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 offering a great product or service 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 during the discovery process will determine whether they buy from you or not.

That is why having the best products and the lowest prices is no guarantor of success. Rightly or wrongly, it is 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. That is because there are:

1. A lot of people in the world, but only a small number who will ever want to buy what you sell.
2. Competitors who want the sell similar offerings to the same people.

Unless market to the right people (those who are likely to be potential customers), you will never be efficiant enough to make any money. And unless your potential customers think that your are better than your competitors, you won't make enough sales to be successful.

Marketing is more than communication, to succeed it needs to shape the perception of your business in the minds of potential customers so they believe you to be 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 to them, delivers benefits that are highly desirable and a lot of people or organisations want. 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 mass-market appeal and attract global media attention.

Niche marketing

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. Often described as a market 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.

What this means in practical terms, is to build or grow a business successfully you have to identify a group of individuals or organisations where the the specific characteristics of your buisness (products, services, pricing, features etc.), put it ahead of your competitors.

Seek to become a big fish in a small pool and not a big fish in a small pool. 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.

Overestimating 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:

1. Your chosen niche is not big enough to generate a sustainable sales and profits.
2. 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.

Advertising

Writing strong advertising content is covered in the article Writing Great Advertising Copy.

Merchandising

For now, let's assume that the merchandising is the content you use on a product page.

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:

1. They are at the end of their decision making process and are ready to make a purchase.
2. The product and/or service meets their specific needs.
3. They are confident that you are the best supplier.
4. The price is right.
5. They understand and are able to navigate the purchase process.

A well designed product page, should help to tick all of these boxes. But at the same time doing so, will not guarantee success. People who buy from you regularly