Why Your Online Business Might Not Be Reaching Its Potential

Intro

Getting a business through its first rough spell is a big challenge. Even if your company experienced initial success, a couple of mistakes could easily make it part of the 20% of all businesses that fail in the first year. One day you can do no wrong, the next your customer intake has stalled and you’re on the slow march to disbanding.

Thousands of startups are founded every year, but very few reach the potential their initial idea promised. If your business has reached a bump in the road to realizing it’s full potential, it may be down to one of these reasons:

You’re following the wrong industry examples

Learning from competitors and businesses you want to emulate is a good strategy for small businesses looking to get off the ground. It gives them a target to strive for and a pattern to follow. If you aim too high, though, you’ll find your business struggling to keep up with your own expectations and making choices better suited to an organization twice its size.

You might think it efficient to simply find a company worth emulating and do your best to copy their blueprint for success, but this is rarely a good strategy. So much of business success is circumstantial, and it can be almost impossible to replicate the conditions in which industry leaders were able to discover their niche and audience.

Even if you _do _find a company worth emulating and proceed to copy what they do, customers are less inclined to do business with a clone and will just go to the original. Marketing yourself like an industry leader before you are one can damage your reputation when the service subsequently isn’t as strong.

Taking inspiration is fine, but applying ideas that don’t fit your business will stop it from realizing its maximum potential. Don’t let yourself get carried away and lead your business down the wrong track. Take inspiration from successful businesses within your niche, by all means, but simply emulating them is rarely the key to progress.

Your online presence is poor

Online businesses live and die by their presence on the web. If you’re operating with a physical store people can come in and visit, you need to make sure your influence on the internet is like that of a local store everyone knows in a small town.

Find the niches you can fulfill and audiences you can cater to. A number of missteps can lead to poor online presence, from limited investment in search engine optimization and SEO tools, to a lack of social media activity.

If you’re not developing a strong social media presence for your business, you’re denying it access to a large potential online audience. The most astute online businesses have found platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have huge scope for growing their audience. They are generally a user’s first, and more prolonged, stop during a browsing session.

It’s not enough to just have an account sitting there, either: you need to keep it consistently updated with new content and interact with your audience.

Google rankings can make or break a business, no matter how long it’s been around. If you don’t invest in improving your ranking for important keywords and search terms, it will be impossible for new customers and clients to find you. The same applies to paid advertisements, which can be a huge drain on your budget if not properly targeted to specific audiences. Poor online visibility is an extension of poor marketing and branding.

Your business is untrustworthy

Nothing sinks an online business faster than appearing untrustworthy. How does your business present itself? Your online presence is your brand, and your website is the face of your business. It needs to look trustworthy and professional, something a customer would feel comfortable shopping with.

If your website doesn’t have the basic elements of trust covered, it will never grow beyond a certain level. Potential customers and clients put a huge amount on how you tell your brand story, how up-to-date and easy to find your contact information is, and whether or not there is sufficient social proof from previous visitors.

Furthermore, you’ll need to consider your customer service offering. Are you able to offer 24/7 support? If not, consider how you can. Chatbots are a cost-effective way of achieving this, but if you want to provide a truly personal touch, it could be worth creating a global team of support agents through a service like Remote. This way, your customers won’t have to wait for a solution, increasing the likelihood they’ll leave a positive review — and powerful social proof — on third-party sites like Trustpilot.

You’re not using customer personas

Attracting more customers is the key to growing a business, but if you don’t know what these customers look like it can be hard to find them. Using customer personas gives you established customer types to target with your strategies, helping you to expand your customer base, with an engaged and active audience more likely to convert.

Without thought-out customer personas, your advertising will become muddled and without a clear focus, as you won’t know exactly who you’re advertising to. This puts a roadblock in the customer journey. Instead, you should create a few established customer personas and create campaigns tailored to them. These personas should guide all your marketing, the design of your content and where you advertise.

It’s not enough to just try and appeal to everyone. Your website is always going to have niches, no matter what your product or service is. It’s doing you a disservice and holding back the potential of your website. Follow this advice and you’ll have an audience much more interested and willing to get involved in what you’re doing.

**Not every business can reach the potential its founders set out for. Sometimes businesses just fail because there is too much competition or a small market, but often, they’re making avoidable mistakes that hold their potential back. Avoid these common pitfalls and give yourself the best chance to succeed online. **