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Challenges You Will Face to Start Your Business Online Targeting right channel to market is the biggest challenge when you take your business online

By Nikhil Agarwal

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It takes a lot more than just an idea for a business to start. Being on an entrepreneurial journey you will face different sets of problems. Be it managing business operations, hiring right talent or marketing.

In this era, user behaviour has moved towards online. Thus, digital marketing is an important aspect of your business. On a journey towards digital entrepreneurship, one will face #5 common challenges to start their business online

1. Website - Your Online Shop for your main target audience to visit

The 1st milestone is to set your website right for your target audience which includes technology to build your website on, UI/UX & actual development

  • It is very easy to outsource the work of website creation to best agency in the market. However, only you know how your business functions. Thus, keeping yourself updated with the technology is a must. Choosing the right technology for your website is the most important factor of digital business, as at the end of day customers will visit your website to know more about your brand. If your website cannot load fast enough or manage users on a large scale, your business will fail badly

  • In your actual shop/office, your ambience matters. Thus, in the digital world, the user experience of your website plays a vital role in convincing them. The online user reads content; looks at the design & interpretation of everything

  • Keeping your content simple & the language what your target audience understands will always help in converting customers digitally

  • Once everything is in place, actual development is the biggest task. Your website should function exactly the way your business wants to work. From mapping user journey online to content tone & the design should all go hand in hand

2. Digital Marketing

The best thing about digital marketing is everything is trackable. Every penny you spend or efforts you invest online can be backtracked to ROI. Digital marketing is about ACPL. Creating Awareness, letting user Consider your brand, Purchase your service/product & become loyal customers. Digital space is purely data-driven marketing. Data gives transparency to scale your business. Digital marketing is a serious business because content going out to customers via digital medium will create your brand name. Digital marketing strategy should be aligned with the business objective. Targeting right channel to market is the biggest challenge when you take your business online.

3. Customer Acquisition

Customer acquisition through digital medium totally depends on your niche. Finding customers for B2B & B2C will differ. Every online channel has a different set of users to target.

On social media, you just cannot sell all the time but you can on a search engine. Deciding right keywords for a search engine, deciding right #tags for social media & right creatives is a challenge. Since everything is digital, keeping different landing page for each set of users is important. Segmenting customers based on their reaction on the website will help in acquiring customer more efficiently. For creating awareness, you can market on social media & display network. Ranking your website for relevant keywords on a search engine will divert quality users who are actively looking for your services/products.

4. After Sales

Usually, entrepreneur fails to acquire happy customers who will become your brand ambassador. The key performance indicator for any business is customer satisfaction. Meeting customer expectation will help you stand out of the competition. Providing a great customer service will satisfy both you & your customers.

5. Scaling the business

The last challenge is scaling the business. After attracting users to your website, most of the website has a static page which is not customized as per user clickstream data. It is very important to show personalized messages to each user. Taking the help of technology, you should customize the website based on the past history of users who have converted. You should also plan a loyalty program which helps your business generate repeat business. They will talk to their friends & family about positive experiences. In the end, the positive word of mouth creates the right impact for your business.

Nikhil Agarwal

Co-founder, Brandwitty

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