The digital market has changed the landscape of entrepreneurs. With the ever-growing social platforms, entrepreneurs can increase their reach to customers to an unmanageable extent. It is limitless.
But it requires disciplined efforts to nurture the digital space.
E-commerce players like Amazon, Flipkart provide a good reach. New young small entrepreneurs today don’t have a brick and mortar store but operate through a warehouse because their customer base is only reached through amazon or myntra.
But with this reach to the potential customers, their competition has also increased by big numbers. Amazon alone has added 1.5 lac sellers in India in 2020. You can imagine the competition that sellers face today.
Some of the best e-commerce websites to sell your product are-
Amazon, flipkart, snapdeal, myntra, paytm, pepperfry, limeroad, firstcry, meesho, shopclues, facebook, instagram, quora, linkedin, spotify.
Nowadays, people have also been selling on WhatsApp and Telegram. Yes, they have a feature, you can create your catalog, people can check it and order via dm.
In today’s digital consumer market, there are so many push systems, but you need to create a pull of customers under this push system. Business Owners can create this pull or attraction by developing the Power of Persuasion (PoP).
Do you see this development trend, what does this heavy man point to?
That it is no longer muscular strength that is in vogue, but the Power of Persuasion. You need to develop this Power of Persuasion, let’s call it PoP, to exploit the digital market.
Some ways to develop PoP
1) Explore Amazon - Since Amazon is the most popular e-commerce portal, it is necessary that you sell on Amazon.
The number of reviews a product has develops customer trust, but then each seller also has a Seller Account, which has a separate rating than the product. You can sell multiple products on the same account. Even if you sell only one product, your Seller Account rating will increase, and after a while Amazon will start promoting all products available through that account on its own.
Check which is the best-selling product on Amazon, such as toys. Always keep such products in your portfolio to increase this rating, promote them, and it can indirectly increase the sales of your other products.
2) Develop your social media profiles -
This is not an effortless task if you are not that adept at creating content. The irony is that you studied engineering and management courses in colleges, and today you end up having to design attractive photos and educational content to create that appeal to customers. You are doing what you were never taught to do.
These leads visit your page and see how many people follow you, they don’t have their own opinion but most of them believe in the opinion of others. If you have good followers, people will gladly join the herd.
You generate followers for your accounts. There are several ways to do this, such as consistently creating content, giving away freebies, writing quotes, etc.
There is another way: you can also buy fake followers to create the herd of followers so that genuine people see it and follow you. But will it increase your sales? That depends on how you convert your followers into customers.
Remember, most people don’t buy the product, they buy the brand. These profiles will help you build that brand on social media. These followers should not follow you to endorse you, but because they are proud that they follow you. Such people are your real customers.
3) Engage with digital influencers.
If you can’t be consistent, then engage with other digital influencers who can drive traffic to your website. But this is a Catch-22 situation because you were forced to engage with them, but you can’t determine how effective it is.
Be careful in such cases as it might be an expensive affair with no lead generation. There are several fake profiles with fake followers with fake engagement. Interact with such people to verify their PoP and ask them about their effectiveness. With my little experience, I have never found a person who can confirm the sale, and it is difficult to measure either. These social portals don’t give you a way to measure this data that should be looked at.
Another reason is that most of them are kids in their late teens or early 20s. Not everyone has that much experience in digital marketing. Since there are no money back clauses, it’s the risk you take.
Engage with them, but you better be careful when you spend your money.
4) Partner with other business owners.
The mantra for success today is: let’s grow together.
You are not running a local pop shop where there may be a steady customer base in the area; you are in an open field where there are big players and small players. You are competing directly with every vendor in the world of your domain.
And to compete with such vendors to expand your reach, it makes all the more sense to partner with several like business owners at events.
It's not limited to these above four avenues, but they are the most common. Every day you have a new technique to attract people to your digital store, and then you use your persuasive power to sell your product.
In India, still only a portion of business people have a digital seller account. With such a population, that is still an untapped potential and that is why such new social portals like Koo, Clubhouse, Mojlite, Sharechat, Chingari are emerging.
Clubhouse is a new rage among IPhone users, it allows people to have voice discussions like you do in meetings but it doesn't store anything. If you log in now, you'll find you're already too late.
All that aside, if your product is good and you have a passion to sell it. The results will come. Explore the digital landscape passionately and exploit it shamelessly.
This post is a part of Blogchatter A-Z Challenge- #blogchatterA2Z. Check out my A-Z Challenge theme, and read previous posts.