An online business strategy can boost your chances of digital success, helping you to define clear goals and focus your online activity.

Do you want to know more about online business strategy, or perhaps improve your current strategy?

In this lesson, you will learn:

• How creating an online business strategy can have a positive impact
• Best practices when creating a business strategy
• Examples of common goals and popular strategies to achieve them.

In this post, we’ll explore how, what a good strategy looks like, and common things you can implement to achieve your business goals.

An online business strategy helps get all the ideas out of your head and into a usable format. This can help define objectives to work towards and increase your clarity and focus.

Imagine you sell skincare products and you set a new goal to sell over 20,000 products per month. Now, increasing your open hours and days may be a great help but won’t help you achieve the ultimate goal you want to achieve

Read also: Customer Touchpoints: Importance and how to identify and develop them

To do that, you’ll base your strategy around key areas that will help you achieve your goal, in this case selling over 20,000 creams. Increasing open hours/days may be a part of it, but offering a discount is more likely to help you succeed. Likewise, identifying actions tailored to your goals will provide you with a better understanding of how to meet your business needs.

So where do you start?

1. Define your goals. Perhaps you’d like to increase sales by 20%, or identify 100 potential customers? Setting goals will provide you with direction and a clear path to follow.
2. Articulate what your business stands for. This can be represented by a simple sentence, generally referred to as a mission statement. For example, this might be “to inspire healthier communities” or “to increase access to comfortable housing”.
3. Identify your Unique Selling Point (or USP) – this is what makes you stand out from your competition online. Find out what makes you different by looking at businesses doing similar things, and work out what sets you apart. For example, if customer service is what sets you apart from your competition, this is your Unique Selling Point.
4. Understand what you want to achieve. This will help you make the right decisions at the right time. Here are some typical goals and the strategies that can be used to address them:

• Increase sales: If your goal is to improve online sales, driving more traffic to your website can help. There are many ways to achieve this, from paid advertising to content marketing.
• Increase awareness of the business or brand. Social media is a popular way to increase brand awareness to both new and existing customers. It provides a platform to express your values, personality, and engage with your audience.
• Grow your email marketing list to encourage customers to sign up for email marketing, try clearly communicating what your audience can expect to receive, whether it’s exclusive content or member-only updates.