THE 5 FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF SUCCESS IN THE DIGITAL MARKETING REVOLUTION
Owning your own business can be a freeing experience. You can choose what you sell, how you sell it, when you work, the choices are huge, but they allow you to live the life you want to lead. But what kind of business should you run? Brick and mortar stores are becoming a more niche market with each passing year. Almost 25% of all business transactions last year were through an online store, and for the past two decades we see a growing number of purchases being made through online storefronts. The pandemic also proved that online stores are much more resilient to market fluctuations and have a greater variety of ways to market and share them. Think of the kind of freedom running an online store creates compared to traditional methods. You can work from wherever you are, engage with markets around the world, receive near-instant feedback from customers, and have countless ways to expand your operations. Online businesses aren’t the future; they’re expanding and growing right now. And not only that, but online businesses have begun to observe specific trends and practices to keep on not only growing, but thriving. The first online store was founded 40 years ago. Ecommerce markets have changed a lot since then, and we’ve learned even more. But you can’t stop at just creating an online storefront and hope people will come along to buy some stuff. Online marketing strategies are vital to keeping online store fronts afloat and visible to online users everywhere. These strategies are the bedrock of your business, because what good is a business if no one knows it exists? An easy way to remember what solid online marketing strategies are is through the 5 P’s of Online Marketing. These are people, product, persuasion, profit, and process. Each one of these is an integral aspect to just about every online business out there. These five P’s of online marketing can be fashioned into the five fundamental laws of a profitable online business. This means that in designing an online business, you should be looking for a target market, selling them the best product, creating engaging ways for them to discover it, upselling it to them, and creating a process to do that all over again. Let’s look at each of these more closely and see how we can redesign these marketing strategies to create a thriving online business.
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Law 1
People, or the Law of the Thirsty Crowd Ultimately, your business wouldn’t survive without people. Businesses need people to interact with, buy their products, and provide feedback to help them better their products and services. In terms of developing an online business, you want to view your people as a thirsty crowd. This is where you look for your hot target market and figure out who you want to serve. The Law of the Thirsty Crowd means that you should be looking to market your business to the right people. If people are thirsty, you don’t give them scissors. They need water. When you’re developing the products your business will sell online, imagine who is the thirsty crowd that would love this product? How can your product change their lives? Your product should also answer an issue that other people have. If you can find one person with a problem, there’s most likely thousands of other people with the exact same issue. These are people who are looking for a solution you could provide them. You just need to decide on which solution you want your products to tackle.
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Law 2
Products, or the Law of the Better Mouse Trap Ralph Waldo Emmerson is famously attributed with the phrase, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” In today’s digital landscape, that phrase rings more true than it did in the 19th century. Once you’ve decided who would want your products, you now should focus on the products themselves and how they function. With the Law of the Better Mouse Trap, your goal is to create a world-class product that is both unique and engaging, one that helps move people away from pain and towards pleasure. Not only this, but you must do this better than your competitors. But not that much better. You don’t need to make a mousetrap that kills every mouse forever. Instead, focus on the mousetrap that’s slightly better. The goal is much more realistic and attainable, which means you’ll be able to do it much faster than trying to make a brand new product that does everything better. You’ll be surprised how much people will appreciate it when you take the time to better their lives, even in small ways. The digital marketplace is filled with hundreds of the same but slightly different products for people around the world. One set of products might be the same with one costing a bit less, another product might cost the same but has an extra feature that people are looking to use. The goal with developing your product shouldn’t necessarily be to reinvent the wheel. Rather, you want to make your wheel a bit more round compared to the competition. Every product sold is geared towards a certain thirsty crowd. Look at other products being sold that are similar to yours. What do they do? Is there much diversity within those products? How could yours stand out from the competition? Take notes on all of this and think about how your thirsty crowd wants to use your product. Keeping a user-focused view of your product will help you better understand how to improve it.
