Okay, yes, there has been a lot of senrenre around doing business online lately.

But there's a good reason for that.

It's basic in business that you need to market your business to your target customers where they are. You agree, right?

Over the past couple of years, more and more people are spending more time online - on social media, search engines, etc.

In the past, when you wanted to find a company that offers a certain service, you had to look inside one of those business magazines or check your business card collection.

Nowadays, people just "google" it. Even the fact that using "google" as a verb should tell you something about this world we now live in today.

Everything is going digital, and if your company isn't, well you should, before you get left behind with barely any customers or money to stay afloat.

Now, that that's been said (and hopefully agreed upon, by you), it's not enough to just get online. You also need to grow your business online.

How do you do that?

Well, here are a few quick tips:

#1. Get a Website

This almost goes without saying. I don't know if you've noticed but before you can even finish dropping your business name in some circles, you're already being asked for your website.

It's become something that's expected these days.

Why is a website important?

Because a website is like your company office building online. People spend a lot of time online looking for services like yours and if they can't find your storefront online, then they won't buy your services.

And considering that recent statistics show that over 3 billion people and counting use the internet, you'd be doing yourself a disservice if you don't have a website online.


#2. Understand your goals online.

You need to be clear on your business goals for getting online.

To grow your business online, you need to acquire more customers, so basically your main goals would be to increase brand awareness around your product, or service, attract more potential customers, convert them into sales leads, and make the sale.

Whatever activity does not contribute in any way to achieving these goals should not be part of your online business strategy.


#3. Know Your Target Customer

You really can't sell anything to anyone if you have no idea what motivates them to buy something, what problems they're facing and their desires.

It's that simple.

Build a few buyer personas that represent the people you're trying to sell to, and let that guide you in what you do online.

You need to know a few things:

* What age groups?
* What genders?
* What locations?
* What are their desires?
* What are their challenges?
* Where do they hang out online?

Using that information, you'll have an idea of how to craft your marketing message and where to reach out to them.


#4. Get A Blog

Blog?

Yes.

You're prolly thinking: "But... blogging is only for people like Linda Ikeji.."

Oga. Madam. Like they say in NYSC camp, "you're wrong."

You need to have a blog for your business. Why?

Let me explain with an analogy.

If you go to ShopRite and there's no extra "senrenre" like Silverbird Cinemas, places to chill and drink "beverages", when you came to ShopRite, if you were interested in buying something there, you'd just buy and leave.

And if you weren't interested at the time you just got there, you won't buy anything. You'd just walk out and (maybe) never return.

Online, if people just get to your site, and there's no blog, or any senrenre to keep them there, they'd just leave and you'd be lucky if they remember your domain name.

Why?

Because the buying habits of your customers has changed. They have a lot of choices due to the internet, and so they don't really trust anybody.

If your customers don't trust you, they won't buy from you. That's basic consumer psychology.

How do you get them to trust you?

You educate them, and by so doing show them that you know your stuff, understand their needs and can fulfill them. That's the basic idea behind content marketing, but that one is prolly gist for another day.

To educate, inform and attract your customers, you need content about the problems they're facing that you can solve. And that's why you need to blog.

Blogging will also help you stand out as an expert in your niche and help with your SEO (We'll talk about this later).


#5. Get Busy on Social Media

I read somewhere that there are over 3 billion people using Facebook.

That's crazy.

And that's just one social network. If you pool together the number of people using social media, one thing is clear - Your business absolutely needs to be on social media.

And not just be on social media.

You need to be proactive there. You need to create content that attracts your customers to your business, and on a regular basis.

You're not on social media to play, after all. You're there to get customers so do that.


#6. You need to do SEO and SEM

Forreal.

Search engine optimization involves making your business rank higher in search results for keywords in your industry.

That was too technical abi?

Let me break it down.

You need to make it easier for customers to find your business when they do a Google search. That means, if possible, you need to make sure your website comes up on the first page of Google's search results when your customers are looking for products in your industry.

How do you do this?

It's really a very broad area, but let me just give you 3 short tips.

1. Ensure your business is on "Google my Business" listings. This helps your business appear when customers search for your services in your area. Do this. You'll thank me later.
2. Ensure your website is easy to navigate, set up correctly and your pages arranged in such a way that Google's robots can look through your site and make you rank better (On page SEO)
3. Ensure that you get high quality links to pages on your site, shares on social media, etc.

If you want me to go into details on this, let me know and I'll do that in another post.

SEM, on the other hand, stands for Search Engine Marketing, and it's a good way to get a lot of visibility early on. It's different from SEO in that you have to pay Google to show your ads whenever there's a search for services in your industry.


#7. Promote your content on social media

You need to ensure that you first create unique content that is highly relevant to your target audience and then you need to take advantage of the ad platforms offered by social media.

These ad platforms are awesome because social media usually requires users to fill in details about themselves. This information can help you target your potential customers (who are most likely to buy from you) with your ads and then get them to see your offer and buy.

You don't want to dull on this one. Trust me, you will thank me later.


#8. Understand your marketing funnel

Marketing funnel here basically means the path your potential customers take before they buy from you.

When you understand how they found your site, what they looked at on your site before they bought or didn't buy, you'll get a clear picture of what area of your marketing needs improvement.

Improve on that area and you'll see more sales.


#9. Understand your Analytics

You absolutely need to analyse everything. I mean, everything.

Measure how many sales you're getting, how much traffic you're getting, how many of your visitors buy, how many of your visitors don't buy, what sites they came from, etcetera shmetcetera.

You need to know all these because it will help you see what's working well and what isn't so that you can do more of what's working and what isn't.


Okay, I think that's actually a lot so I'll stop here.

What do you think?

Did I hit the hammer on the nail's head, or am I talking cool story? Let me know in the comments.


Happy Hustling,

Tomi Joshua.