How to transfer offline business to online

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Step-by-step instructions to help you avoid the most common mistakes.

The Internet made it possible to open a business at minimal cost. For example, to create your own online clothing store, you do not need to spend money on renting premises, salaries of consultants, expensive withdrawal and purchase of goods. You can purchase items upon order, process applications yourself and invest only in online advertising.

In addition, there are no restrictions on audience coverage: there is an opportunity to tell about yourself everywhere. It sounds quite promising, and over time, online platforms have become attractive not only for start-up entrepreneurs, but also for players who are successful in the offline environment.

Another thing is cosmetics, clothing, toys, textiles in the middle price category. Also, through social networks, the services of beauty masters, artists, artisans, photographers are excellently sold. In such cases, you should choose SMM.

Method description

Choose one or several channels - Facebook, VKontakte, Instagram, Odnoklassniki - depending on your target audience. Further work will be carried out according to a single scheme:

1. Development of a content plan. Prepare topics and distribute publication dates one month in advance. Content can be duplicated. To do this, rely on the social networks of competitors, but do not copy them completely.
2. Content creation. The advantage of SMM is that this method gives scope for a wide variety of content: videos, texts, photos, pictures, podcasts. The main thing is that the content corresponds to the topic. You can hire an SMM specialist, copywriter, designer and videographer, or do it yourself. Social media texts should be short and clear for your audience. Make sure that the format of the story is kept in a uniform tone. The same applies to the style of graphic and video content.
3. Attraction of subscribers. Your content should be of interest to your target audience. For example, if you are selling tools for hairdressers, then the page should include tips for choosing such products, industry news and useful life hacks. It is also necessary to put thematic hashtags and geolocation.

At the initial stages, you can use services for boosting followers - this will help to encourage people to subscribe. In the future, you should not get carried away with this, since bots will not become your clients.

Landing page

Landing page is a one-page website that is used to sell goods and services.

Suitable for you if:

• You have a small assortment (1-2 items).
• To buy your product / service, the client does not need to get to know your company closely.
• Your target audience is prone to impulse one-click purchases.
• You are selling a seasonal product / service.
• You do not have the time, money and desire to work for a long time with a multi-page site and groups in social networks.

According to What is Landing Page: a complete guide + 12 examples of IN-SCALE agency founder Nikita Zhestkov, a one-page site is ideal for selling one product or service. Moreover, it is effective for the implementation of both simple and inexpensive products, and for the complex, premium segment. For example, you only sell a certain model of portable speaker or an expensive battery-heated jacket.

The advantage of this tool is that it does not require complex technical development and, if properly promoted, quickly leads to customers.

Landing Page is not suitable for online stores with a large assortment and for companies with an abundance of various services. Also, this tool is useless if you need to build the audience's trust in the brand itself to stimulate a purchase. For example, a company that sells computed tomographs will need a website with detailed information about the company, services and certificates.

Method description

Landing Page can be done on any website builder (uKit, uLanding, Wix and others). An effective landing page meets the following parameters:

• The page contains one trade offer.
• Text and graphic content is intended for one target audience. If your project has several of them, then you will need several different pages.
• At the bottom there is always a call to action - an offer to buy a product or service.
• The text is divided into logically connected, small and descriptive blocks.
• After reading, a potential buyer has no questions or doubts.

The purpose of the page is to quickly tell the buyer in the most accessible and selling form why he should buy the presented product or order a service.

Email Marketing

Email newsletters are a marketing tool for selling products or services and attracting attention to a brand through contact with the target audience.

Suitable for you if:

• It is important for you to establish direct communication with the audience, to increase brand loyalty.
• You are interested in upselling (encouraging the client to purchase at least one more product / service along with the first purchase or immediately after it).
• You have a limited promotion budget.
• Your brand strategy involves a large number of discounts and promotions.
• You regularly or periodically hold thematic events.

Email marketing is often chosen as an additional method of attracting customers. It is suitable for almost any online business.

The advantage of email marketing is that it doesn't require a lot of financial investment and can be done on your own.

But mailing list cannot be the only promotion tool on the Web. It's a great complementary tool that drives sales, builds awareness, and builds brand loyalty.

Method description

Mailing lists about a company, goods and services, as well as promotions and news in your area of business can solve different problems:

• Promotion of sales, including through promotions and special offers.
• Increased loyalty to the company.
• Increase brand awareness.

Mailing letters are:

• Welcome. Only sent to new subscribers or customers. This is where you usually thank the recipient for becoming a friend of your brand, and briefly talk about the offers and special features of the company.
• Triggered. This letter is a reaction to the action of a subscriber of your social network. In the text, you thank the addressee for their interest in the company.
• Transactional. A reaction to the purchase of a product or service, where you thank the customer for the purchase and make an announcement of some offer from the company.
• Promotional. Bright and capacious announcements of special offers, discounts and sales.
• Informational. Actual news and interesting facts on your topic. For example, suppose you sell bicycles. Your subscribers may be interested in the topic of choosing the right bike, information about new models or curious collections of these vehicles from different times.
• Announced. Invitations to upcoming events.

