Tips To Improve Digital Presence of Small Businesses
Digital technology has brought a new wave of communication, advertising, and relationship-building tools. Hence, for a successful business, you have to go social.
We took a closer look into the Bangladeshi local business industry and observed the various forces which influence the retailers. Among the many effects we found, consumer confidence is one of the most important; people don’t stop when they are not feeling good or when they don’t have the time and/or energy to run down to the mall.
It is important to understand your target audiences’ needs and adapt to them accordingly as they change over time. Be it due to time or energy constraints or due to sheer convenience, more and more consumers are moving towards online shopping: E-Commerce, therefore, is the next BIG tide to hit the Bangladeshi industry!
Branding
As an apparel retailer or a boutique shop owner, whether you move to e-commerce right away or not, make sure you exist online. Your brand needs to have an online presence that your customers can identify with. Branding is an integral part of positioning your company.
Branding is important because people make purchases based on emotional triggers. When it comes to clothing lines, you’ll find that your customers are looking for a unique identity, which is why how you position your boutique, is crucial to its success. It plays a vital role in identifying and connecting with your target audience. If your boutique is not positioned as a unique brand, then it’s just another clothing store; there’s nothing that separates it from its competition.
Target Audience
While branding and awareness fixate on a unique image for your shop, it also facilitates in narrowing down who your ‘customers’ really are:
1) The age group they belong to
2) The places they live in
3) The restaurants they are more likely to visit
4) The sort of “interests” they have
This kind of detail enables you to specify your potential customers and helps you reach out to them conveniently.
Now that you know how to narrow down your potential customer pool, let’s move on to their buying habits. Most consumers make buying decisions based on factors such as price, quality, and preconceived notions. Without a unique brand identity, you have no control over preconceptions and therefore you are more likely to compete on pricing factors. If you have any plans of expanding your business, this is not a wise approach.
Cheap does not outsell quality.
So, what can you do now, which stands out? Something which outsmarts your competitors in the market? Join the new tide and reap the first-mover advantage! Instead of fighting overpricing and location, why not bring convenience to your customers? Take the product to your buyers. Let the products reach the customers instead of keeping it the other way around. Break the traditional clutter!
Moving Online
As we come down to statistics, over the last year, an average of 7.2 thousand inquiries per month hit Google search from Bangladesh on e-commerce while approximately 20 thousand inquiries per month were made about online shopping. Patterns show that more people look up for online shopping options right before Eid and such special occasions. Interestingly enough, during winter – which is ideally the wedding season in Bangladesh, Google search about Salwar Kameez, Makeup, and Accessories go up significantly. Over the past year, for makeup, in particular, search frequency went up by almost 34% from June 2013 to December 2013.
Buyers are shaping up to receive their products while it’s being delivered at their doorstep; it’s about time we let the commodities find its way to the customers.
With an emerging market of 11 million+ Facebook users in Bangladesh alone, we are looking at a booming new market. Your customers are online and now is the time to seize the opportunity to reach out to them; grab their attention.
Here are 9 mistakes Bangladeshi brands are making online. Check if you’re doing online marketing the right way!
Going Mobile
Mobile commerce is huge, and it’s only getting bigger. With the holiday shopping season just around the corner, there has never been a more important time to understand the significance of e-commerce within the online retail world. Given the current traffic congestion, more people are likely to browse through their preferred clothing lines using their phones while they are stuck on the road. After a long day at work, regular office goers would rather have their dresses delivered at home than rush through a sea of people to find a dress that suits them and which they can barely have a proper look at before they make a purchase.
The crucial point here is, your customers are moving online and your business has to go where your customers are, remember?
Prioritizing Platform
Having established the necessity for your product to go digital, the next step is to determine which platform is most relevant for your brand. Business owners often wonder about the ‘Return on Investment [ROI] on social media’. “Will my Facebook page actually be driving sales? Is all that tweeting really going to do anything for our bottom line? Should we be on Pinterest and Instagram?” – Well it turns out, when it comes to e-commerce, being social matters.
Among a few of the most popular social media sites in Bangladesh, Facebook tops the rank with an average of 4.1 million users talking about it on Google as of October 2014. What does that mean for your business? It means for you to set up a Facebook page right away (if you haven’t yet) and start boosting your digital advertising to your target market.
Challenges & Approach
The biggest challenge that online store owners face is increasing traffic to their e-commerce store. Knowing where to start and how to stand out from the thousands of other shops that are competing for the same traffic is a daunting challenge. Get help from a specialized digital marketing agency or learn to narrow down your target audience using Facebook search tools and place ads right away.
Let’s look at some ways to increase engagement via Facebook page and its significance for your brand:
1) Post-Contents Consistently to Increase Engagement
Keeping your customers engaged is one of the key ingredients to driving traffic to your page. To keep your target market engaged, you need to post rich and relevant content regularly. Posting at least once a day for Facebook is ideal.
2) Use Lots and Lots of Images When Posting to Facebook
One of the best ways to increase engagement in Facebook is by attaching a photograph along with the text. Photos on Facebook have been shown to generate approximately 53% more* likes than an average post that contains only text and/or a link. Sometimes, when you have a new announcement, for example, a ‘new discount’, perhaps you can post a suitable picture along with the announcement.
3) Create and Share Infographics
Over the last few years, infographics have become extremely popular. Due to the overflow of information surrounding us, people have less patience to go through detailed writings. Also, it is difficult for ordinary readers to make sense of and contextualize all the numbers being thrown at them out of the blue!
Infographics are fast, efficient, and relatively easier to absorb. They are also an attractive means of communicating crucial points with viewers in a matter of seconds. Professionally designed infographics can spike huge traffic to your sites. Invest some time researching intriguing topics relevant to your industry. Good infographics can easily go viral and sometimes other blogs or news sites might link back to infographics created by you which can drive back thousands of visitors to your page!
Go ahead and use these simple tactics to create and expand your target market and watch your businesses’ engagement rates shoot up! Build strong credibility over time, and increase your company’s growth and sales on the Facebook platform.
It is not the ideal place for targeting local Bangladeshi customers, however, as per the statistics, approximately 4.15 million Bangladeshis are talking about Twitter on Google. Therefore, the pattern indicates that having exposure in Twitter, however minimalistic it might be, could prove vital for your brand awareness in the long run. Twitter engages and helps you reach out to a global audience with a similar field of interest.
It is now the 3rd most popular social networking site in the world. It’s a new social networking site that literally everybody is talking about! Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo-sharing website that allows people to share and discover beautiful images, videos, products, and discussions.
For an e-commerce store owner, Pinterest can help your best products get discovered by other users. Pinterest’s growth is staggering – the site already has over 1 million members, and it receives almost 12 million unique visitors a month. The whirlwind of excitement that surrounds Pinterest provides online store owners a great opportunity to leverage its popularity to bring attention to their online store.
Take Away
Digital media is certainly shaping up to become one of the major channels of communication between businesses and individuals. Make your product promotions part of a user’s experience in social media through engagement and interaction. Prioritize the platforms you think are most relevant for your brand and start narrowing your market down to potential customers. Get help from experts specializing in the digital media marketing field for better ROI.
It’s time to grow out of creating advertisements for distraction.
It’s wiser to get involved with agencies because it means working with a group of marketers who consistently adapt their project management methodology to fit the needs of each specific project and client. It means working with people who work hard to stay ahead of innovation, who maximize their resources and actually listens to what you need. Go digital!
