If you’re interested in online business tactics, then there’s a good chance that you’re looking to outdo one or more competitors. Competition on the web can be fierce, so here are some tips for staying ahead:
1. Build a single, strong brand. It can be easy to get carried away with the simplicity of building websites or joining social networks. You can end up with a mess of different profile names and web addresses confusing your customers. Relate everything back to your core brand, and try to promote it everywhere you can. That’s what people will remember for the search engines.
2. Compete on price, quality and service. Sometimes, it feels like outdoing the competition on the Internet is about nothing more than fighting your way up the search engine rankings a rung at a time. Remember though that more orthodox approaches still have a huge role to play in effective online business tactics. If you produce a better product at a lower price, then in the long term that will tell.
One curious element of most approaches to online business tactics, and particularly online marketing, is that they often seem to be more about pleasing search engines than pleasing people. People who would go to almost any length to get their search engine optimisation right, and who build links assiduously, nevertheless occasionally manage to produce sites that are of zero interest to their customers.
It seems to be part of a wider approach where the IT section of your company, or of yourself, takes over, making the assumption that what you’re technically able to do is automatically what you should do. It’s an approach that leads to cleverer and cleverer company websites, masses of effort going into link building, but not necessarily any more sales.
There’s something very wrong with that, but the problem with this approach to online business tactics can be put very simply. People buy your goods and services. The Internet doesn’t.
Of the many online business tactics in existence, the most important is simple- build the strongest brand you can. It is what marks you out from your competitors, what potential customers think of when trying to work out where to go for your product, and what existing customers keep coming back to.
Design a Strong Brand
Designing a strong brand is even more important on the Web than for offline businesses, because customers have so much more choice. Take the time to really think about what image you want to present, and design your brand with that in mind. Do you want to seem innovative, dependable, personable? Now is the time to decide.
Build Around the Brand
Your logo should be prominent on your company website, and not just on the home page. It should be on every page that has anything to do with your company, to ensure a coherent approach to your online business tactics. The whole style of your web presence should reflect the overall brand, and you should be careful to maintain it.
Often, people do their research into online business tactics when they first start out, planning the first year in particular very carefully. But what about once your business is already established? How do you build from an initial success to a long term one?
Review Regularly
The first key is to review your efforts on a regular basis, both to highlight any potential problems and to identify future opportunities. Set aside a specific time to do this, so that there’s no chance of forgetting if you happen to be busy, then ask yourself what is going well, what needs to change, what you could do better, and what is likely to happen in the future. Be honest with yourself. There’s no point in pretending that everything is perfect if it isn’t, and ignoring it will just allow any potential problems to get worse.
Update Your Marketing
The Internet is in a constant state of change, and your online business tactics need to reflect that. Since you began, new social networks will have been established, new forums founded, new e-mail lists completed. Not all of them will be appropriate to your needs, but some might. Take the time to investigate new developments and see if any of them can be incorporated into your marketing plan.
Expand
It may be that you’ve done well but now feel that the business is growing static. It may be that competitors have moved into what was originally a niche area. Either way, consider whether this is the time to expand your business. Can you take on more suppliers than before? Can you grow into new areas, or into areas related to your core business that you had originally avoided in the interests of specialisation? Growth can provide new incomes, new challenges, and the opportunity to do something fresh.
How often have you run into people whose online business tactics seem to amount to “well, we’ve got a very nice website”? Worse, does that describe you? If it does, then you probably need to reconsider.
Unless you’re an established brand, customers won’t know or care about your website. They certainly won’t have any reason to go there. Sure, a few will be pulled in by the search engines if your pages are well optimised, but do you really think that your competitors won’t have done the same?
The days when you could just build a site and sit back are long gone, sadly. Instead, you need to take a proactive approach to gaining customers, based on a well thought through marketing strategy.
There are as many approaches to online business tactics as there are people running companies on the web. And, just like people, not all of those approaches are particularly pleasant. From black hat approaches to search engine optimisation, to spamming social networks, to flaming competitors on Internet forums, there are lots of ways of fighting dirty on the Web. Indeed, something about the ‘unreality’ of it seems almost to encourage that sort of approach. As varied as these approaches are though, they all have one thing in common.
They don’t work.
That’s right. They don’t work. At least not either consistently or in the long term, which is what you’re probably looking for if you’re setting up a company on the Internet. Don’t believe it? Well, let’s take those three examples then.
The truth is that many of the businesses employing a range of online business tactics aren’t purely Internet based. A lot of them grew their online aspects out of existing, physical businesses, or started web-based and offline elements at the same time. If that’s true of your business, it may be worth asking a radical question: is it time to shift your whole business online?
It Has Been Done Before
