That’s the million-dollar question to many small companies, especially ones that are just trying to launch a new business; online or offline. But for this article I will be focusing on what small businesses can and should do to compete against the larger companies online.
So you decided one day to launch a new e-commerce website selling beers from all over the world. With research and some general knowledge, you also realize the immediate competition are giants like Bevmo, or if you were living near my city – it would be a store like the greenjug. Whatever the case, the day you launch your website will be full of excitement and anticipation for that first online sale…you wait…and wait…and wait. Nothing.
24 hours later
Still nothing.
48 hours later
Nothing.
1 week later
2 sales! HOORAY!!! You’ve got sales. After the excitement settles you realize two sales in one week is not exactly what you had in mind.
What can you do?
Let’s cut to the chase. You need ways to increase your online traffic and get more sale through your door or you might have to host a local BeerFest in your town. Here are a few things you need to focus efforts on, if you are serious about getting more online business.
CONTENT – does your site have content that creates interest? Are product descriptions informative enough and possesss a strong enough pull? Invest some time in crafting useful snippets about the product that help your visitors purchase easier.
SOCIAL / COMMUNITY – a channel increasing in importance as shopping online becomes a more social activity. User reviews are key. A large percentage of purchase decisions are made after reading another buyers’ past experience. Investigate what social sites have the audience you need to target; Facebook.com, Twitter.com, Ning.com – to name a few popular ones.
CONTEST – let me preface by making clear this does not encourage or support drinking as a contest, but just an example for all intent purposes. Even though the site its about beers of the world, your contest can be effective without involving beers. For example I would run a contest on the most beer bottle caps, or creative ways you use bottle caps.
SEO / SEM – refered to many as the holy grail of online traffic; paid and organic traffic are coveted in their respective ways of generating qualified traffic and great sales for e-commerce sites. This post will not likely cover these two big topics, but essentially you need to either learn or hire experts who can develop and deploy a strategic roadmap of tactics in SEO and SEM to be successful.
A few immediate things you will hear a million times everywhere is make sure your pages have great TITLEs, Meta descriptions, and H1 titles with keywords that describe the pages’ content.
PARTNERSHIPS – a key component for any successful business is to have great partners. Through relationships and partnership deals your website will benefit from quality links, great recommendations, product distribution and relevance in the business. Partners do not always have to in the shape of financial investments – they could be other websites that make sense, like wine sites, beer and wine tasting communities, wineries, breweries, and such.
These are very quick pointers and small business sites that just launched can learn about these strategies through blogs, communities, books and most importantly get in touch with someone who has spent many years immersed into these strategies. If for nothing else, at least you will have an idea what it takes to make your site successful.
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