Venturing into the online realm is not only a smart business move, but in these trying times, it’s a necessity. Even without a pandemic on our hands, there’s no denying that modern businesses are increasingly digitizing their processes and going online to grow their presence, generate more loyal customers, and take their brands to the next level.
Driven by technological advancement and the ever-evolving consumer trends, business leaders are incentivized to invest in their online presence. That said, even though the digital world is rife with opportunity, that doesn’t mean that success is a guarantee.
There are a number of key challenges that all business leaders need to overcome for their businesses when going online in order to solidify their digital presence, minimize financial waste, and ensure a positive ROI. After all, with ample opportunity comes ample competition, so you need to invest in the right tactics and solutions from the start.
An online business faces different challenges from a traditional business and you need to do some preliminary research work before taking the first step. So, you're wondering What's the Biggest Challenge for Most Businesses When Going Online? Let’s go over these challenges and take a look at what you need to do to hit the ground running from day one.
Understand How to Grow Organically
First things first, what do the majority of small business leaders do when they launch their website and social accounts? They start thinking about their first ads campaign and how advertising on Google and social media will help them get more customers. While there is a lot of merit in investing in PPC, for example, your first priority should be to start growing your online business organically.
What does that mean? Organic online presence means understanding how search engines work and then implementing the right content, social media, email, and other inbound marketing tactics to build your brand’s presence, authority, and identity. In turn, this will incentivize customers to come to you, and inspire people to become your loyal customers.
Businesses when going online are all about developing meaningful relationships with the online community. Defining a customer base by creating buyer personas is essential to start with. Instead of pushing ads to your customers, motivate them to become your lifelong brand advocates with good SEO, brand values, and educational content.
Invest in a Performance-Driven Website
You don't want to wait a decade before making a mark in your industry. Applying beachhead strategy to your website can help you enter the market fast. Your website is one of your most powerful selling tools, and one of your brand’s most valuable assets to improve your customer base. This is not just your digital storefront but also the face of your brand, it’s personality and identity where your values reside. Or at least they should.
Keep in mind that modern customers are spoiled for choice. They are no longer just looking for the most affordable solution or the best deals and discounts - they are looking for a more meaningful connection with their favorite brands. And to create that connection, you need an impactful website.
The first problem you need to tackle is performance. Website performance will be instrumental in improving the overall value of your SEO investment, as a performance-driven site will also help you rank higher in organic search results. To that end, make sure that:
● Your website has a simple and clear structure with an optimized theme.
● You use a dedicated hosting plan if you have a resource-intensive site.
● Your site is optimized for all handheld devices.
● Your visuals are not slowing your site down - use image compression for that.
● You have browser caching enabled.
These are your performance basics, and they will set the stage for a beautiful website with proper on-page optimization. Once you have optimized the performance, you can go ahead and work on the design and the user experience, but pay special attention to website security.
Focus on Website Security and Uptime
The design of your website will make all the difference for your online business, and there’s a lot that goes into building a user-centric site. Design is a whole other topic that we’ll tackle at another time, but the bottom line is that you have to work with skilled professionals who know your industry. For now, though, let’s focus on another common challenge - website security.
Most online businesses are at the mercy of cyber threats. Cybersecurity is a challenge for most businesses whether it's an enterprise or a small business. Building a secure digital presence is paramount to success in the online world and is often seen as the biggest challenge for online business owners. A secure website ranks higher, builds rapport with your online audience and customers, and elevates your brand’s trustworthiness in a saturated market.
This is especially relevant if you’re handling sensitive customer information as well, which is why it’s so important to tend to continuous security monitoring to spot any threats early, identify errors immediately, and keep all business and customer data safe. What’s more, your website visitors will expect your site to be up non-stop, so you need to monitor performance continuously in order to ensure constant uptime, which will in turn ensure business continuity online.
Grow Your Ecommerce Side with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) & SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
One of the biggest challenges for most businesses when going online is developing a proper growth plan to increase your customer base and have evolutive business models due to the ever-changing digital space. Most businesses find it tough to create a strategy while going online because they don't know where they should focus on.
Everything we talked about so far has led us to one of the key reasons why business leaders decide to venture online - to sell more. Now, this is also a big challenge, because growing the Ecommerce side of your business is a long process that involves various digital marketing tactics, new sales principles and methods, and continuous innovation.
There are a lot of Ecommerce businesses in the online realm right now, and one of the biggest challenges is standing out from the competition. If you want to start a successful Ecommerce business and thrive in the years to come, then you have to invest in SEO.
