Every entrepreneur or businessman lives with a dream of growing his business. He/She is always in search of avenues to multiply the business 2X, 5X, 10X times. If we plot products versus market, we will get four quadrants. These are used to plan growth as a part of business strategy. Currently, your brick and mortar business is restricted to one quadrant 1. If you decide to go online with the best web hosting company, suddenly you have three more quadrants to grow. Here new market is nothing but online market available due to internet.
As a cautious businessman, you may want to explore this side first and once you get the early success, you will surely venture into offering new products for your existing and online segment.
This does neither take a lot of effort nor money. You do not believe me, right? Please continue reading, in next 3 steps your business will be online.
Step 1 : Define your value proposition
Value proposition is a promise from your business for value it delivers. Value proposition is the reason why someone would come to you and buy your product or service. This is what differentiates you from your competition.
As an established business owner you know pains and issues of your customers. With your services you are trying to provide solutions to alleviate/reduce those issues.
Creating a strong value proposition is important for you to attract and retain customers. This step is needed for non-digital marketing or digital. Once you have it, you have won half the battle. Now what remains is just to make this value proposition reach your existing/new customers through digital medium.
Step 2 : Create strong web presence with best web hosting company
Some people believe that this website and all this jargon like domain, hosting is for techies. That is not true. I will show you how you already have done absolutely similar things in setting up your normal business. Now you need to only do them in digital way. Let us see how.
Starting a company office
1. For starting business you have chosen a unique name and registered it with Registrar of Companies (RoC).
2. You hired an office space where you can operate from and talk to customers or take orders.
3. You have taken a phone number so that you can be contacted on it.
4. You have designed a visiting card with your address and contact number so that customers can connect with you.
5. Some product brochures are printed and kept in your office for customers so that they can know more about your product.
And all of this was a piece of cake for you. Now see how these activities you can easily replicate in the new digital internet world.
Starting company’s web office
1. Website is like your branch office. It should be identified by unique name of your company. This is what is called as domain name in technical jargon. You go to a domain name provider, search if it is not already taken by someone. If that domain name is available (check domain name availability), you have it by paying a small fees.
2. Next step is to hire the place for web/online office, called hosting. You visit the best web hosting provider and buy hosting space. This being your own space like your office premises, you can put here appropriate information about your business and services. This includes brochures, order forms etc.
3. Now you have acquired the domain name like yourbusiness.com. This is your postal address on the web, customers can reach your office by typing this in the web browser.
4. Alternatively, your customers can write to you using your postal address. In the digital world, email address does the same job. Unique email address matching with your company name is easy to believe by the customers and hence it builds trust.
5. In your web office (website), when customers visit, they can view the brochures, fill the order form, raise an issue if any, chat with your sales team, get to know about your branch offices and services etc. Barring the physical touch and smell, everything else is possible on this web office.
From best web hosting to your amazing website
1. Search and get the domain name for you.
Domain name is a unique name by which you web office would be found by your customers and prospects.
2. Buy from best web hosting company
Now you need to get space on internet where you can set up you web office. Here you can keep your brochures, information about business etc. For the office you need the server space, security for your office documents/ website, an email account.
Different web hosting providers offer different plans with unique features. Typically you should look for amount of space, email accounts, security, backup, speed and off course the cost as your primary parameters to select the best web hosting company.
3. Build your website
To create website, you need not be a pro in coding technologies like HTML5, CSS, Java script, JQuery and so on. There are very popular website builders like WordPress. Here you can get very good themes for creating your website. Theme is nothing but a ready-made structure which is pre-created with some images, menus, forms which are required for a professional website. What you have to do is select one and start adding text and images which are related to your business. With themes, creating a website is as simple as editing a Microsoft word document or an Excel sheet.
Starting with what you have is important right now. As your customer base increases later you can give a professional touch by hiring expert.
Step 3 :Now that you have website hosted by best web hosting company, turn to social media
Social media is great channel to reach more audiences. If we look at statistics, on each of the social media platforms there are millions of potential customers for your business. You can start here by creating your business profile on couple of social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn etc.
On social media the key aspects are keeping you profile active, engage you followers using different activities/posts/sharing and ultimately bring all of them to your website.
You need not focus all your attention on social media and try to become popular at once. This will not work because firstly you may not have enough time to spend on these activities and secondly you may lack the required expertise and experience.
So start small. Choose couple of platforms and see what your industry peers are doing. Learn from them and slowly you would be able to put forth best offering and your brand image on social media.
Website is a strong first step, but there is more!
Above mentioned three steps is the fastest and low cost way to achieve your goal of taking your business online. There are more things to do as you mature in this online medium. We will cover next critical 3 steps which can give a real booster to your business from the online channel in our next article.
