Scaling your online business is easy when you follow these steps!
If you have a business in a certain industry, you need to know that industry inside out. However, don’t forget that, within the day to day running of your business, there are multiple industries that you probably have no idea about. For example:
- Web Design
- Advertising
- Accountancy
- SEO
- Content
- The List Could Literally Go On
So if you’re the kind of business owner that tries to control everything, especially if it’s something you aren’t an expert in, then you’re the problem. Once you understand that, your business will start to grow naturally. Other than that, there are some key points to scaling your online business successfully, so let’s explore them below.
Make It Easy To Buy
Over complicating the buying process for your customers is probably the number two reason a business fails to scale properly. It’s all about the customer journey and how easy it is for a user to get going.
For example, look at Amazon and how easy it is to buy something. You login, find the item and press “buy now”. That’s it. Your item is already on the way and you’re only 2 minutes into your lunch break.
To be honest if you’re an eCommerce website, you’re probably best off trying to include your delivery fees in the overall cost of a product. The main reason for this is if a user gets to the checkout and sees that it’s going to cost them more to have it delivered, the first place they’ll go is Amazon. Why? Because if you order something from Amazon and pay for it to be delivered, you know for a fact that it’s getting delivered quickly. If it doesn’t, Amazon’s customer service will resolve the issue super quick and you just can’t compete with that type of comfortability.
So enough with the “sign up to our mailing list” and if you can, make it so the user doesn’t even have to create an account before buying. Nobody wants to spend forever navigating your website. Entering all of their details, then go back to find the product, add it to their basket, get asked if they want to join a mailing list then get a whopping delivery charge added on top of their order.
Adapt To The Changing World
This one is quite different to any that you’ve probably read before but it’s just as important as the above two points. The world is changing constantly. In the 90’s newspapers, all over the world reported that Wall Street and “people in the now” had predicted that the internet was just a fad and would disappear without a trace within months. Well… It’s been over 30 years and the internet has single handedly shut down a number of industries because of how useful it is.
You might be thinking to yourself, “what else could I possibly have to adapt to? I have a website and I’m on social media, what else is there?” Well the answer to that is who knows, just be ready to adapt when the time comes. For example, cryptocurrency is being used more and more in today’s society. What if you accepted cryptocurrency as payment? Don’t even get me started on NFTs.
Pay For Marketing
I said, pay for marketing. Stop thinking that you can scale on “word of mouth” alone. Or thinking that having a £1,000 per month budget is all you’ll ever need for your Google Ads to scale your business.
Some Rules To Live By When Marketing Your Business:
Stop Budgeting And Start Scaling Based On ROAS
So many old fashioned business owners try to add up all of their marketing spend per month and then think that it’s important to stick to that budget all year at the very least. This is so wrong.
Quick question, if you could spend £1,000 and get £10,000 in return you’d spend it right? What if your marketing agency asked you to spend £10,000 with a potential of returning £100,000? The first thing you’d probably do is say “There’s no guarantee I’ll get that return” and you’d be right. What you haven’t thought of though (because you’re not a marketing whizz) is, with all the data that your ads have shown, your ROAS might be stable enough to slowly scale your ad spend and eventually deliver that sort of return at that scale. At the very least you’re taking a very very calculated risk. So stop counting how much you’re spending and start looking at your return model, then take the leap of faith (as long as you’re with the right marketing agency).
Track And Measure Everything
Digital advertising is so different to non-digital advertising. If you advertise on a billboard or a radio/TV station, there’s no accurate way to track how many users saw that ad and then converted because of that ad. If someone else is telling you differently, they’re lying. It’s not anywhere near as accurate as Google Analytics for example.
You can track:
- Button Clicks
- Scrolls
- Page Views
- Engagement Rates
- Conversions
- Conversion Values
- Conversion Times
- Return Rates
- And About A Million Other Metrics
If you know what you’re doing, then the insight you get from tracking all of these metrics can help you to see where you have the most success and how to magnify in that one specific area. On the flip side, tracking everything allows you to see where your users aren’t having a good time and allows you to improve in those areas as well.
Stop Thinking You’re Better Than Everyone Else
The ego will make you blind. Be honest with yourself, you aren’t in the marketing industry and you never set out to be. There are people out there that have dedicated their lives to perfecting their marketing skills. Investment into a professional agency with multiple eyes on your campaigns is highly valuable and will make sure you get the best bang for your buck. The thing is, when you start to undervalue whoever is doing your marketing, that person then starts to look elsewhere. The main reason for this is because there’s hundreds of businesses out there that are willing to pay them high prices for their services. Simply because those willing businesses know that the results to make that kind of outlay worthwhile can definitely be achieved.
Care About Your Customers
This is a great point to finish the article on because everyone says they care about their customers. Well, I don’t know about you but I’ve had some pretty terrible experiences as a customer when ordering something online (be it a product or a service). So does that mean that some people are lying about caring about their customers? Probably.
As soon as your online business starts scaling in the right direction, there’s a sort of snowball effect. All of a sudden there’s a lot more demand and operationally you have to deliver what you’ve told the customer. Otherwise, the death of a small online business can come from review pages like Trustpilot and Yelp. If you don’t do what you say you’re going to do, then people will leave reviews. If you end up annoying 100 customers by not doing what you’ve promised (because you weren’t ready for the scale), 50 of those customers will leave you a bad review. Then when a new potential customer comes to your website and they check your reviews to see 50 customers leaving 1 star reviews because you didn’t do what you say you’d do, you’ve just lost that customer too.
I’ll say it again. CARE ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS. If you’re wanting to scale your business, you need to move quickly once you start seeing traction. Hire more customer service staff, get more people answering emails, call your supplier and give them the heads up that your next order will probably be a lot bigger and make sure they can handle the order.
Customers are trusting you to give them what they want. If you do it right, the honest truth is, the customer probably won’t give you any props and 9 times out of 10 won’t leave you a good review, so just deal with it. However, if you do something wrong and you don’t do a good enough job, then 1 in 2 customers will leave you a bad review.
Summary
So scaling your online business is easy if you do the following:
- Stop Trying To Control Everything
- Make It Easy To Buy
- Adapt To The Changing World
- Pay For Marketing
- Care About Your Customers
If you want to know more about what our agency (Everything Digital) can do for your business and how we’ve successfully scaled huge brands, check out some of our case studies on this link.
