Angela Hausman, PhD June 24, 2021 Each passing day, business owners find new ways for leveraging the internet to help them operate more efficiently, save money, and build profits. If you’re a business owner, mastering various internet strategies impact not only the success of your online marketing efforts but those offline efforts as well.
Courtesy of BCG
Fortunately, there is a wide range of business tools and strategies available on the internet that you can leverage to steer your business toward greater heights. Below, we’ll discuss several of the most impactful ways of leveraging the internet for success and discuss some best practices to ensure you achieve that success.
Leveraging the internet
As you can see in the image above, the evolution of the internet was dramatic and continues to evolve, with more people spending more time on the internet every year. Massive changes wrote by the pandemic and resulting shutdown may change the way vast swaths of consumers shop, conduct business, socialize, obtain a wide range of services, and even how governments serve citizens.
Levering the internet for your business is no longer an inexpensive option to reach a highly targeted customer base but a necessity for businesses of all sizes and market niches. By combining traditional marketing efforts with newer digital marketing options in the right way, a business optimizes performance.
Building a professional-looking website
Building a website for your company is mandatory to achieve credibility with your market, whether you sell online, offer online services, or even direct folks to your physical store from your website. Brand trust comes from a strong online presence, a great website that works well, and online testimonials and reviews, so build these features into your website.
A website can also serve as a great marketing tool. It gives you a platform to showcase knowledge in your niche, allowing you to become an expert and give you an advantage over the competition. A website will also allow you to educate your visitors on your products and services and build a reputation for your business. A well-designed website that’s fast, offers great SEO (search engine optimization to help you connect with search users), providing an intuitive and efficient customer experience, and optimizing your sales funnel dramatically impacts your conversion rates.
Building a professional website is possible You can hire IT support to help you create a professional website for your business since an amateur look really damages your reputation and decreases trust.
Leveraging social media
Leveraging the internet also requires you to get your business on as many social media platforms as you can. Since most businesses don’t have the bandwidth to be on all of the more than 200 social platforms, however, focus most of your attention on where your target customers spend the most time. Below you can see a breakdown of the demographics featured in each of the major social media platforms.
If you don’t choose the right social platforms to attempt a presence on too many, you may find yourself spending a lot of time on your social media pages and getting the results you hoped.
Engagement is the name of the game in social media. You need to post content that fits your target market and the dominant content types on the specific platform. For instance, Instagram contains primarily image content, while TikTok is comprised of short videos. Also, develop a great listening program so you can respond appropriately when users comment about your brand.
Do online market research
Traditional market research was often purposeful, attempting to solve a problem or gain insight into consumer attitudes and decision-making processes. This type of research is expensive and time-consuming so you can’t do it very often and you might wait for results to the point where you lose the nimbleness necessary to capture the market and beat your competition.
With online market research, the cost goes down dramatically (in most cases) and you can get insights at the drop of a hat. Listening on social media is a great tool for understanding your customers and prospects, the problems they face (especially unmet needs that reflect great opportunities for product development), how they express themselves (which is great for messaging), and how they create the world they live in. Armed with this information, your marketing efforts generate much higher returns.
Even better, online tools allow you to collect information on a consistent basis rather than to simply solve a problem. In today’s online world, you have a vast amount of information at your fingertips, making you more nimble with improved insights.
Track Your Success and Every Other Aspect That Relates to Your Business
One of the most ultimate tools that the internet offers businesses is Google Analytics. You can leverage Google Analytics to gather important information on your business by creating an account and copying a code onto your website, allowing the tool to track your business across a variety of metrics and KPI (key performance indicators). See the image below for just a sample of these metrics.
You can also use the tool to determine whether your audience’s characteristics match your target market and use such information to create new marketing strategies that aid business growth. You may also select from the wide range of the other analytics trackers available to find one that best suits the needs of your business.
In addition, leveraging the internet makes other types of analytics possible. For instance, you can use EDI (electronic data interchange) to increase the speed and efficiency of your supply chain, metrics stored in the cloud to see the performance of any part of your business at a glance, and much more.
Conclusion
Leveraging the internet involves not only communication channels, such as your website and social media but tools to increase your efficiency, such as EDI. Evaluate the extent to which you’re leveraging the internet against these recommendations to find ways to optimize your performance.
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