Why emphasize SEO, you ask? Because you already know that you need great product images and pages, and you know that you need a beautiful website - and now’s the time to incentivize people to buy.
Instead of wasting money on PPC initially, you want to start optimizing your pages for maximum visibility on Google, and start publishing quality content regularly. This will not only improve customer acquisition, but also improve your customer retention rate over the long term.
SEO is a key component of Ecommerce growth, which is something that newcomers in the industry will often overlook in favor of paid advertising. To that end, let’s talk about keywords and content.
Now that you understand the benefits of SEO and leveraged the power of organic traffic from search engines, you can invest in SEM (Search Engine Marketing) such as Google PPC ads. To start with, I suggest you focus on long-tail keywords with high purchase intent.
Know Your Keywords and Optimize for Voice Search
In order to make your new business website stand out and rank high in the search results, you need to weave the right keywords into your content. Of course, keywords are not the be-all-end-all of SEO, but they are the foundation that will allow Google to properly crawl through and index your site.
Start by conducting meticulous keyword research. Here are the steps to follow:
●Make a list of topics that are relevant to your business and audience.
●Brainstorm relevant keywords for each relevant topic - something you would type into the search bar to find what you are selling.
●Categorize keywords according to user intent. Remember that some users are here for information, some are comparing options, and others are ready to buy.
●Research related terms and phrases and see what pops up.
●Plug your keywords and phrases into a keyword research tool to get more keyword ideas and suggestions.
Once you have your keywords, consider the importance of voice search. Given the fact that more and more customers are using voice search to browse online, it’s important to optimize your website and all content with query-based keywords.
So, instead of using traditional phrases like "local auto body shop", you need to start using query-based search terms. This can be something like "where is the nearest auto body shop" or "who makes the best mochacino in my area".
Those two serve two very different industries, but as you can see, the principle is the same. Be sure to leverage voice search to get your online business on the digital map.
Create a Proper Plan & a Comprehensive Content Strategy
One of the biggest challenges that new online businesses face is which marketing channel to invest in first, and the most. Digital marketing is an all-encompassing term for everything from PPC to social media, from influencer marketing to affiliate marketing, and all the way to SEO and content creation. Developing a plan is an essential element!
While digital marketing is more affordable and impactful than traditional marketing, that doesn’t make it cheap, so you need to prioritize. Every marketing channel can help your online business grow, but in the initial stages it is imperative that you invest in content marketing.
Optimized content is the foundation of everything that you do online so having experienced content creators is key whether you hire them in-house, work with freelancers or hire an agency. Most businesses need to create optimized content for their sites and blog posts, attractive social media marketing, compelling emails and newsletters, high-converting landing pages and engaging copy. You can measure the performance of your social media efforts with social media analytics tools.
All of this works together to boost your online visibility and engagement, and tell the search engines that you are a trustworthy brand. Needless to say, continuously investing in content marketing will help you rank higher, build brand authority and trust, and drive lead generation and conversions forward.
With all of that in mind, use content marketing to grow your business and inspire the online audience to reach out both digitally and in the offline realm.
To Sum Up: The Biggest Challenge For Most Businesses When Going Online
The offline world is different from the online one. There is no one big challenge that all businesses face when they venture into the online world and that's what I wanted to show you with the detailed information I provided above. Rather, there are a number of challenges that you need to overcome in order to unlock your brand’s potential and build a thriving online presence through social media marketing, copywriting, blog content, SEO and more. Google Digital Garage is a great place to start learning about those.
Prioritize your digital marketing expenses and focus on inbound tactics such as SEO, content marketing, social media management, and good website design. Focus on growing the Ecommerce side of your business early, and prioritize website security to earn trust and retain customers.
In the end, always make sure to keep optimizing your digital presence with the right keywords, earn links on other authority sites, and keep the innovation process moving forward. Don’t allow your brand to stagnate, and stay on top of the latest trends in your industry.
Take these tips to heart, tackle these main challenges first and head on, and you should have no problem setting your brand up for success in the online realm.
Growth Hackers can help you to create an efficient digital marketing strategy for your business. We are one of the top digital marketing & growth hacking agencies that can help your business with Content marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, E-mail Marketing, and the likes. Contact Growth Hackers if you're looking to make your new company start off on the right foot.
Nina Petrov
I am a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. I start the day scrolling my digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. My white little bunny tends to reply to your emails when I am on vacation.
