The world of online has, over the last decade, expanded exponentially. This has allowed businesses to grow and thrive online reaching customers that they might not have been able to reach before. Entrepreneurs who have big business ideas can now easily execute them and launch their businesses effectively and in less time than they would if they were launching a physical store.
E-Commerce research has shown that by the end of 2019, over 1.92 billion people globally will be shopping online. That is nearly 25% of the earth’s population. In fact, eCommerce makes up 13.2% of total retail sales world wide, and it is not stopping there. Statistics show that with the continual growth of these solutions,, by 2040, 95% of purchases will take place online.
More and more people are shifting to shop online due its effectiveness and convenience. With the introduction and growth of mobile shopping, people can now shop from anywhere at anytime. This, together with the raising of safety standards, as well as swifter, more efficient payment and shopping processes, online shopping has just become the first choice for many people.
We took a look at how you can create your own success online and what essentials you need to keep in mind to reach online success.
Align Your Website To Your Brand
You have found your niche, you have a product or service that you can provide to your customer and you have an idea of your brand. The next step to take is to create a website that will not only reflect your brand, but will ensure that your customer keeps coming back for more.
There are a few key elements that you need to keep in mind when launching your store.
Firstly, what platform are you using? You have several options that you need to research before simply launching in. If you are starting off, you might find it easier and cheaper to either buy a website instead of creating it, or launch it on Shopify.
The challenge that is raised with that is that it has very limited functioning and should you start expanding rapidly, you might grow out of the website. The answer to this is to conduct a Shopify to Bigcommerce migration in order to make room for a more effective, customer friendly site to cater for your bigger customer base and more traffic.
Ensure here though that you take care when you are migrating your site. A migration, if done in a rush, or incorrectly can sink your rankings and make you invisible on Google. 404 pages will plague your site and this will chronically impact your Google ranking. Make sure that you get the right assistance when you making the change.
Create Content To Get You Noticed
When they say that content is king, we can only agree. Content is the key ingredient that gets your brand out there and noticed on social media. Its role is twofold:
- Content that is pushed out through blogs, social media, mailers and affiliate sites should attract the attention and engage your customers. Your content that you are producing should be educational, trustworthy, informative and engaging. Companies are spending thousands a month to create written blog posts, videos and eye catching images to attract their customers. Videos and images are key elements to attract your customers attention to draw them to the article or product page. Make sure you research the best image solution for large ecommerce companies in order to have crisp, attractive images on your site.
- Content heightens your ranking on Google. The savvy use of keywords within your blog and your site will determine how high you are ranked for that keyword. You need to make sure that you are totally aware of what keywords you need to be including and place them strategically and repetitively in the site.
Spend time on your content that appears on your site and understanding the keywords that need to be included for you to show up in search. Google scrapes your content and ranks you according to how many times words show up on your site, so if you are selling pet products, you need to know all of the affiliated words that people search for to be picked up when they type it in. Make use of keyword rank checkers to see what is essential to add in to your site!
Get That Marketing Strategy Right
Digital marketing is taking over the world one step at a time! Many sources claim that digital marketing is almost overtaking traditional marketing to reach out to customers. You need to do extensive research into marketing strategies and determine which is going to work for your company. Most online companies still base their marketing strategies around the 4 ps of marketing rule of thumb, and simply adapt the execution to work for digital.
Merging your content and marketing strategies is critical! Content is vital for SEO and social is vital for marketing. But a savvy online entrepreneur knows this is one in the same. Content is the key ingredient in online marketing, and you need to ensure that you are adding content to your brand on a daily basis.
Work out a content and social strategy from the get go. Plan the year ahead taking into consideration seasonality, holidays and any relevant days that you can make use of. Create blogs, images and video content that you can post on your site, share to social like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and that can go to affiliates. Remember, the more it gets posted, the more exposure you get!
Wrapping Up
To wrap up, when you are setting off on the eCommerce journey, you need to keep the customer in mind at all times. You need to carefully plan the customers journey and make sure that you are creating a strategy to surprise and delight them. Ensure that your website is optimized for swift and efficient scrolling and page jumps. Make sure that the customer can go through the funnel easily in order not to bounce before they have checked out and made a payment. The customer journey is critical for your companies success.