As the world adjusts to the after-effects of the pandemic, 2022 presents businesses with a renewed outlook and opportunity for growth. Now is the time to kickstart your planning and build a robust and versatile strategy as your roadmap.
We suggest starting the year by taking the time to identify new market trends and competitors – and how it will impact your business. These are the components that will serve as the foundation of your strategy and help you set your business goals for the year.
This will prepare you to explore the trends that will shape 2022 and respond to them throughout the year.
In this article, we cover some of the most important strategies you can implement to grow your business in the new year.
Leverage Online Communities
Digital connectivity played a major role in fostering communication throughout the pandemic. This led to a rise in online communities through platforms such as Facebook Groups and Discord. Research tells us that virtual groups play a significant role in building connections – in a survey conducted by Facebook and NYU, 77% revealed that the most important groups they’re a part of exist online.
For businesses, online communities can be a powerful tool to organise an audience around your brand. It’s also a great way for you to gather insights on your target market through immersive learning.
Whether you decide to start your own or join an existing one, the positive attributes of online communities are undeniable. Here are some of the ways you can leverage an online community to grow your business.
Build a Community of Advocates for Your Business
An online community is a great way to bring your customers together to build support and advocacy for your business. Nine out of 10 shoppers rely on customer reviews when making buying decisions and online groups allow you to build and manage a community of loyal advocates that help to elevate your brand in the eyes of potential customers.
Nurture Customer Relationships
Creating an online community for your brand through a platform like Facebook groups can help to grow a loyal community of long-term, returning customers. Use it to share relevant and helpful information about your products and services, attend to queries, and interact directly with your customers. By regularly engaging with your customers in a meaningful way, not only will you build trust, you’ll also keep your customers coming back.
Listen and Respond to Community Feedback
Understanding your audiences’ needs is key to your business’s success and online groups provide a safe and accessible space for customers to reach you. It also allows you to listen and respond to conversations surrounding your brand and grow your business with the best interests of your customers in mind.
Create Synergy Between Offline and Online Activities
Being able to reach your customers offline and online is integral to your growth. However, these efforts can be inconsistent and ineffective if they are poorly aligned.
As customers become more connected and empowered, their expectations of online and offline mediums will continue to grow. Buyers today want the efficiency and convenience of digitally enabled platforms and the personalised experience of traditional shopping.
For this reason, creating synergy between the two is vital to providing a consistent customer experience.
Some key steps you can take to integrate your offline and online channels include:
- Be consistent in your offline and online messaging. For example, if your customer goes to your store and sees that you’re running a 30% off storewide sale, the information on your site should also have a similar promotion so that you don’t neglect either platform.
- Align the look and feel of your platforms. Your online presence should be an extension of your physical presence, and vice versa. Thus, using the same keywords, language, colours, fonts etc will help to unify your offline and online brand image and make you more recognisable to your customers.
- Use clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs) to direct your customers from one channel to the other. For example, you could invite your customers to visit your website and get 15% off their first online purchase through a print collateral displayed in your physical store. Meanwhile,your website can host banners informing customers where to find your physical location and organise for in-store pickup for their order.
- Use QR codes to create interactive and cohesive shopping experiences. Nike is a prime example when it comes to masterful use of QR codes. Consumers can scan QR codes displayed across Nike stores and events to download the Nike app. They can also receive in-app alerts when theý’re approaching a Nike store and unlock promotions, find items online, and reserve them to try on in-store. Once they’re in a store, they can scan barcodes attached to display items and access product information and request to try on items through their smartphone.
Explore Brand Collaborations
Brand partnerships occur when two or more businesses collaborate to create unique and innovative products and services. Allowing you to reach a wider audience by leveraging another brand’s customers.
This not only exposes your products and services to diverse customer groups, it also expands your reach to more locations.
And because most items that are a product of brand partnerships come with a ‘limited-time only’ sticker, it creates a sense of urgency and exclusivity that increases market share within a short period of time.
Follow these tips when forging collaborations with other businesses:
- Look for a partner whose products or services will complement rather than compete with yours. For example, flower delivery platform HappyBunch collaborated with local perfumier Analog Apotik to produce a series of artisanal scented candles to include in their gift delivery sets.
- Know your own values beforehand. Knowing that your brand stands for and what your goals are will make it easier for you to find the right partner whose values align with yours.
- Don’t overlook partnering with your retailers. They already understand how you work and the existing relationship will make it easier to transition into a collaboration.
- Set your expectations early on in the relationship and draw up a contract that clearly states what each brand will be bringing to the table. This might include the objectives, division of labour, assets, and more.
Level Up Your SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most important things you can do to increase your ranking on Google. If your goal is to create long-term awareness online and maintain consistent traffic to your website, SEO is an indispensable tool to have in your marketing mix.
Here are some of the ways it contributes to your growth:
It Increases Your Inbound Traffic
Populating your content with relevant keywords lets you target the right audience. This not only increases your inbound traffic but also ensures that you’re attracting high-quality leads that show interest in what your business has to offer.
It Helps You Build Trust and Credibility
Onliner users have been conditioned to associate credibility with search engine rankings. This means the higher you sit on Google’s SERP, the more likely you are to be considered as trustworthy by customers. Also, the more search terms you rank for, the more exposure you’ll receive!
It Indirectly Improves the Quality of Your Website
When you put in the effort to regularly create high-quality content, reduce your load-time, make your site mobile-friendly, and optimise all of your pages, you automatically improve the usability of your website and enhance the customer experience.
To find out what online marketing and SEO strategies you can implement, read our blog here.
Deep Dive into Your CRM
Cultivating healthy customer relationships forms the backbone of your business activities and your CRM is a proponent of connecting with customers.
It keeps track of your customer interactions and shopping patterns to determine and prioritise your most profitable customers and product segments. This also aids in your cross-selling and up-selling efforts as you’ll be able to zero in on opportunities where there is potential for add-on deals and promotions.
Another thing to do is to use it to identify what matters most to your customers. Learn about their challenges and preferences before following up with an action plan to solve their problems. This might include recommending products or services, referring them to instructional content and information, or connecting them to promotions on items that are relevant to their interests.
Your CRM can also help you upgrade your products and services by giving you insight into how your customers are responding to them. All of this information can be mined and utilised to identify gaps in your business, spot problems before they escalate, and make adjustments.
A dedicated CRM will also benefit your employees. By automating various manual operations such as data entry and recording customer information, your employees will have more time to focus on the tasks that truly matter such as acquiring new leads, brainstorming new market opportunities and strengthening existing customer relationships.
Grow Your Business with Dropee Solutions
With strategic planning and the know-how to utilise the resources that are available to you, 2022 presents plenty of opportunities to accelerate your business’ growth. The key to this is consistency. Persistent execution and adapting to changes in your surroundings will give your business the resilience it needs for success.
Working with the right partners can help to maximise your growth plans. Whether you’re new to the digital adoption cycle or are a seasoned e-commerce player, Dropee’s online solutions can provide you with the tools to mobilise and automate your business processes at various stages of your growth. Book a demo with our sales team and kickstart your digitisation journey!
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