If you are reading this article, then you must be already considering taking your business online. But you might be looking for more reasons to convince yourself to do so.
That is what we will be covering on this article so that it helps you to get a clear picture of all advantages of being an online business.
It doesn’t go without saying that getting your business on the internet world is the need nowadays. If you are looking for your business growth, then introducing your business on this biggest platform is the only way to achieve that.
If you are seeking opportunities, go online. If you are trying to reach masses, go online. If you are planning to hire new talents….Go online.
Every business activities need not have to be offline any longer. Industries are adopting new strategies to meet their targets and objectives. Internet is a new world in itself where you buy a space and establish your company for those customers who are most likely to visit your business.
Now let us go through 25 reasons that can motivate you to take your offline business to the online world:
- Access to the internet: We understand that 2 decades back the internet was not available freely across this planet. But today every kid is able to watch cartoons on the net. Everyone is shopping and placing food orders online. So why can’t you take your business online?
2. Business Remains Open: An offline business would have offices that have working and closing hours. However, if your business is plugged in, then it remains open 24/7 for sale and services. As per statistics, it is the top reason for customers to shop online.
3. Transparent Catalogue: If your business is connected through a network, then your products and services are clearly visible to the audience. Nothing to hide. Products and their features, prices that you charge, benefits than your customers can avail, everything is transparent.
4. Presence in Bigger Market: Once you are there, you will feel opportunities flowing in from multiple marketplaces. You can target your products to reach unexpected boundaries. You can offer various products and services across different locations.
5. Target Potential Customers: You need not have to worry about reaching out to the customers by shotgun approach targeting. Now you can design your campaigns and publish ads yourself to ‘pull’ customer’s attention.
6. Social Media as Marketing Options: Social media platforms, like Facebook, Google and YouTube, are not for entertainment only nowadays. They exist with their marketing strategies designed to help newbies like you to compete with big players. Now you can create your own company page and business account and start posting whatever you may want to display your offers.
7. Global Presence: As discussed above, your business need not have to stick to a defined territory now. Expand your business to make it a global phenomenon. Reaching out to potential customers in different countries is not difficult anymore as it used to be a few decades ago for an offline business.
8. Target Online Customers: Along with your offline customers, now you can increase your visibility for the customers who are connected online. Nearly 4.39 billion people use the internet as of 2019. Now, look at the opportunity.
9. Clients Get Attracted to Online Business: Recent survey suggests that 85% of people are more likely to contact a business if they have websites. They like to surf through various pages on the site, compare the products and services offered by your company with other brands and take a call to contact you for further more information.
10. Brand Awareness: It becomes effortless for you to educate your existing and potential customers through e-books, blogs, product features and videos uploaded on your website. Online brand awareness strategy implementation shows a much better result than done offline.
11. Impacts and Achievements: Imagine you have an offline business, and you need to showcase your achievements to prospects. How difficult that task would be, isn’t it? It’s challenging even to invite someone to the office to explain the impacts your company is making on the business, industry or society. But when you upload required information on the site, customers can go through all details as per their comfort.
12. Target marketing: In comparison to mass marketing, a company receives more engagement and ROI when strategies are aligned with target marketing methods. Social media platforms keep personal details shared by you, such as age, company name, location, device type, interests, job profile, previous companies, relationship, shopping experiences, etc. These options work as filters while publishing ads or running campaigns. Also, email marketing and campaigns can be personalised and customised as per buyer personas defined by your company.
13. Brand monitoring: People are always talking about your company on the network. But if you are an offline company, you won’t even know what they are talking. But there are multiple tools available to track your brand mentions online. A company must have a brand monitoring team to track, analyse and react on such posts or comments. Some of these comments could be highlighting the area of improvements in products and services, and others could be testimonials or positive feedbacks.
14. Displaying Testimonials: Your customers might be appreciating your brand or products and services. With proper use of brand monitoring tools, you can analyse such comments and approach customers to write testimonials on your website. These testimonials could help you to boost confidence in other prospects to approach you for business or for using your products.
15. Website is the first step towards success: Your business website can have all the details about your business, products and services required for a customer to make a decision. You can display product features or customer testimonials to convince your customers about product or service quality.
16. Legit Business: A company with an online presence is mostly perceived to be legit and scam-free. The reason is a customer can search and access all information about your company and also ratings received from your customers.
17. Customer Service Improvement: Not all customers like to give feedback on the face. Hence, they use social media, blogs or reviews section on the website to provide the same. Based on the feedback received, you can decide which customer service is doing well and which one is not leading to discontinuity or improvement in the service.
18. Time-Saving: In an offline business, most customers are shared with product information verbally. But when the same data is available on the website, it saves both the marketer and the customer’s time.
19. Cost-effectiveness: With the reduction in manual efforts, a website also reduces operational costs. Transportation and other allowances required for marketing offline can be cut short immediately. Your home can become your office. Availability of Website Builders reduces website development and maintenance expenses.
20. Goal Achievement: When you decide to take your company online, you create a set of goals such as whom you want to target and what results do you want to see. A website helps you to perform target marketing with existing customer database and the personalized content published for the customers helps to receive engagement and most often a good sale.
21. Healthy Competition: Having a website gives a fair chance to a small company to compete with big players. A well-designed website with useful product features and positive testimonials reduces the pressure of competing with big brands.
22. Business Email: If you want to look professional, then do not forget to have a business email. It has some function of a general email ID, but the structure of a business email has the company domain name in the email ID after at the rate ‘@’ sign, which delivers a very professional look to the company’s image.
23. Advantage of Webrooming: Previously, customers used to watch TV ads and then go to stores asking for products they saw in the ad. But today they watch attractive ads online and search for products in physical stores. This phenomenon is called as Webrooming.
24. Online vs. Offline Sales: As per data, small scale businesses invest nearly 51.3% in digital marketing to drive online sales. 97% of consumers search online for local business or services. So no further explanation required for this point.
25. Ease of Website Development: Many offline small companies are not online yet because they believe developing a website is expensive. However, there are many Website Builders available which cost you almost nothing to have a well-designed website with features and plugins that would support essential functions of your company website.
