Is your business online yet?

Is your business online yet? I sometimes ask business owners this question directly or indirectly, and perhaps this is one of the very important questions you need to ask yourself at this time of huge technological advancements.

There has been a growing trend of businesses going online, embracing the internet, and putting the internet into full use, to their advantage.

You need to embrace some social media and digital marketing channels such as; website, blogs, social networking sites, email marketing, social bookmarking sites, media sharing sites, and so on.

However, you need to find the ones that are suitable for you and your business. This is because not all channels might be suitable for your business. You need to carefully point out the ones that are relevant to you and use them.

Here are some benefits your business stand to gain while being online:

1. More brand awareness: when your business is online, you have more awareness for your brand. People can easily get to know your business and know more about what you do. You literally put your brand out there, and you have lots of people online you can tell about your business in so many ways.
2. More customers: also, going online can also help you gain more customers. It can serve as a form of advertisement for you.
3. Aids brand consistency: through the things you put on your website, blogs, social media accounts, you get to put your brand out there and it can help to improve your brand consistency. This is because as you embrace digital marketing, and you are consistent with the way you post in different channels, it can increase your brand consistency.
4. Brand recall: also, for some brands that people may have forgotten about, having an online presence can help people remember your brand. For instance, there have been brands that I have forgotten about for some time, but whenever I encounter them online, I get to remember them.
5. Improved customer relationship: also, online media has a way of helping you to converse better with your audience. It can help you improve your customer relationship, and attend to the needs of your customers faster, for instance through social networking sites.
6. Well-defined corporate image: also, you can have a strong corporate image online; by the way, you carefully define your business and what you do.
7. Makes information more easily available to others: in addition, it helps you to easily give the public information about your company.
8. Global: it is global, and you can easily access people from different places in the world. Going online helps you take your business to people far and near you.
9. Cheap: going online doesn’t always require much money, it is cheap and you can even get some tools for free.
10. Reviews and feedback: sometimes you can easily get instant reviews or feedbacks about your products, e.g. through comments, likes, etc.
11. Better accessibility: it helps people to access you easily. Through your different social media channels, you get to have different ways that people can access you easily.
12. You can work from anywhere: in some cases, perhaps depending on the nature of your business, you can work from anywhere.
13. Getting better analytics: with online media, it is easy to track your sales on any of your platforms. And this can also help you plan better, and work better.
14. It can help customers easily find your business: sometimes when someone tells me about a company, one of the things I do is to look up the company online or on social media to have an idea of who they are and what they do.
15. Helps to research better: in addition, embracing the internet can help you to research better, in relation to your customers. For instance, you can easily know who your customers are and the products or services they prefer. These can be known through different tools.

Take your business online today 🙂