The online shopping craze is rapidly escalating. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the shopping behavior of people has changed. People prefer to buy online in order to avoid physical contact. Thus, physical business owners are turning towards online stores.
According to the statistics by sleeknote, E-commerce sales are expected to reach $4.2 trillion by the end of 2020. The brick and mortar store merchants are showing their presence online more especially after the COVID-19 outbreak.
When you are all set with the online business - created a product list, build an amazing website, started getting customer attention, and much more. Now you have reached the moment to focus on growing your business.
Not everyone can spend thousands of dollars to invest in growing their business, particularly small businesses. Even though you can engage in a lot of activities to grow your business. All you need to do is effort.
Here are 7 actionable tips to expand your small business. If implemented well it can bring your business to the next level and work miracles.
7 Actionable Tips For Online Small Business Owners
Before discussing the actionable tips for online small business owners in detail let us take a quick preview
1. Emphasize customer fulfillment and support
Everything starts with the Customer. Identify your customer’s needs and focus on the products and services that can fulfill their needs. Listen to the feedback from your customers. This will help you to think better. Include live chat on your website so that customers can reach you easily and quickly.
Make customer support your priority. Listening to them and getting engaged with the customers will help to increase your brand awareness. Stay in contact with your existing customers via newsletter or informing them of offers ahead of time.
Improve the user experience of your store and quicken the login process of your store with Google One Tap Login for Magento 2. The customers can directly login with their Google account with just a single click.
Happy and satisfied customers will not only remember your services, but they will also refer to others and prove to be a good word of mouth.
2. Concentrate on your niche
When you start a new business, it’s too exciting and you want to connect to all the marketing strategies you get to know about. Scattering yourself into too much stuff will result in missed opportunities to reach your targeted audience.
Do not attempt to be the best at everything, just be the best at something. While trying to be perfect from every corner, it happens you reach nowhere. So, focus on one main thing. In the race to grow business, merchants usually do too many things at a time and want to fix every problem at once.
Improve your products and services, focus on organic SEO growth, and concentrate on your niche so that you can stand out of crowd. Invest your time into digital marketing.
3. Use your time wisely
As a small business owner, you are an all-rounder in your business. Sometimes you are the CEO, sometimes you are the digital marketer, sometimes you are the E-commerce manager, and so on. As you expand your business, it is necessary you use your time wisely.
Look for technology and automation services to speed up your work and save your time. There are various different tools that can come to help to quicken your work. By using them, you can focus more on your products and customer requirements.
4. Grow your business with Google
According to Oberlo, 46% of product searches start with Google. As stated by Internet Live Stats, 3.5 billion searches are made per day. Thus, appearing in Google is very beneficial to reach more users.
Google for small business targets the growth of startup and small scale businesses. Google My Business provides creating your business profile for free on Google. Your products show up on the search results of the users and maps.
Show your store discounts and offerings on Google Ads. For contactless payment, use Google Pay for Business to manage your payments. Keep connected with your customers through Google Meet.
5. Prioritize your target audience
Focus the business on your target audience. The more you simplify products, services, and content, the higher quality of visitors you will receive. Post relevant content about what your business offers instead of going off track.
The one misstep business owners make, is targeting everyone. Instead, the business owners must focus on the audience that really purchases from you.
If you are clueless about who your target audience is, you can make use of free tools like Google Analytics. With this tool, you can know what the audience likes and can work on it better. The tool helps you to know your business reach and engagement. Another way is to get to know your audience from the direct competition. What is working well for them?
6. Social media is powerful
According to baclinko, 3.81 billion people use social media worldwide in 2020. This is a huge number. Hence, being on social media is not a matter of choice. It is mandatory to make your presence on social media if you want to expand your business.
One of the beautiful things about social media is, it is free to create a profile on most of the platforms and can easily put your business in front of your potential customers.
Begin by finding out what social media platforms works best for your content and products. Broadcast your social media via newsletter, blog posts, and emails. Engage your followers with a catchy content. Post daily, include images and videos in your post and add social buttons.
7. Be a part of online communities
Online communities include forums and question-answers website. These are the places where people go to post questions, find answers, and research. Top communities on the internet are Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Yahoo Answers, Q&A on Google.
These communities provide a range of areas for people. You can join for free and invest your time building the community. Find out where your customers most likely look for the answers. Select the community, based on your business.
Do not always add links to your website into these forums. This will affect the genuineness of your business. Post relevant answers and add the links of your business or website where it is adequate.
Wrap up
Be patient. It takes time to build your business. Growing your business doesn’t happen all at once. With strong endeavors, you can build and grow your business online. Use these 7 actionable tips to enhance your building efforts. In today’s market, your online customers are just as essential as your physical store. Have patience and establish something that helps your target audience. Focus and you will do this.
