If you’re trying to get a business off the ground, you’ll know just how much work goes into it. There’s so much paperwork, permits, payments etc. to deal with and you’ll soon want anything to help you.
Luckily, there are a lot of solutions to common business problems found online. The internet age has given us a lot, including platforms and software that will make business aspects a lot easier to deal with. These are the internet tools that you’ll need if you are trying to get a business seen.
Customer Service
Online marketing is all about building fanbases, and so bad reviews can be detrimental to a business. Keeping your customers happy isn’t just a matter of personal pride or making a few refunds, but overall business reputation. As mentioned, users are researching who they buy from, and if they see a lot of other people reporting bad experiences with your business, they will know not to go near you.
If you are running eCommerce as part of your business, you can reduce customer dissatisfaction with Riskified. The service enables chargeback protection for merchants, which will enable you to differentiate genuine complaints from fraud and thereby handle the situation accordingly. Plus, it will protect you when a customer successfully claims in a dispute.
Another mark of good customer service, and a good way to avoid disputes, is good communication. You can offer your customers a way of handling issues on your site with a chatbot, but sometimes you need to speak to someone real. With everyone working from home today, it’s easy to see why so many phone platforms have landed on the internet. The best ones offer customer service features like call fielding etc.
Website
A good website is vital to any business. Users need a touchstone to your brand, which the business website offers. Sometimes they’re simply looking for a contact number, an address for a premise, or some social media links, sometimes they’re looking to get a vibe of the brand, and sometimes they want to know if your brand fits their needs or principles.
It’s important to keep your website up to scratch to ensure that nothing impedes the buying process, either. Everything should be clearly displayed so that your customers can find what they need. If you are selling products or services on your website, you’ll not want anything like glitches or page issues getting in between the customer and the checkout.
If you’re not a coder, you’ll want to look for a website builder like WordPress or WIX. They both offer a range of templates so that your site will clearly display everything you need it to, and you won’t have to worry about glitches.
Content
Content has vastly expanded in the past couple of years. With lockdown, a lot of users were looking for something new to entertain them, some found podcasts, some found TikTok.
And with these discoveries, marketers discovered that the old way of posting a photo of their product over Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Not only are users becoming aware of them, and are therefore swiping past any they see, but there is nothing to keep them there. Knowing that, the point of marketing has changed, to grabbing and keeping users’ attention rather than barraging them with details of how great your product is.
And there are ways to do both. You can post reviews, demonstrations on how it works, how it can be used, behind the scenes, etc. The benefits of both podcasting and short-form video content is that they offer high return on little effort, so it won’t distract too much from your business.
Whether you’re going down the podcast or short-form video content route, you will need editing software. The go-to has always been Adobe Premier Pro, but it is notoriously expensive and notoriously difficult to use. LumaFusion on the other hand, is a lot more affordable and a lot easier to use. It offers all the tools Premier Pro does but with clearer layouts and instructions to find and use everything.
Data
Keeping your website well informed and full of content is important not only to satisfy users who came to your site to answer a question, but also to satisfy the powers that be that run Google. Where your site shows up on Google search results is determined by how informative your site is. It’s part of SEO and is part of a bigger problem in online marketing: the data.
The data can be difficult to get your head around. Where the rest of online marketing can be picked up on due to you being a consumer, the data is something that takes some studying.
And you can study it. There are lots of courses online that will give you a deep dive into all the more technical aspects of online marketing. You can find some good courses on LinkedIn Learning for a subscription. They also offer courses on everything from business management to leadership skills if there are any other skills you’re looking to sharpen.
