website, the content you put on there, the keywords, and videos. Google is able to position your business based on how you’ve been able to optimize your website. When people search for some words in relation to your business, they should be able to find you on the first page of google. You can work with an expert on this if you don’t know how to go about it as a business owner.
You should be ready to spend money on your business. If you need something to move your business forward, outsource it. In order to grow your business, spend money in the right places.
Even at this, you need to understand some things. You do not have to be tech-savvy to understand some basic stats and analytics for your social and website. For social media, for instance, you need to check how well your content is doing, the kind of content that is doing well, and how you can improve on your content.
You also need to know that your business does not have to be on every social media platform. You don’t have to be everywhere but you need to be in the right places. You need to know and understand where your type of audience or your customers are.
Know the analytics of your website as well, know how many people frequent your website daily and weekly.