In order to organize an effective email distribution, you should proceed step by step:

1. Determine the target audience. Based on this information, choose a presentation style and topic.
2. Develop a content strategy. What's on your mailing list? Are you going to run a large number of promotions and make a lot of commercial special offers or are the purpose of the letters to immerse the reader in the specifics of the company's activities and make a friend of the brand? Depending on your goals, the type of planned letters is determined.
3. Make a content plan. Plan your mailing for the next month. Come up with subject lines and release dates.

The advantage of this approach is that it can be applied with zero financial costs.

contextual advertising

Contextual advertising allows you to display a site in the top for search queries without using SEO-promotion.

Suitable for you if:

• It is necessary to bring traffic to the site as part of SEO-promotion work.
• You have a new site that, by default, cannot rise to the top of the search results by SEO-promotion.
• You urgently need the first clients for the earliest payback of the project.
• You are selling seasonal products or services.
• The target audience is looking for your product or service in search engines, not social networks.
• You don't have a hard budget and you are ready to make a significant financial investment.

Contextual advertising goes well with SEO, making it more effective to promote your site in search.

Method description

Thanks to a properly configured advertising campaign, your site appears in the search results in the first positions with the mark "Advertising". The advantage of this method is that it gives results within a few hours after tuning.

You do not need to wait several months for the first clients to come to the site.

There are two popular services for setting up contextual advertising in the largest search engines. These are Google Ads, or Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), and Yandex. Direct . There you will find a step-by-step guide on setting up and running an advertising campaign, practical advice on how not to waste your advertising budget and use the tool most effectively.

SEO

SEO ‑ optimization is a complex of internal and external works for website promotion in search engines.

Suitable for you if:

• You are ready to wait up to six months for the first results.
• The target audience comes for your product through the search.
• Trust in the brand is important for a potential buyer.
• You have a large promotion budget.
• You are ready to combine SEO with contextual advertising or other promotion methods to speed up your site's promotion to the top.

SEO takes time. You will not receive the first results immediately, but after 3–6 months of continuous work with the site. Therefore, if your initial task is to quickly attract customers, then it is better to spend money on contextual advertising. In addition, it is extremely difficult to bring an audience to a website without other marketing channels.

Search engine optimization is an excellent option for the future development of your business, when you have already mastered some online sales channels.

Or you can optimize the site in parallel with work on contextual advertising, SMM or mailing.

Method description

First you need to create a website. You can contact a professional developer or make it yourself using the constructor. Developing from scratch will take a lot of time, money and effort. An alternative way will allow you to do this in one evening. According to the latest figures from Best Website Builders 2019 Russia, the best free services include WIX, SITE123 and WordPress.

So, the site is created, and you have chosen SEO-optimization. Search engine promotion consists of several steps:

1. Checking technical errors on the site.
2. Formation of the semantic core - a set of words and phrases that characterize the activities of the site.
3. Improving usability - user friendliness.
4. Link building - the number of active inbound links to a website hosted on third-party sites.
5. Analysis of the project and development of a content strategy.

The topic of SEO is quite deep, and in theory it can be mastered without special knowledge and experience. In practice, this is not entirely easy to implement. The ranking rules are constantly changing, and the process itself has many pitfalls that can only be learned in practice. Also, working with a new site is much more time consuming than with an age one. This is due to the fact that search engines do not have enough data to trust the resource, and they are reluctant to let it go up.

Therefore, it is best to entrust the optimization to a professional. Freelance work is cheaper than agency services. In addition, having at least minimal knowledge of the topic, you will be able to control the actions of the performer. You can look for a specialist on the relevant exchanges.

Step 3. Track intermediate results

So, you've chosen channels and methods, started promoting yourself, launched campaigns, started maintaining social networks and sending letters, or outsourced all tasks. The work did not end there. Monitor intermediate results, draw conclusions and react quickly to them.

If something goes wrong, does not bring results at all, then you need to make adjustments to the strategy.

At the same time, there is no universal verification of all promotion methods. For example, SEO gives first results only after 3–6 months, and the quality of contextual advertising settings is visible immediately. It will also take time to attract real customers to the social network, and the effectiveness of email distribution largely depends on the size of your contact base.

Regardless of what marketing tools you use, promotion is always based on the correct choice of the target audience. Also, do not forget that you should always keep your finger on the pulse. Follow marketing news, apply new advertising tools and pay attention to audience reaction.