The Ultimate Guide to Online Selling From Market Research to Consumer Financing

Whether you have an eCommerce business, are thinking about starting one, or are in the process of integrating one, online selling requires strategizing and developing comprehensive marketing plans. In this ultimate guide to online selling, we discuss how you can prepare your online store for a successful year. We showcase the steps to take to ensure that your eCommerce platform is optimized, attracts your target audience, and drive sales, from market research to consumer financing. 

Conduct Market Research

Market research allows you to closely understand how your eCommerce platform fits into the existing marketplace for your specific products. Market research involves analyzing the current competition, auditing the need and growth potential for a store like yours, assessing the most prominent marketing tools similar businesses use, and clarifying an action plan to drive all of your marketing efforts. This helpful resource provides a step-by-step guide on how to conduct market research. 

Identify Your Target Audience

The next step to running a successful online business is identifying and defining your target audience. This refers to the people that you intend to sell your products to. It is not enough to have a loose idea of these people in your head. You should work with a marketing team to pinpoint the exact person who will benefit most from your products and outline everything there is to know about them in buyer personas. These buyer personas should explain the ideal customers demographics, psychographics, discuss their likes and dislikes, their preferred social media platforms, what drives them to make a sale, what’s important to them, their profession, their household roles, and the list goes on. The reason eCommerce companies develop buyer personas is so that they can send the right marketing material and content to the right person at the right time. This ensures that marketing budgets are optimized and that there is a positive return on investment. 

Build Your Brand Presence

A brand presence involves creating a solid brand narrative, expressing your brand identity visually, and delivering content that aligns with your brand story and visual aesthetic. Holistic brand presence development rests on an appealing corporate identity and digital playbook that will guide the styling of your website, social media pages, and all consumer touchpoints as well as focus your content publication efforts. To build brand awareness, you can utilize social media advertising and other paid media channels to showcase your growing brand presence to new consumers within your target audience.

Optimize Your Storefront for Sales

With buyer personas, a solid market research and action plan, and a strong brand presence, you can drive sales on your website. That is to assume that your storefront is optimized for sales. Optimizing your website is not only beneficial for your google search ranking but a seamless user journey is fundamental to eCommerce success. Shoppers want a website that is easy to navigate and offers additional integrations to supplement their shopping experience. For example, consumer financing from ChargeAfter is a powerful platform that provides consumers with zero-interest financing options at the checkout. Individuals that have access to consumer financing are more likely to convert to paying customers as this form of financing is more cost-effective, quicker, and less stressful than traditional financing options with third-party providers or financial service providers. Consumer financing integration is one of many storefront optimization techniques to support your online selling. 

Conduct market research, identify your target audience, build your brand presence, and optimize your storefront to sell online faster than ever and grow a thriving eCommerce business within your competitive industry.