Irrespective of the number of ways of doing business in today’s economy, a business you do online has many advantages.
If you want to know why your business needs an online presence, read this guide.
It covers 5 good benefits of having an online presence for your small local business.
Or better put,
Why should your business be online?
Bill Gates, in a quote, makes a stern warning while speaking on the benefits of having an online presence for small businesses.
He says A business that is not run online will run out of business. Bill Gates, What does that mean?
It means the old marketing system is phasing out and it’s high time every small business owner takes his business online.
The time you would pay for radio jingles and sit down in your store, legs crossed and waiting for customers to come, had gone.
Most of the traditional marketing strategies were found to be mere media noises.
Customers now want to reach you on the internet and learn from what others are saying about your products and services before they can trust you.
They want to place an order online and have their items shipped to their doorsteps.
So, if your business doesn’t have an online presence, you can’t benefit from this new customer behavior.
As a result of this, you would leave your customers with no choice but to look elsewhere.
In the video below, Olawunmi Sanusi gives three vital tips on why your business needs an online presence.
Why does your business need an online presence?
Without much ado, these are just a few of the advantages of having an online presence in Nigeria.
1. Low Cost
Your business needs an online presence for cost reduction.
Taking your business online can drastically reduce the costs and risks of doing the business.
For example, if you have an e-commerce website, you won’t have much to spend on distributing your products and hiring sales representatives.
Since your e-commerce channel can serve as your storefront, you need not worry about yourself looking for money to rent a store.
With the use of search engines, social media, and other similar digital technology available on the internet, you need not recruit and pay advertisers, sales representatives, and distributors.
Despite the fact that these professional services incur a lot of costs, you can’t avoid them if you run your business offline.
Whether you make a profit or not, you must pay for rent, pay taxes such as business permits, amenity charges, and so on.
Taking your business online will end most of your overhead costs.
No more owning or renting a warehouse because your website would serve as your warehouse.
From there, your customers can buy and pay you without any stress.
2. Convenient
Moving your business online can make you leverage e-commerce, automate sales and start making money working from home.
As a result of this, your transactions will be more convenient, faster, and safer.
After taking your business online, you can attend to a million customers with just a push on your computer keyboard.
You don’t need to see each of them face-to-face before you can settle a deal.
The difference is that a single marketing effort you make online can serve your entire customer base. No need to repeat yourself over and over.
Converting your brick-and-mortar business to an online business doesn’t mean your business can thrive without marketing efforts.
Your customers want to know how is your business relevant to them and you need to adopt digital marketing strategies to constantly reach out to them.
You can snap your product and share the pictures on social media to engage thousands of customers at a go.
You can also sell thousands of products with a single blog post. And that can be at the convenience of your smartphone.
If it were to be an offline business, you would have to first bring the product to each of the customers.
If they weren’t going to buy on the spot, you would go back and book another appointment with each of them.
That’s the stress you don’t have to go through with your online brand presence.
3. Flexible
An offline business is stationed in a particular location, while patronage depends on a few particular sets of people whom others are competing to share with you within the location.
You may need to shut down your business temporarily or permanently if a disaster or crisis looms in that area.
But if your business has an online presence, you don’t need to relocate or set up an office everywhere in order to annex your tentacles or avoid a social crisis within your area.
Meanwhile, the more annexes, the more employees, more costs, more risks, and more problems you have.
The problem of location can be resolved only when you give your business an online presence.
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Some of the advantages of moving your business online include the privilege you have to switch between locations and target different markets or customers without any restriction.
4. Digital
To do your business offline and succeed, you need to rely majorly on television and print media, which is not so after taking your business online.
When your business is online, all you need include:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- Email marketing
Each of these strategies would enhance your online brand presence.
With effective use, they all work to help you increase your reach, generate more leads and boost your sales.
5. Readily Available
The internet has an established lead, which you can easily tap from.
As one of the benefits of having an online presence, you can take advantage of this system to target internet users and pitch your products or services to them.
Billions of people rely on social media and you can leverage the audience base of each platform to source, reach, engage, and convert more customers.
Assuming you want to market your business on Facebook, the platform has all you need.
Take for instance, the Facebook Audience Insights tool will tell you how the audience behaves over a period of time.
And this will help you target and convert the right audience.
To fully take advantage of moving your business online, you need to put your attention on value creation, and then have your business present on all major search engines and social media platforms.
These are the places consumers go to find solutions nowadays.
Search engines and social media algorithms work in a way to help users find the best products and services online.
If your business has an online brand presence, it’s very certain that Google will seamlessly lead potential customers to you.
Conclusion Why Businesses Need an Online Presence
If you ask yourself, why your business needs an online presence, I guess you have the answer now.
For sales and marketing reasons, hardly can a business survive nowadays without having an online brand presence.
We have discussed how the Internet helps small businesses reduce costs, improve sales, and expand reach in this guide.
So, having realized some of the key benefits of having an online presence in Nigeria, I bet you don’t want to be left out.
Most startups go to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to open a business page and promote their businesses. You too can do the same and even start a blog to promote your business.
In a nutshell, having an online brand presence can make you remain in business come rain, come sunshine.
