The online marketplace is the most challenging environment for businesses to make their mark in. Even the great businesses that have a great product or service offering, robust customer experience program and offline business model can quickly get lost in the crowd if they don’t know how to use the new search engine optimization and social media marketing practices in a way that grants the exposure needed to effect the bottom line and generate a steady stream of new customers. The fact that these practices are continually growing and changing make it even more challenging for a business to keep up because what was working even a couple of years ago does not work today and could even get your business website penalized by search engines where customers will not be able to find them easily at all.
Keeping an eye out on the competition and in particular the businesses that seem to be thriving online is one way to find out what works for your particular industry for online business growth today. While your business may never fully compete with the world’s top name brands, modeling what seems to be working best for them can help your business corner a small percent of its particular market. While you can gain a lot of knowledge by staying up to date on the latest trends by following marketing experts, not all of them focus on your particular industry. Looking at what other businesses in your niche’ are doing can give you the additional information you need to push into a new sales bracket.
Knowing your customer base is more important than ever, especially since much of marketing today depends on building and sustaining relationships more than promoting and advertising “cold”. Knowing how to engage them and keep them interested in your business requires a strong social presence and the more you know about your market. The more you can engage with them on personal levels to keep them interested in doing business with your company.
The more you know your own customers, their preferences, likes and what kind of interaction they will be most interested in from your business, and the more you can add elements that are working for your direct competition, the more successful you will be in online marketing efforts. Along with these practices, continually measuring your results through analytic reports so you can adjust or change what you are doing to optimize your return on in investment is going to provide the highest increase in growth. While your business is focused on keeping up to date with the most current best practices, you will see that you are able to keep it more competitive in your industry.
