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5 Ways Establishing Your Online Presence Can Lift Your Business To Greater Heights

    By moving part or all of our business operation online, we would be “losing the personal touch”. If your competition believes in this, you should take action and lift your business’ online presence immediately!

    Despite the talk that “Revolution 4.0” or “Digital Revolution” is upon us, many businesses are still not leveraging on the advantages that digital business operation brings them. Why? They believe that setting up a Facebook page does not allow them to engage their customers as well as they do face to face. The truth is far from that. Having an online presence ensures that you are available to your target audience 24/7 and can address clients who are seriously considering your products and services. Other than increasing accessibility, having an online presence also helps widen your reach, cuts operating costs, communicate your products and services in greater variety of ways, as well as provide flexibility to respond to changing customer needs.

    Engage Customers The Ways They Like It

    When you are engaging your potential clients face to face or over the phone, you are interacting with someone who are extroverts, comfortable with conversing on the phone, or someone who already has an idea of what they want.

    What about introverts? Singaporeans are “slightly more introverted”, and introverts are “more likely to locate their ‘real me’ on the Internet”. While a majority of the population are more likely ambiverts, by appealing to the introverted self on introverts and ambiverts online, your business is more likely to find out what their true needs are. From there, you can engage them in a more meaningful way.

    While there have been reports about millennials (who, together with Gen Z, now make up 50% of the working population and consumer markets) hating to make phone calls, the fact is that not everyone likes speaking over the phone. Not even Gen X or Baby Boomers.

    By interacting with potential customers over the internet using chatbots, social media comments and product videos, your business will be more helpful to customers in their exploration stage – which makes you more favourable than your competition who tries to force customers make a purchasing decision over the phone, when all they want is only to find out what choices there are in the market.

    Phone calls are still useful. They’re for closing the deal, making an appointment with keen customers who are ready to convert and buy your products and services. Before that, engaging your potential clients is more effectively achieved via an online platform.

    Showcase Your Products and Services In A Variety Of Ways

    For customers who are still in the exploratory stage, they want to know more about the product offerings in the market. And considering how strapped for time modern people are, few people have the luxury of allocating 1 hour (half an hour more for commute) to meet a salesperson and sit through their product demonstration.

    If the product demonstration is shown via YouTube, the viewer can choose to watch it at 1.5x speed to save time, to stop the video to attend to last minute requests, and to rewatch a certain section for more clarity.

    If the product information is listed on a website, they can do side by side comparison. Even better, they can transfer the information onto a spreadsheet and do a quick presentation to their management who makes the buying decision.

    When the product is showcased on a social media platform like Facebook or Twitter, they can easily gauge whether the product is suited to their needs by reading the comments from users on the social media.

    Do we lose customers this way? Yes, we lose customers who will hate the product anyway. Do we gain more customers? Yes, we gain customers who, after careful research, decided your product is the one that will satisfy their needs! Overall, your business outcome is lifted when you establish a meaningful reputation online.

    Be Accessible 24/7

    Ever had to go to the bank to do some transactions that must be done in person, but by the time you can do it, the bank is closed? Ask the older generation, or people living in countries with less competitive banking systems like Canada, and they would tell you that activities like opening a bank account, signing up for a credit card or remitting money used to have to be done in person. Singapore banks have overcome the challenge by moving these in-person transactions online. For transactions like receiving a new ATM card, banks like DBS created Digital Lobbies – branches manned by machines that are accessible 24/7.

    The above example is one of providing better accessibility to products and services for customers. While your business is nowhere like corporate megamoths like DBS, this does not mean you can’t improve your customer experience with better accessibility.

    Chatbots help answer your clients’ simple questions any time of the day (imagine having to be put on hold on the phone just to wait for an answer to a simple question!). More complex questions can be answered via Facebook Messenger or Twitter posts. You can take questions from multiple parties on an Instagram Live session, which can later be uploaded as IGTV or onto YouTube.

