How to Sell Online
Introduction
Creating and growing an online business is similar to growing any business!.
People buy products and service because they want to enjoy the benefits they offer. For consumers, these benefits usually relate to their personal wants and needs and for businesses, they are are more likely to lead to increased sales and improved efficiency.
The problem is that selling a product or service that develops these benefits isn't enough. Unless your prospective customers know who you are and what you do, they aren't going to contact you. And even if they have heard of you, the perceptions they have of you, your offerings and your competitors will determine whether they buy from you or not.
That is why having the best products and/or the lowest prices is no guarantor of success. It is usually the company with the best marketing that becomes the market leader.
The role of marketing
Everyone who has been in business for more than a few days knows something about marketing. Common sense informs us that that no one is going to walk into our shop, or visit our website, unless they know that we exist and where they can find us.
It isn't rocket science, but it is a lot harder than it sounds because there are:
- A lot of people in the world, but only relatively a small number who will ever want to buy your products.
- Competitors who want the sell similar things to the same people.
Unless you sell to the right products to the right people, you will never be efficient enough to make any money. And unless enough of your potential customers think that your are better than your competitors, you will end up generating more sales for them.
Marketing is more than communication, to succeed it needs to inform the development of your offerings and shape the perception of your business in the minds of potential customers so they believe that you are the best option available to them.
Target the right people
If marketing is difficult, but essential to success, how do businesses get off the ground?
Sometimes it is because they sell a product or service that is unique and delivers benefits that are highly desirable. If they can make enough people aware of it quickly enough, then all they have to do, metaphorically speaking, is "light the blue touch-paper and stand back". This kind of runaway success is rare, because very few products or services are truly unique; have viral, mass-market appeal; and attract substantial media attention.
If you can't get big, get niche
Unless you offer something that is truly ground breaking, the only realistic way to launch a new product or service is to focus on a small sub-set of a market, where their products are most likely to succeed - usually described as a "niche".
I once attended a lecture at the Cranfield School of Marketing where they said that all businesses succeed by becoming a leader in their market, but that sometimes these markets were large and sometimes they were small.
The implication of this insight is that the best strategy for building or growing a successful business is to become a big fish in a small pool and not a big fish in a small pool. Identify a group of individuals or organisations where the the specific characteristics of your offering (products, service service levels, pricing, features, etc.), put it ahead of your competitors.
If your business is at least partially successful, then the chances are this has already happened.
Discovering your niche can harder than it sounds. If your business is already up and running then customer research is the best place to begin. For start up business, you need to combine your inuitive understanding of potential niche markets with hard data to create a list of candidate niches that can be tested.
Don't overestimate demand
A common error in identifying niche markets is not paying enough attention to the potential size of the market. Your goal might be to be a big fish in a small pool, but it is not possible to be any king of fish in a puddle.
Your offering may be perfect for your target market, but you won't get enough sales if:
- Your chosen niche is not big enough to generate a sustainable sales and profits.
- The benefits of you offering are not substantial enough to convince enough potential customers that they need it.
Overestimating demand is a common error made by entrepreneurs, it is likely that you are already doing it.
Why targeting works
Marketing is a numbers game.
Whatever business you are in, your products a will not have global appeal. Unless you focus your marketing activities on promoting your offers to the people who are most likely to take them up, you are going to waste most of your investment in marketing.
Engage them with relevant content
Once you have a good understanding of your target market, the next challenge is to engage with them. This can be harder than it sounds, because your voice will be one of many competing for their attention.
Let's think about the the two different types of content used in the sales process.
| Stage | Description |
|---|---|
| Advertising | The content you use to grab a persons attention, such as a the content of an advert or the title and description of a web page. |
| Merchandising | The content you use to persuade potential customers to buy from you after they have landed on your store. |
This is where understanding your niche becomes important.
The most efficient businesses have a good enough understanding of their target market to offer products and services that would be of particular interest. When this is the case, creating compelling adverts and merchandising is usually quite straight forward.
When these are aligned with the expectations that come with your brand, then you give yourself the maximum chances of success,
Convert them into customers
The process of improving a web page's ability to convert browsers into buyers is called Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO for short. The goal of CRO is to create the content and that will maximize the chances that someone who views the page will add the product to the shopping cart and go on to place an order.
The likelihood that they will depend on a the following factors:
- They are at the end of their decision making process and are ready to make a purchase.
- The product and/or service meets their specific needs.
- They are confident that you are the best supplier for them.
- The price is right.
- They understand and are able to navigate the purchase process.
A well designed product page, will tick all of these boxes, but ticking them will not guarantee success. A business that is a well-known brand with many loyal customers does not have to work as hard at generating sales as a lesser-known brand. If it did, then starting a new business would not be as difficult as it is.
Why your brand is important
If you are a small business, the brand concept can seem a bit high-brow. It is also fair to say that it is possible to spend a lot of money on brand marketing (promoting your business rather than its products) and getting very little in return. However, don't be deceived, your brand is important.
There are more than enough academic definitions of what people mean when they use the term brand, so I am not going to plagiarise them here.
It is more complicated than this, but a good place to begin is to think about the three important judgements that buyer make when they purchase goods:
- What they think about your product or service.
- What they think about how you deliver them and how much you charge.
- What they think about you, personally and corporately.
These judgements are not made independently, every purchase buyers make is guided by a combination of perceptions regarding utility, cost, convenience, reputation and trust. Even the design and colour of your packaging can influence the process.
In our personal lives, we are all drawn towards certain types of people, perhaps because they share our outlook on life and values. At the same time, we tend to be shy of people where we don't feel we have much in common. We do the same with products and companies and this influences the choices we make when shopping.
You can argue that this behaviour is a good thing and a bad thing, but it is real and it is the reason why your brand or corporate identity is so important. It is the businesses who proactively shape their brand identities around the needs and desires of their customers who tend to succeed in the long term.