“We went from being the Flintstones to the Jetsons in 9 months.” — Dan Schulman, PayPal
Covid-19 has paralyzed businesses across the globe and will continue to suppress growth for the foreseeable future. But while the rate of growth has been definitely hampered, it does not mean that businesses cannot make money.
Making money hasn’t changed. HOW to make money definitely has.
The quote at the start of this article is an indicator that businesses should not be scared of moving online. Accept that going digital is the only way to move forward and once you do make the move you will realize that the entire process was not as cumbersome as you thought it would be.
Here are a few practices that businesses should take to tackle the present situation.
1. Go Digital
Well, obviously!
But it isn’t that simple. Purely offline or offline-online mixed brands lack a clear understanding of the intricacies of what it takes to go digital.
Website
Your website has officially become the face of your company. It also is the place where your potential customers are going to make a decision about whether to buy from you or not. How can you do that?
Make your website a visually engaging masterpiece.
Get them blown away by how good your design is. 60% of first-time customers trust new websites by its first impression. First impressions are the best – the saying is actually proved.
Next, get them interested. Clearly define your product and offers, take them through a visual roadmap and experience of using your product/service and back up this visceral experience with a list of your clients, social proofs, testimonials, client reviews.
Don’t do this
Instead, Do this
Servers
Having the right server is so important to your website. GoDaddy has occupied so much of market mindshare, that a lot of the time we fail to see beyond that. While GoDaddy server hosting is an excellent place to host your website in the initial months, the server does not allow for fast scaling.
Investing money into platforms like the digital ocean or AWS lightsail will make a huge difference to your loading speed and boy does google loves your loading speed
2. Google
And that brings us to the big daddy.
Google is your best friend. And you NEED Google to like you.
On average 70% of customers trust brands because they are on the first page of the Google SERP.
Traffic coming from Google generally averages 40-60% of total conversions on the website.
But how do you get your website on the first page, isn’t it difficult?
Check this screenshot out
Yeap just 36.5 million web pages you have to compete with. Not a biggie.
So how do we get on to the first page of Google search results?
You need to understand what Google wants. Google wants you to use it’s a platform because
Google will show you the most relevant websites to your query.
I honestly believe Google’s end game here is for you to type “restaurants in Kochi” but Google
already knows you want Biriyani so it will show you the top Biriyani spots in town.
(that was an easy one, who doesn’t want biriyani?)
So make websites that are super relevant to pieces of content. Create silos of content on this
page absolutely dedicated to specific topics.
And don’t forget to make your website super fast ( thank me again for that server tip I gave you
before )
While this only skims the surface of what goes into the SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) of a
website, it gives you a start as a business to know what goes into getting your business to go
digital.
By getting your website on the first page of Google and investing in SEO, you will be able to
create
3. Social Media
Social Media channels like Facebook and Instagram have become validators of trust of most
businesses.
A digital sales funnel looks something like this.
Get the customer to hear about your product/service -> customer visits website to check to offer
->visits social media channels to check what they are doing on those channels -> enters into the
remaining steps of the sales funnel.
Great visual Social Media pages have become great validators that your company is a trusted
business. Having pages that are not populated recently, poor designs has a psychological effect
on customers that place value on your social media pages.
86% of first-time customers check your social media pages before making a purchase. So
having recently updated social media pages with clean designs help build a lot of trust with
costumes.
Social Media has given brands unprecedented access to communicate and engage directly
with their audience. Grievance redressal, customer support, fun engaging activities, community
building are completely being done on social media.
Brands are now able to reach out in real-time to customers talking about the brand on social
media, interact with them, and create a lot of “wow” moments that resonate with the audience.
Dunzo has always been one of the leading brands that react in real-time to mentions of their
brand on twitter and this has automatically created a real feel-good factor with their audience
about the brand.
4. Automation
“Being able to foresee which business processes need to be automated is the difference of
running of a business with a few thousand dollars in revenue to scaling it to a few hundreds of
thousands of dollars in revenue” – CJ, 2018
Seems legit right? Well, the quote really isn’t. You might think it was said by someone who has
vast experience in industrial automation but CJ is just me. Doesn’t take anything away from the
facts of the quote.
Being able to automate day to day operations at scale is a key differentiator of rates of growth of
businesses. Entire sales teams rely on automation to scrape the web for leads, create
personalized content, emailer campaigns, segmentation of content, and follow up with
prospective leads.
Automation is even used in basic tasks like scheduling posts to go up on social media. It
reduces the number of man-hours and dependency on uploading on a daily basis.
Automation is also used in finance departments with 100’s of clients. Once invoice and contract
details are fed in, automated invoices are generated which are then automatically shared with
clients on the respective days.
Automation is widely used in hiring as well. LinkedIn shortlists potential candidates, these
candidates are then sent a questionnaire, once this questionnaire is submitted, we can
automate which candidates are selected which again sends out an email communication to
them to select a convenient calendar time on https://calendly.com/
Contributed by
Co-City Lead at Bangalore Chapter