The benefits of an online strategy

So you want to know more about online business strategy, or perhaps improve your current strategy? In this lesson, we’ll explore how creating an online business strategy can have a positive impact, what a good online strategy looks like, and common things you can implement to achieve your business goals. An online business strategy helps get all the ideas out of your head and into a usable format. This can help define objectives to work towards, and increase your clarity and focus. Imagine you’ve set a new fitness goal to become more flexible

Now, going for a10 mile run may be great for your cardio, but it won’t help you achieve that bendy yoga position you’ve got your eye on. In order to do that, you’ll base your workout around key areas that will help you achieve your goal, in this case becoming more flexible. Running may be a part of it, but stetching is more likely to help you succeed. Likewise, identifying actions tailored to your goals will provide you with a better understanding or how to meet your business needs. So where do you start? The first stap is to clearly define your goals. Perhaps you’d like to increase sales by 20%, or identify 100 potential customers? Setting goals will provide you with direction and a clear path to follow. Next up is articulating what your business stands for.

This can be represented by a simple sentence, generally referred  to as a mission statement 

 For example, this might be “to inspire healthier communities” or “to provide fun spaces for everyday fitness”. You also need to identify your unique selling point (or usp) this is what makes you stand out from your competition online.find out what makes you different by looking at businesses doing similar things,and work out what sets you apart.  For example, if customer service is what sets you apart from your competition, this is your unique selling point, 

Understanding what you want to achieve can help you make the right decisions at the right time.

Here are some typical goals and the strategies that can be used to address them: increase sales if your goal is to improve online sales, driving more traffic to your website can help. There are many many to achieve this, from paid advertising to content marketing. Next up: increase awareness of the business or brand social media is a popular way to increase brand awareness to both new and existing customers. It provides a platform to express your values, personality, and engage with your audience. Finally: grow your email marketing list to encourage customers to sign up to email marketing, try clearly communicating what your audience can expect to receive, whether it;s exclusive content or member only updates.so hw do these benefits all of this stack up in real life? Let’s take a look at a real life business that used a strategy to maximise their impact online. My name is rechael and i’m from rachael’s kitchen and we are an online cupcake delivery company. So, our unique selling point is that we offer next day delivery across the country for orders placed by 4pm. When I first started the business we were purely an e-commerce company. A couple of years later i decided to open up some physical shops to increase brand awareness locally. I discovered along the way that, really, all of our customers are online customers. We can deliver across the nation therefore we are not limited to the proximity of our physical shops.it’s quite important we made the quickly made that shift purely to e-commerce. It quickly became apparent that corporate clients, so things like logo or brand cup cakes were really key, important parts of our business. Therefore we created a bespoke, corporate landing page to better service those customers.we are no longer limited to our local customer base, but customers that are all over the country. If this lesson has got you thinking about your own online business strategy,be sure to explore the additional resources at the end of this topic