Your Business Online

With COVID-19 putting a spanner in the works, we have all had to adapt by becoming a bit more technically advanced so that our businesses’ can continue to function in one way or another. Getting a website for your business, whether it be for customer service, hospitality, retail, or more, all industries will benefit from being online; you need to make sure your business is keeping up with the times.

According to the Guardian Newspaper, online shopping could more than double its share of the retail market by 2028. The internet is expected to account for 53% of retail sales in 10 years’ time, up from about a fifth at present, as younger people who have grown up with the internet become more than half the UK’s adult population, according to a report by the analysts Retail Economics for the law firm Womble Bond Dickinson.

It is not just retailers now that have taken this hit. Market Business News confirmed that these 6 types of companies have also started to move online: E-commerce, Divorce Services, Blogging and Journalism, Casions, The Movie Industry, and Freelance. Slowly but surely, everyone is moving online.

Therefore, getting your business online provides longevity (from moving with the technological times), and is crucial in getting more traffic, and potentially more leads, ensuring your company’s future success.

The simple first steps to getting your business online:

Figure out your company’s purpose. At its core, why do you sell the products you sell? Is it so that ‘Do it Yourselfers’ have the tools and know how to build gardening apparatus? Is it so that you can sell products that help people sleep? What is your businesses’ core goal? Never lose sight of this in the next few steps. Content for the sake of content will not help you. Make sure everything you create relates to your company’s main purpose.

Get your business on Social Media. For this step all you need is an email address. Then you can begin to attract potential customers with images and information that is relevant to your company. Remember to adapt each post on social media to fit the audience each platform will generate.

For example, Twitter is about short, 140-character, snappy text descriptions and links to content with an infographic and catchy title to hook people’s attention. People scroll on Twitter and have no desire to be trolling through tonnes of information. If the title and infographic take their attention, and the description shows them what your company culture is like they will be more likely to click the link to find out more. Whereas, on Facebook people generally want a bit more of a description, like a summary or excerpt, before engaging with any further information you have to offer. To better understand the marketing analytics that these social platforms provide read our recent blog post Digital Marketing Lingo.

Set up a website that has a style guide. This means that your entire team will be aligned on how your website and content should look, sound and interact. This allows for consistency of aesthetic and customer care. We can help you with this or for a more bespoke website talk to us directly at Ergo Creative.

**Start Blogging. **Blogging will result in more indexed pages on Google search results and more Domain authority, for the basics on SEO keep an eye out for our next blog, Get to Know SEO. In short blogging will give your website more opportunities to rank highly on browsers and catch the attention, and potential custom, of new post viewers.

Personalise. Grow your audience and in turn, grow your business. When you are more comfortable with your business being online you can get your page visitors to fill out forms and subscribe for specific information and offers. Customers are more likely to become a returning customer and spread word-of-mouth praise about your company when they have been given a personalised customer experience.

Analyse and Evolve. For a more advanced experience you can use tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot to run the metrics on how well your content is performing. Keeping an eye on the metrics means you can trial and error what does and does not work for your business until you crack the code of what brings the most revenue in for you. As times change, buying behaviours and customer queries will change. Change with them.

To conclude

We have more content from our<u> [Your Business in Your Hands]</u>(https://ergo.agency/blog/your-business-in-your-hands) series that cover some other areas of digital business management.