Offline to Online Business: How to Transition Your Physical Business Online?

by Vipe Team in WordPress Development; Published on 15.03.2020 Last updated on 02.07.2021

READING TIME: MIN

Is the idea of taking your brand online making edgy and nervous? What if it doesn’t work out due to your lack of experience, needed for creating a successful online business?

If this sounds familiar, then consider the following: Facebook has over 1.66 billion active daily users. That’s the potential number of customers you could reach by simply having an online presence. With the increase of consumers actively turning to the web for shopping everything from books, clothing to groceries – it only logical that so many entrepreneurs are looking for different ways to take their offline business online.

While moving to the online world may seem like a challenging task, it isn’t. The idea that you are not quite familiar with digital marketing and creating a website can be a bit stressing, but it’s not an impossible task. So where should you start?

Choosing the Right Platform for Your Site

The biggest mistake you could make when starting your website is choosing the right platform for it. This could be a costly mistake which could significantly limit your potential for further growth.

Our expertise as a WordPress agency would be to choose WordPress. It’s the most used and popular website builder on the market, powering over 30% of all websites. This includes both large and small businesses.

To start your own self-hosted WP site, the first things you would need are domain name and hosting account. Depending on the hosting company, you will be offered different plans which are suitable for your business and will, in turn, affect the cost of your website.

How to Make Your WordPress Website ADA Compliant in 2021

Benefits of choosing WordPress

It’s free
Easy to customize with plugins and themes
SEO friendly
Easy to manage
Safe and secure
Works well with different media types

In short, WordPress is free, secure, responsive, and very customizable. If you’re are looking for an online platform, which is easy to use, WordPress is a quick win in terms of better consumer expertise.

Choose a Website Which Is Functional and Simple in Design

A lot of business owners believe their customers would not take them seriously if they don’t present them with a professional and beautifully designed website.

This, however, is not needed when you are just starting. You can simply start with a ready-made free and premium WordPress theme. If you, however, decide that requires professional services, gives us a call. WordPress development is what our agency does best. Check out our development process and prices here.

Make it Easier for Users to Contact You

Bringing in more customers will be possible if you make it easier for them to contact you. The simplest way is by adding a contact form on your website.

WordPress offers several user-friendly plugins which are just for the job. Contact form plugins will help users get in touch with you easy and efficiently.

Build Your Database

Most people after leaving your website, will not come back again. If you don’t get their contact details, such as email address, you will not have a way of contacting them in the future.

How to Make Your Own WordPress NFT Marketplace Website

Email marketing is the most reliable way of communication with your customers, ensuring they will be notified of future offers and sales.

Use Social Media to Boost Traffic

Social media is famous for having a very engaged and active audience. Over 20% of the world population are active daily users on Facebook. Other platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn have a cult following as well.

With so many users, these platforms bring the tremendous potential for business. Create social media profiles on the most suitable ones and share your blog posts there.

Make it easy for users to share your content. Use the available social media plugins for WordPress, which add social sharing buttons to your site.

There are many things you could do to engage with your audience on social media channels. The key is keeping your profiles active, grow your followers and bring that traffic and engagement to your site.

Create a FB group for your customers/industry.
Create a LinkedIn group for your business/ industry.
Use Facebook ads to target users.
Focus on the platforms which are more suitable for your industry.

Plan Your Marketing Strategy

Create useful and relevant for your audience content so that you can attract more customers. Any WordPress agency specializing in content marketing would tell you this is the patch to get more targeted traffic from search engines without the need of spending a fortune.

7 Plugins to Successfully Manage WordPress Multi-Author Blogs

The easiest way of adding quality content to your website and using a blog. With WordPress, you can add a separate blog page to your site and sort the content into different tags and categories.

Planning your content strategy consists in finding out which are the keywords for your industry and use them appropriately.

Content marketing is a very effective and already proven strategy to market your products and services.

Conclusion

For a business to stay relevant, it’s important to evolve. If you are an entrepreneur, you must identify which are the latest trends and make the most of them. Choosing the right WordPress agency as a partner who will guide you in the process, domain name, designing a user-friendly site, providing great customer experience, these are just steps which would help you in the long run when evolving your business online.