How to Scale your Online Business for Global Market

For business expansions and increased revenues, many online businesses are going global. That warrants sudden growths in some instances. These sudden growths come with their own unique challenges. The reason marketers now pay more attention to scalability. Global expansion calls for an appropriate scalable strategy of business development. Such strategy ensures your business can manage a substantial increase in demand without a critical drop in quality of service. If your business is scalable, you can manage exponential growth over time even with sustained quality of service. Good management is key to guaranteeing that. With good management, you can effectively combine a high-demand product/service with solid support and production possibilities by scaling essential elements of the business. Some of these elements may be business-specific but you’ll do nicely if you can first fulfill these here universal requirements.

Make Comprehensive Plans

You must plan long term and comprehensively. That is very essential in global business expansions. Have substantial market research before drawing up a plan. This plan must include how to seamlessly reach and serve your customers anywhere they are in the world. Essentially you must plan for your teams, online ads, delivery systems, resources, including financing, international trade, tariffs, taxes and so on.

Automate all Processes you can Automate

To enter a worldwide online market and be able to make some impact, you need to have quality time and resources at your disposal. Both may not be readily available. That calls for automation. To save time and resources, you need to automate certain aspects of your business. Characteristically, automation allows for more efficient use of time and resources and it contributes to a positive customer experience. You can automate emails and deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, generously in your marketing activities. AI can help in automatic language translations, currency conversions, customer service and many other activities that you would otherwise have needed personnel to handle.

Provide Universal Solutions

One great way to scale your business for global audience is to provide products/services that are universally acceptable. What that means is that you can scale your online business worldwide by offering something that is needed across the world. If the product/service you are offering helps to solve a problem for different people from around the world, you can do profitable global business with it. No matter how effective your marketing campaigns are and how great your business funding is, you cannot successfully scale your business on the global market without a substantial demand for your product/service. Providing solutions with universal appeal helps to address that challenge.

Endeavor to Rank Well on Google SERPs

You can hardly market successfully online to a global audience without the help of search engines particularly a major search engine like Google. Google must like your content and rank it high enough for it to reach a global audience better. That calls for a good SEO on your website. A good SEO will help Google to rank your website well enough to send free organic traffic to it from anywhere around the world where keywords/phrases related to the site are used to make searches on Google.

Partner Reputable Logistics Companies

Unless your product is a virtual or digital product, you must arrange to have it delivered as is to any corner of the globe. That calls for partnerships with reputable logistics companies with global delivery experience. Damaged goods, pilfered goods, lost parcels and delivery delays are very bad for international business reputation. Partnering with reputable business services with extensive shipping, handling and storage capabilities can help with scalable growth for your business no matter the surge in future demands.

Fund your Business Adequately

Sudden and rapid business expansion that global reach may require has to be funded adequately. All sources of funding must be on the table at all times. You can get funded by investors, through bank loans or government funding agencies’ grants or a combination of two or more of them. Whichever you use, be sure it is reliable enough to be stepped up when demand suddenly surges. Doing international business successfully is near impossible without adequate funding and adequate funding helps the scalability of your business.

Take Advantage of Outsourcing

Outsourcing certain components of your business helps to bring down costs without lowering standards or outputs. No matter how efficient your business team is, a global business surge may task it to breakable limits particularly when the surge is sudden. So, outsourcing comes in to help out. Because there is a limit to the tasks your team can efficiently handle, you can consider enhancing human resources or outsourcing tasks that are beyond their field of expertise. If your business experiences sudden growth that overstretches your team, to avoid compromising on quality, you can outsource tasks like customer support for instance and still be doing great. Thus, you can always do well to avoid overburdening your team with any work that can be outsourced as and when needed.

Keep a Keen Eye on your Business Analytics

If you market online, without the benefit of analytics data, it is like marketing in the dark. Whatever marketing results you can measure online by way of analytics data should be carefully measured and analyzed. Your analytics data will give reliable info about inbound traffic, sources of traffic, sales growth, trends, conversions and other key performance metrics. The analysis of such data will allow you to develop predictions, attract investors, plan ahead, react to challenges, and make projections/forecasts. That gives you the much needed business confidence about the future of your global business. A good scalable strategy assumes that with such vital knowledge at your fingertips, you are willing, able and ready to take on any business issues as they arise even if occasioned by sudden business surge.

Concluding Thoughts

Even if you are experienced in your business, scaling it online should be deliberately systematic with good planning. Expect challenges like disappointing sales, sudden and unexpected growth surges that may induce loss of quality if adequate care is not taken. There are hardly any of these challenges you cannot handle well enough if you planned well. With a scalable development strategy, you can easily make adjustments as you go along. For so long as you have a good idea what you are up against, you can always take the necessary steps as needed to grow your online business reputation and for your global business to prosper in the long term. That no doubt demands from you quality time and efforts.