    The above online tools not only provide engagement to customers in diverse ways, they also let you lift your online reputation by reaching out to your target audience anytime, anywhere, and making your business a reliable one for your customers.

    Expand Your Customer Reach Beyond Your Physical and Time Constraints

    And speaking of reaching out to your target audience, lifting your online presence also help you expand the reach for your target audience and build your business’ reputation in uncharted waters.

    For example, if you own a bakery, you can expand your reach beyond your immediate neighbourhood by managing your presence on Google Maps. If you are selling a service or a non-perishable product like a cloth face mask, you can reach out to people who falls into your customer profile but are located in a geographical location.

    Even for businesses who can’t deliver products or services over long distances, maintaining an online presence and engaging potential customers in a different geographical location helps in your decision when you decide to set up a branch location. Instead of hastily done market research that surveys people at one point of time, your online profiles – Website, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – would have all the information collected over time. This information can easily be extracted from Google Analytics, Facebook pixels and Twitter tags and provide an indication whether the geographical market has matured for your next outlet.

    Respond To New Customer Demands Quickly And Easily

    Maintaining an online presence also means receiving feedback faster. This translates to the ability to respond to changing customer demands faster than your competition who do are not well established online.

    Additionally, it’s easier to set up a new promotion page or a Facebook engagement post to respond to these changing demands.

    Even better, use these social media posts to “test the water” to find out if your clients are receptive to new products, before they are officially launched.

    Be it responding to shifting customer needs or to do an A/B test on customer preference, it’s easier and cheaper to execute these changes with your online channels. Imagining closing your outlet for months to revamp your kitchen machinery only to realise that customers have moved on from brown sugar milk tea!

    Achieve Same Results With Lower Costs

    All of the benefits above, from enhanced engagement, 24/7 accessibility, reaching out to wider audience to flexibility in meeting customer demands, can be done without an online presence. However, this meant employing more staff to man your store at night, booking slots at roadshows across the region (and finding people to man the booths) or renovating your outlet to cater to a new campaign etc. The cost to attain this is exponential, when compared to doing all those online.

    The basic cost of setting up a website (hosting, domain, excluding website design services) comes up to less than SGD250. And this is an upfront cost for running the website for 2 years. Chatbots can be set up for free to answer simple questions by customers. Facebook Page, Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Ads Manager are free to set up. You will only need to pay for ads run on Facebook. Hosting videos on YouTube or Instagram (via IGTV) is also free. All these channels can help you achieve what you can do by setting up physical roadshows, but at a fraction of the cost!

    And as mentioned earlier, having an online presence and tapping on customer geographical analysis based on data collected on your online channels also helps you make a better decision on where to open the next physical store. When you have an established online reputation, it is also easier to activate your fans online to gather their opinions. Should your next store provide dine-in? Will your products be delivered to your customers within 20 minutes from your new outlet? You can find answers for these market queries from your online channels, but not from a traditional market survey!

    Parting Words

    Contrary to common beliefs, establishing an online presence for your company brings more benefits than you imagine.

    When you lift your online presence, you attract customers who are more interested in your products and services, through your diverse ways of showcasing your products online. Customer loyalty is improved thanks to the enhanced reputation of 24/7 accessibility. Your customer base is expanded beyond your immediate neighbourhood when you extend your influence online. It is also easy to modify your online channels to capture the early changes in customer demands, while the rest of your business operation and physical outlets adjusts itself in the longer run. Best of all, all these can be achieved at a fraction of the cost compared to doing outreach physically, thanks to the low cost of entry for building online channels.

    You can contact DiNoMinator for a free audit of your business’ online presence. Simply tell us the URL of your website and/or social media profiles and one of our DiNos will get back to you!

    If you have not started online reputation management for your business, tell us what your business model is and what you hope to achieve with these online channels. For a limited period of time, DiNoMinator will provide free consultation and strategy-building for your business.

    Take the first step to lift your online presence and contact DiNoMinator using the form below!

    L.i.F.T Your Online Presence