Communications & Marketing

The rise and rise of selling online

By Tom Scott (pictured), Head Mester at Little Mesters

Global retail trade rose from 14% in 2019 to about 17% in 2020. That’s pretty significant. The global pandemic has made it abundantly clear how important selling goods and services digitally is for businesses. We are approaching a time where physical and online will both be back available to consumers, here’s our top tips for those considering selling online.

Choosing a platform

I’ll be honest, there are a lot of choices out there for where to host your store or services. From third party providers like Shopify and WooCommerce, to more bespoke solutions, it’s well worth taking some time over this decision. Some key factors to look at: • Costs –What are you ongoing monthly costs, including payment system fees? • Aims –How does the platform fit in with what you’re trying to achieve? • Growth –Will choosing a third party platform restrict you from growing compared to a custom solution?

How will customers discover you?

So you’re all set up with a lovely online store, and your products or services are there waiting to be discovered and bought. How are you going to get people there? There are plenty of avenues to choose for this, and I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t recommend looking at paid social media as a means of finding your audience. But first things first, make sure your tracking is in place. You need to think about: • Google Analytics (other analytics platforms are available) –Here you are recording a wide range of statistics that will help you work out performance • Social media tracking pixels –They all have them and with it you’re going to be able to do so much more.

Once you’ve laid that groundwork it’s time to think about where your audience lives online and who else do they connect with, such as competitors brands, celebrities etc. Doing this analysis is going to allow you to have confidence in choosing the right avenues to communicate with them. Oh, and build an email marketing list. It’s priceless.

Evaluate what’s working

You’re going to need to know what’s working once you’ve started. Being able to evaluate and measure means you can make educated decisions on which avenues to increase budgets for, which to pause, and which ad creatives to do more of. Once again the options here are pretty overwhelming. Here’s a few popular options: • Native analytics –Most platforms have some form of insights available for you to use. The downside to this can be the breadth of statistics they make available, and it can be time consuming if you have multiple platforms to check • Data studio –Google’s much underrated and underutilised tool. You will be able to pull in statistics from Google channels for free e.g. Analytics, Google

Ads and Search Console. You can connect other services like Facebook using third party connectivity tools which do come at a cost • Analytics –We’d recommend having this set up from day one. There’s a lot you can do here, but even at its most basic you can quickly see traffic, referrals and time on site.

‘There are a lot of choices out there for where to host your store or services’