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Law 3 Persuasion, or the Law of Getting Attention Your business also needs to grab attention. The online marketplace is growing, fast. There’s companies popping up with online storefronts all the time. Some of those businesses are purely online, some already exist in a brick-and-mortar store. But each online store is looking to grab as many customers as you can. The Law of Getting Attention focuses on gaining attention for your product and company. Having an online store is a great way to sell your products, but if no one knows it exists, then it’s not worth all of the effort it takes to set it up and maintain it. You have to put time and thought into creating the attention your online store needs to drive traffic to it and sell your products. And once you have their attention, you want to create a captivating callto-action that moves people from interested to buying. There are three main ways of driving traffic to your online store: free, paid or borrowed.
Free Attention Free focuses on search engine optimization (SEO) skills, as well as views with YouTube videos and social media posts you create. These traffic driving practices don’t cost any money to use or implement; while it might cost something to create the product, it’s free in the sense that you pay nothing to post it.
Paid Attention Paid traffic involves using software such as Facebook ads, Google Pay Per Click ads, TikTok and YouTube ads. These allow you to pay a company that already has visitors to advertise you online store. Usually they have data on their users, which is an amazing tool to use when you’re focusing on a specific thirsty crowd of people. Most people have
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seen sponsored ads on YouTube, Google, or Facebook. If not, scroll around and see what kind of ads are created, how they’re implemented differently in each site, and what ways your store would most benefit from.
Borrowed Attention The last kind of traffic is called borrowing traffic. This is done through joint ventures, and this is where other influencers email their list of people. Joint ventures (JVs) have an understanding of your product and who it should be advertised to, so they can put your online store in front of exactly the right kind of people you’re looking for. This traffic also comes highly endorsed that tends to convert better than any of the kind of traffic. Its effects are almost immediate. JVs also aren’t paid a flat rate; they’re only paid through how much product they sell for you. If they make a bunch of sales, it’s probably sales you wouldn’t have gotten easily by yourself. And if they don’t make any sales? Then you don’t lose anything because of it. JVs also help you network. They’ll introduce you to their social circles at parties or at networking events, and that will ultimately lead you to finding more JVs. Having JVs promote you is the best kind of traffic since it’s risk-free, it helps gain more industry contacts, and it’s the highest converting traffic you can get. How do JVs work? You first have to start by setting up an affiliate program. This is where people can become promoters of your product. Influencers, affiliates, or JVs can sign up for this program where they’re given a link to your website. Each link will be unique and traceable to each individual affiliate. As they disperse this link throughout their own networks, it will help drive reliable traffic to your site. These affiliates are using the trust they’ve built in other people to bring them to your site. If someone recommends a product to someone they know, that person is much more likely to purchase it. And, again, you don’t have to pay your affiliates until after they’ve sold your product. Up until the point of sale, the traffic they send your way is free.
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Law 4
Profit, or the Law of Getting a Yes Now that you have traffic coming into your online store, your goal should be in converting those visitors into paying customers. The Law of Getting a Yes aims to do just that; moving people from interested to purchasing. Using tools such as copywriting, direct response marketing, and marketing funnels, you can create captivating calls to action that drive people to make a purchase. The Law of Getting a Yes uses a combination of all of the laws before it to culminate towards a purchase. Your crowd is focused, your product has some sort of benefit over the competition, and people are aware of your website. From here, creating a call-to-action that engages them to purchase your product should be a breeze! But it’s still an important step. Without a good call-to-action, you won’t convert as much traffic as you could. When you begin to convert traffic into customers, you’re also creating a new support system. These first customers will be the gateway for others to come and see how they enjoyed it. They’ll write reviews, talk about it with their friends, and will begin helping you generate more traffic and sales to your website. From there, you’ll begin to see your business grow.
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Law 5
Process, or the Law of Scale and Automation Now that you’ve gone through the first four steps and people are beginning to purchase your products, you should be planning to expand the scale of your business. If your online business is successful, wouldn’t you want to replicate that success? It’s a no-brainer, and it’s even easier to do once you’ve done it all before. Look for easy and obvious ways to increase the scale of your business. This is where past customers come in handy. Look at the feedback you receive. What have you been doing well, and what could you have done better? Look into how you can expand through the feedback you gained. Sometimes, people look to grow their business through ways that seem like they would work, but don’t listen to any of the reviews they’ve received. By growing in ways that ignore feedback, your company’s scale increase could end up backfiring and causing more issues than growth.
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Discover The Best Online Business Tips, Tricks & Tools Here
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