Digital marketing is, at its core, simply using your website as your primary marketing tool. So it’s important to ensure your website is as cohesive and compelling as possible. Luckily, there are three questions that any entrepreneur – marketing savvy or not – can ask themselves to set their business on the right track.
For your website to be the hub of your marketing efforts, you need to differentiate your business from your competitors and give your customers a reason to visit. If you’ve developed a content marketing strategy, where you offer helpful industry insights, top tips or advice that you know your visitors need, that could be your differentiator. If you’ve found a way to solve a problem – by aggregating information, or displaying it in a simpler way – then that could be the difference. It’s important that you can answer the question: what makes our website different?
Next we turn to value – and how people will understand your website’s value. First they need to find you, which means you need to either invest in the content marketing strategies mentioned above, in Google ads, or focus on social media to grow your reach. Remember that value doesn’t only mean price. While your competitors might have a different pricing model, you could offer them a more seamless process, a greater sense of trust, or better quality.
And finally, meaning. The most important point of all. Does your website offer a cohesive brand experience that provides value to your customers? How do you make their lives better, or easier? This is when it’s essential to return to your roots and figure out why you started your business in the first place, what difference you wanted to make in people’s lives. Are you clearly expressing that on your website’s home page? Can you immediately share that information as soon as people interact with your brand, in a way that feels authentic and natural?
Once you've pondered over these questions, it's time to leverage the tools needed to bring your vision to life. The Heavy Chef E-commerce Entrepreneur Education report revealed that 52% of entrepreneurs wished they had invested earlier in. Here are a few of our favourite digital tools that entrepreneurs can use to their advantage.
Start your digital marketing strategy today
While it might feel intimidating to have to master digital marketing on top of all the other things on your To Do List, this is one area in which effort really does result in reward. You don’t have to master it all in one go, but if you can answer these three big questions about your brand and website, and start using a few of the simple digital tools we’ve outlined, you’ll be well on your way to success.
The Heavy Chef E-Commerce Entrepreneur Education report was created by the Heavy Chef Foundation and xneelo to map out the learning needs of e-commerce entrepreneurs in South Africa.
“Xneelo is passionate about enabling South African entrepreneurs
with the tools and knowledge, they need to create and grow their businesses. We’re proud to be associated with Heavy Chef and their community of entrepreneurs. We believe that every successful business creates a multiplier effect for society to thrive,” says xneelo CEO, Philip Delport.
To download a copy of the report visit https://heavychef.org/2021-ecommerce-report