All ecommerce or retail startups follow the same business strategies. Most people believe that ecommerce is eating up the retail world at this moment. Well, it is true to some extent due the inherited benefits of ecommerce, but there can be another significant reason for retail businesses, especially the startups, to fail.
This is the lack of a proper plan and business strategy that will lead them to the path to success. Yes, it is crucial to have a proper business plan irrespective of the mode of it to succeed or else you will be forced to either close it or go bankrupt.
You may feel that the digital landscape is an exciting and promising place to be but rest assured that this is not Utopia! You will have to compete with similar digital brands in the marketplace and along with it also face and try to overcome the innumerable challenges that this digital world is sure to offer you from time to time.
Create an online presence
Without a strong and impactful online presence you will find it very difficult, if not impossible to succeed in this modern business world. This holds true for your brick and mortar store or for your online store alike.
However, this is not an easy task. You will need to consider several aspects to hit it big and also know a few of the online trade secrets for that matter. Such knowledge will help you to reach to the top of your business as well as in the Search Engine Result Pages or SERPs just like the most major brands and other sites.
This will help your customers to find your website easily when they type in a specific keyword in the search engine. For example, when you type in ‘debt relief’ in any of the search engines, it is highly likely that you will see nationaldebtreliefprograms.com featuring at the top of the SERP or at least within the first four or five search results. This is online presence.
There are several important factors to consider for ensuring this as well as the success for your startup.
Brand is the main purpose
The next step to ensure your startup success is to buildyour brand value. Remember, for any business success the values behind it is the key and the primary purpose. It is the core of the identity for any business believe it or not. For this you will need to find out the answers to a few specific questions:
- What it is
- What you have to do and
- Why you need to do it.
Typically, while creating the brand value you should remember that your brand should embody all those values that are not only related to the central endeavors of your business but also provide some specific value to your customers.
That means you will need to have a clear mission and vision regarding your brand and avoid the common mistakes that older brands make and do not age or perform well.
You can do this by making sure that:
- You identify the purpose of your brand
- Align these purposes properly on the basis of the values of your targeted customers
- You know the extent to which your company can motivate brand advocacy and
- You must know how all these will affect in making a purchase decision by the customers.
When you assure that everything is as it should be like the above, you will enjoy the desired results. However, at this juncture you must know that these results may vary from one demographic to another. Therefore, your brand as well as the level of appeal your brand can create in the customers is the key to success.
The bottom line here is that you should never deviate from your brand as there are serious and chain reaction of it.
- When you deviate from your brand, it will seriously hurt your message.
- When your message is hurt, it will in turn hurt the reputation of your brand.
- When the brand reputation is hurt or tarnished, it will hurt your customer values.
- When the values of the customers are affected, it will hurt the organic traffic.
- When the traffic is affected, it will hurt the conversion rate and its chances.
- When this is hurt, it will affect your business revenue.
- When revenue is hurt, you must understand that the end of your business is close by.
Now the question is can you really afford such things to happen and is it worth when you can easily avoid all these with a clear strategy followed? Surely not, and it should not be. This is because your brand is the most important thing for your business that will always persiston the perceptual map of your customers.
Focus on SEO
Now you know a lot about brand and customer value and therefore it is time to focus on the Search Engine Optimization or SEO aspect. This is something that is very important for all business startup as well as the established ones, irrespective of the fact that it is only an only store or a physical store.
Proper SEO will bring in more traffic and there are lots of articles in the internet you will come across when you look for ways to build a better SEO. Not going into how to build a strong SEO, here is the importance of it for your startup.
- A strong SEO will ensure that Google ushers your site to feature near the top of its organic search engine results.
- It will also ensure that your site meets with all the requirements of the Google’s algorithm that keeps on changing so frequently that it is sometimes too hard to keep pace with it.
- In addition to that, SEO will ensure that your site also avoid lowquality posts simply with an intent to generate more revenue but focus on meeting with the Search Quality Guidelines of Google.
All this will ensure high ranks and easy success to your startup business.