Blogging as an Effective Online Marketing Tool

Blogging is for everyone who has something useful to say that others will like to read. Blogging for business is now hugely popular amongst online marketers because they’ve found blogging as an effective online marketing tool. You can get these benefits too if you blog the right way. Here is what you can do.

Create a Blog: You have a choice either to create a free blog from Blogger, WordPress or some other free blogging platforms online or you invest in your own unique blog domain. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but what really matters is how to post your blogs regularly and unhindered in their visibility online and it allows you to effectively promote your products and or services as you want.

Have a Blogging Plan: A planned blog is a more effective blog. You can therefore plan out your blog topics ahead of time with clear writing and posting schedules. Your audience is always expectant and in order not to disappoint and lose their following, you must give them what they expect from you on schedule. That is where planning your blog is very essential. You must dedicate specific times to blogging and stick with the schedule. That is the best way to avoid time crush that can force you to deliver poor quality blogs and even out of schedule.

Source Topics/Ideas from Your Customers: Let’s face it, the real reason you blog is to satisfy an audience. That audience is made up of mostly customers and potential customers. Your blog is effective if you post what they want to read. The best way to know what they want to read is through FAQs from your customers. Some of these FAQs can become potential blog posts. It is such blog content that can be really informative and helpful to your readers. If you blog about issues you know your customers really care about, your blog becomes much easier and less time-consuming to write even without compromising quality.

Build an Audience for your Blog: From this audience, you can have your own contact and email list. These are very useful tools for online marketing. You can segment and market more effectively to an audience you’ve build up over time yourself. Once your blogs posts are relevant, qualitative, educational and informative enough, your audience of loyal followers will grow naturally.

Promote your Blog Content: You can take advantage of online communities to promote your blog. When a blog is not deliberately promoted, it is less effective. You can take full advantage of social media to promote your blog and grow its following. Social media posts can be the perfect vehicles to drive readers to your blog content. If you join social media groups that have an affinity to your business objectives, they can feed your blog interaction.

Outsource Blogging Responsibilities: For some people, blogging can be a very tedious exercise. If you are in this category, you can outsource your blogging responsibilities to professional/freelance bloggers at mutually agreed terms which may include but not limited to paying some fees. That takes the burden of tedious blog writing off your back and it makes it much easier to keep your blog updated with smart content and on schedule too.

Make Only Easy-To Read Posts: The big secret about blog effectiveness is that people don’t necessarily want to read.  They simply want useful information. Not many readers have the time and patience to read long and complicated articles. For this reason, a blogger must always strive to make easy to read blogs. Expert bloggers recommend the use of short paragraphs, breaking up long sentences and the use of appropriate formatting for blogs to make for easy reading and comprehension. After writing a blog post, you may choose to read it out loud yourself. That way, you can easily identify if the content doesn’t flow as expected.

Encourage Feedback from your Readers: Encouraging feedback from your readers is a great way to keep them engaged and to collect useful information for your blogging efforts. Have close relatives and friends read your blog and give useful advice how it can be improved upon particularly in terms of content and style. If you want to do exceptional work in your blog, you need to get sincere inputs from some other persons who believe in you.

Consider Guest-Blogging: For more inbound traffic, you can reach out to other marketers and reach a deal as a guest blogger. Guest blogging can help you to feed your own blog readership because when blog readers see your posts on associated websites, they follow the links to your blogs. Guest blogging helps to build your online reputation. That translates to more inbound traffic to your own blog.

Pay attention to your Industry: Paying attention to your industry is how your blog can be more useful and better noticed. Take note of what is trending in the industry and what others are saying. That way, you can craft great blogs that will make your brand to stay relevant in your marketplace. If your blog speaks with authority as some kind of expert in your industry, it gets better attention. This you can do by using your blog to react to current events in your industry, provide solutions and recommendations, and contribute to trending discussions on important industry topics. By doing so, you’ll not only be creating more content, this content will help your website to rank higher in Google SERPs. That inadvertently helps to establish your brand as a voice of authority and expertise in your industry.

Create Amazing Headlines: Yes indeed! Amazing headlines easily grab readers’ attention many of who never really get to read the full blog anyway. Marketing experts reveal that many more people habitually read headlines than read the real content. That’s why they advise that bloggers should always make the headline the most crucial piece in their content.

Share Customer Stories: Yeah, every customer always has a unique story to tell. These stories can be a treasure trove of information for more blog posts. If these stories are success stories, so much the better! Through such stories, you can seize the opportunity to celebrate these customers. This in turn will help to highlight the contribution of your business to their success stories. As an added blogging advantage, customer stories usually take less time to write since you do not have to create content out of nowhere. It is as simple as calling up your customers and asking them to share their success stories. That helps you to create happier customers in addition to getting valuable information for your blog content.