Getting online or stepping up a gear.
Getting online or stepping up a gear.
The necessity of online visibility for you to survive or thrive - we make it easy.
No matter how many businesses you ask what they do they will all give you a different answer. But there is one thing all of us have in common, we are all marketers.
Look after your customers or somebody else will. The main reason people stop dealing with you is you ignore them. After they spend money with you they are not appreciated or they never hear from you again.
There are fewer and fewer average small businesses with average marketing and an average sales and marketing strategy.
You can't survive like that anymore. There are being wiped out and it is going to get a lot worse in the future.
A major change to the way business was done online happened with the introduction of GDPR. Businesses struggled to get compliant and just as everything was getting back to normal COVID-19 shattered our future plans. Online Marketing is now more important than ever with the upward surge of people shopping online. People that never shopped online are now treating it as the new normal and the fact that some businesses will not re-open there will be a lot of additional shoppers with online shopping experience searching for goods and services. Now is the time to grab market share that you never had before.
Most Businesses start because a person has a high level of skill at what they do. They soon run into problems because they lack the other necessary skills like accounting and marketing.
Marketing
Marketing being on top of the list of the reasons there is such a high failure rate of business start-ups in the first five years. It does not matter how good you are at your job, if enough people don't know about your business, you will fail.
Marketing is not a cost, it’s the investment you make in getting customers and securing the future of your business and financial future.
The number one mistake businesses make is to stop marketing. The second mistake is not communicating with customers. Video is the future of marketing. You can send short videos to your customer's smartphones so they will never miss a video.
You can make yourself visible to a lot of people and sell directly to them. With coverage improving at a rapid pace, it will not be long until it will be possible for everyone to be online. With a basic plan, you can be on all devices and be online to do business on the go from anywhere in the world. You don’t even need a desktop or laptop.
Online information is critical in the present marketplace.
B2B Byers now prefer to research products and services themselves rather than ask a vendor sales rep. for information. Good informative content is vital on your website providing relevant up to date content to buyers.
Learn how to do business online.
With marketers competing for the attention of potential customers, you have to use all methods to get noticed. Getting online is no longer an option for most businesses if they want to thrive rather than survive.
You can't afford to be complacent about your business.
Even if you are comfortable at the moment things can change rapidly in this fast-paced world. Keep up to date on the products you need sooner rather than later. To keep informed of the latest trends visit our website https://www.tipperaryebusiness.com and make this a regular habit. Familiarise yourself a little at a time rather than trying to grasp everything at once.
You can no longer rely on your ability or customer service to keep you at the top. If you are not visible on the internet someone else will take your customers because of their web presence through the search engines and the power of social media. While visibility will bring customers to you, the ability still matters they will leave as fast as they arrived if your service is inferior and search for someone else.
With the constant growth of customers abandoning traditional shopping and the boom of smartphone ownership, this trend is only going to increase. Shopping centers around the world have noticed a drop in numbers as more people have moved to shop online. Some stores have had to close their doors and not only small shops but large well-known chains are been affected. People's desire for convenience and their irregular working hours have fuelled this. With the constant increase in rent, rates, and insurance it is becoming more difficult to stay in business. When you visit large shopping centers you notice the rise in vacant units and this will continue unless retailers change the way they operate.
It is a well-known fact that most people in shopping centers today are people in for the heat and a walk in comfort shielded from the weather. They seldom if ever buy anything, They even bring their own food, and meet up with their friends as they enjoy their day out. Your best customers are the ones at home on their smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops who already know what they want. They are in buying mode and are doing their research online and deciding where to buy.
Promote your business online.
If you can’t beat them join them, you can turn this to your benefit by learning how to do business online and introducing some cost-effective methods. Make this first move before your competitors do. Visit us online and update your knowledge before someone else implements up-to-the-minute methods and steals your customers. If you are not constantly updating your skills, and equipment and getting in front of new customers you get left behind and end up closing your business. It is a learning process it will not happen overnight, update your knowledge of what is available. Let the software do the heavy lifting, make a start, learn a little at a time, and implement what suits your business when you are ready. A place to start is https://www.tipperaryebusiness.com where you can learn at your own pace. Remember the greatest expert in any subject knew nothing at the beginning. Don't be left behind, if you are not moving forward you are standing still and in danger of falling behind. Make every day a day in school. Learn in small portions, then add to it daily.
If you can’t be found online you are not in the picture.
People searching the internet will not know what you do, what products you sell, or what services you provide. The chance of people calling to your premises to purchase something they searched for online and discovered you stocked it is greater than risking their money. Waiting weeks for delivery of goods, the high risk of loss because of non-delivery or paying duty on goods from outside your trading block. Some of these duties only become known when the courier sends you an invoice because the goods were drop-shipped from outside your region. This is on top of what was paid at the checkout all because they did not read the small print on the website. Even if they did read the small print they don’t tell you what goods it applies to or how much extra you have to pay. Avoid these nasty surprises, it would have been less expensive to buy locally where you can handle the goods before you buy and save the hassle of returning unsuitable goods. When you buy from untrusted sources you are at the mercy of online scammers.
Their latest scam, you order an item online, they give you a tracking number, you wait several weeks, and nothing arrives. When you contact them they say it was delivered on a specific date, you check with your postal service quoting the tracking number, and they confirm it was delivered. Then you realise you received an item you never ordered around that time. The item you received was only worth a fraction of the value of the item you ordered. I received a cushion cover, I ordered a chair. The tracking number confirms the delivery was made, they are covered, and you are scammed.
If suppliers had their goods visible online they can be found in a search and people will do more of their shopping locally. Buying and selling online within your own trading block is the only way to beat these nasty surprises. Sourcing goods locally is not just about shopping in your own village or town, some goods are not available even in your own County or Country. If shoppers are not aware of goods that are available locally you can't blame them for sourcing elsewhere. It is up to every business to make their goods or services searchable online.
You need to get your business online.
To do this you need a mobile-friendly website. This is vital as search engines are penalising sites that are not mobile-friendly. If your potential customers can’t read your website on their smartphones, they will leave and go to one they can read. If your web presence is not mobile-friendly, the search engines will bury your site so far down the search results nobody will find you.
Do you use social media for your business?
Don’t underestimate the popularity of social media. Visit our website for some of the best social media products.
Make it easy for people to do business with you. Use offline marketing to get people to your website, telephone, postcards, leaflets, and newspapers. Check out our Free QR Codes to drive traffic to where ever you want it to go, simply by scanning with a smartphone. You can generate your own virtual business card to carry on your smartphone photo album so that people you meet can scan it to transfer your information to their phone contacts. You can also print them on any advertising material, newspaper adds, the outside of your premises, point of sale, etc. so your potential customers can collect your information by scanning it with their smartphones. When your premises are closed people can collect your information with their smartphones by scanning the QR Code. No need to have a pen or paper, this is not the future, this is right now.
A must-read for anybody doing business online.
This article by Blake Morgan on how the B2B buyer journey and companies need to adjust their experience to match.
For all this and much more visit https://www.tipperaryebusiness.com
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Until the next time,
For TIPPERARYeBUSINESS.com
David O’Donnell