Your first and most crucial task before going online is to identify what you want to achieve. Unless you have carefully thought this through, you will expend a large amount of time and money on unnecessary areas.
The whole planning process is not always simple or straightforward. Instead, it’s a process of coming up with an idea or theory, testing its worth and then either accepting, adjusting or rejecting it. Knowing what you want to achieve helps to provide a focus for your efforts.
Initially, you may want your Web site to be a communications tool for your existing business, providing present customers with information on contacting and ordering from you. Later, you can go beyond a simple online presence and develop your site further to make it a more proactive part of your business.
Alternatively, you may want to create an online store immediately and offer specific products and services online so you can expand your existing customer base and target a different clientele to the one which comes to your “bricks and mortar” business. Or you may be targeting a niche market and will want to offer both specific products and in-depth information relevant to that market so your business becomes the online “information source”.
These are just a few ways of operating online and each necessitates a different type of business model, as well as a different approach in Web site design.
Consequently, it is important to work out:
What you wish to offer online
Who you wish to offer it to
How you are going to offer it
How this differs from what you offer in your existing business.
These decisions will then enable you to focus your research efforts in the right areas.
Organising your market research
Once you have decided what you want to achieve with your online presence, you will then need to find out whether there is actually a market for it. You can’t just build a Web site and hope people will come, you must first research its viability.
You will need to organise a market research plan. This will help you in deciding on the scope of your Web site such as whether you will need an online store to cater for market demand or if you need to offer your customers something “different” to distinguish your site from a multitude of others.
Your market research should encompass various factors that affect your product or services, your customers and your business. In all cases, you need to be able to determine what affects them from both an online and offline point of view.
Areas your research should cover include:
Looking at your product
Analysing the current business market
Identifying your target customers
Determining how going online will affect your present business.
Analysing the current business market
In the “old” days, it was fairly easy to analyse your competition and the market. You simply had to stroll down the street to see how the competition was doing. Online, however, you can forget about checking out the “locals”.
E-commerce means a global market and you are competing not only with the store down the road but also the one half a world away. There are probably plenty of bookstores which curse the day Amazon.com was born.
As a result, you need to search the Internet to find out how other companies offer the products and services you want to take online. Try searching using at least three different search engines so you have variety of Web sites to look at.
Once you start searching, you will need to determine:
Whether similar or identical products are offered by other Web sites
Where these businesses are located. Remember, the Internet now offers you a global market, so your customers may find cheaper products elsewhere in the world, but your delivery times or costs could be more convenient.
Whether your local competitors have an online presence and for how long. If your competitor has only been online for a few short months, you should track his/her progress to see whether there are any changes to the site or products so you don’t make the same “mistakes”.
Make a note of what Web sites were easy to find or ranked highly in the search results and what sites you had to make a determined effort to find. You will then need to analyse whether you would consider these sites to be successful based on your experience.
Analysing the success of other sites
Once you have an idea of the number of Web sites in competition to you, you will have to analyse what you think works and what doesn’t and if the sites would be successful.
First analyse what you were tempted to buy and why. Write down what Web sites looked appealing or professional and what ones you didn’t like and why. A sophisticated site does not necessarily mean one that uses dramatic and eye-catching features. On the contrary, good sites are far more likely to offer a clean, logical appearance and make navigating the site effortless.
Try going through the purchasing process without actually buying anything on a few of the sites to see if it was easy and convenient or just wasted your time. Write down why a site was convenient and why it wasn’t. Sites which create hassles when shopping are unlikely to be a huge success.
Check to see whether the sites have a “Last Updated” feature and if the site has been updated or whether the information could be considered “old.”
Additionally, have a look at the prices offered by these other sites. These can be an indication of success. If the prices seem to be too high or too low, see if you can work out why. You will have to compete with them in order to attract your customers.
Remember, customers will pay more if they think they are getting value for money. One of the main values is, of course, convenience. This is where physical location and provision of delivery services make a big difference.
How successful are your direct competitors?
Once you have looked at a cross-section of sites, you then need to narrow your analysis to your direct competitors, the ones which compete with your offline premises.
It is much easier to work out the relative online success of a competitor down the street, than one in England, for example. For starters, you probably already know when your competitor went online through word-of-mouth. You can then use your network and customers to ask what is being “said” about this site. Do people like it and why?
You could even have someone go to your competitor’s premises as a potential customer and ask questions about their site and if it has been successful.
You need to find out:
What has not sold well online
What has been successful, especially anything which was an unexpected success
How popular the site has been with existing customers
Whether they are attracting a range of new customers from further afield.
All of this information serves to build up a picture of the state of the online market in your particular field. The more you know about what is being offered and how well this is working, the better able you are to make informed choices for your own online venture.
Before finishing your online analyses, bookmark those sites you like the best or considered to be successful. You can then periodically reassess them to see if any changes have been made and to remind yourself why you felt they were successful.
Once you have determined what was a success and why, you must look at who is likely to buy your product, i.e. your target market.
