Working from home (home office) almost daily, being your own boss, earning money with content production and also taking the risk of going viral and gaining a certain fame/presence online -line looks like the perfect world, doesn't it? Living and working on the internet has been the dream of many people.
What will you see in this post?
- Define your type of business
- Take your business seriously
- Assess the capital you will need to invest
- Study your market and your audience
- Define Your Marketing Strategy
- Choose the platforms you will use
- Choose where you should be and get your hands dirty!
We live in the age of "influencers" and many end up getting carried away by a life in which it seems easy to have an online business or simply earn a living by publishing posts for big brands, isn't it?
But not everything is as simple as it seems! Making money on the internet by producing content such as an influencer, virtual store, online courses or simply putting your business online to gain visibility is not that simple.
Indeed, the internet is a blue ocean of possibilities. A good Inbound Marketing strategy linked to the stages of funnel sales can be the "game changer" to take your business from point A to point B faster than working only offline media. This is undeniable! Not being positioned on the internet these days is literally "losing money".
Another point that stands out when we think about starting this journey of opening a business is that the internet is the easiest way to do this. Often, getting a permit or authorization to be physically in a place turns out to be time-consuming, expensive, and difficult. In this scenario, the digital medium ends up being more practical and faster.
But make no mistake! This "ease" in entering the digital world does not mean that it is so easy to stay in this environment and get results. It's not just about putting a post on Instagram or any other social network in a disorderly way, without any strategy (this is a very common mistake in many small businesses, especially).
Regardless of the size of your business, being on the internet requires knowledge, practice, investment (time, money and study) and KPI analysis like any other type of business!
To obtain results with Digital Marketing, it is necessary to have a strategy, from the moment you decide to open a business until the moment you actually start work (and for as long as your company lives).
And to help you in this endeavor of starting an online business, we decided to bring you some super important tips that will help you get started the right way! Come on?
Define your type of business
As the song says (which was trending on Reels a few days ago) "First things first" - would be something like "first things first".
If you want to start a project, you need to define what. Our suggestion is that you map your areas of interest, things you like, what you imagine yourself doing and in which you have the initial capital to invest (whether low or high).
This step is essential, do you know why? For a long time, your business will depend directly on you, your time, your investment and your actions.
It's important that you enjoy doing it. Thinking only about profit may not give you the right direction and, over time, you may get discouraged.
This discouragement is, in fact, one of the things that make many people want to leave CLT and work with their own business. Working just to receive the money at the end of the month makes many feel that they are "working for work", that they are far from their life purpose.
It's increasingly difficult to find people who can work with what they love, so here's the tip: if you're going to start your own business, try to get out of the box, go against the stats and choose something you really like, okay?
Read too:
- Inbound Marketing: 7 metrics to track and optimize;
- How to capture qualified leads in a digital marketing campaign?;
- The 8 essential tips to improve your CRM. Check out now!
Take your business seriously
Once you've chosen what you want to work with, the first thing you need to understand is: take your business seriously.
Many think that because they have a CNPJ MEI or CNPJ of smaller companies, they don't need to invest so much or that they should just start thinking about certain strategies, such as customer experience management and even processes that directly impact the capture of new leads (such as email marketing), when the company is bigger. But this is not true.
You must take your business seriously from the first day you understand what you want to do.
Assess the capital you will need to invest
When we talk about capital investment, we are talking about everything:
- Investment in raw materials to start the business;
- Investment in visual identity and stationery to personalize your products (naming, logo, colors, typography, cards, email signatures…);
- Marketing: website, social networks, photography, product filming, email marketing, etc.;
- Stakeholders (who they will be, what impact they have on your business, how much money will be needed…);
- Will you already have people working with you? How many? What will be the salary and benefits?;
- Accounting part: what is the type of CNPJ? What are the fees involved in issuing an invoice?
Having an internet business can be cheaper than you think, but that's not why you shouldn't plan your steps on this journey. So, it is very important that you start the right way and that you can already include your investment in digital marketing in this financial planning.
Study your market and your audience
This step is extremely important. To define a good marketing strategy, it is important to understand who you are going to talk to, if there is an audience for your business and define your niche.
It's no use having an idea and only you consider it amazing. A business needs profit to survive!
This marketing mapping will allow you to understand if there really is an interested audience for your business, the ideal customer profile that makes up this interested audience (subsidy to create your persona), your niche and, consequently, that you can make a relationship management with your client.
Define Your Marketing Strategy
This step is as important as any other. Promoting a product the right way is one of the keys to success.
When we talk about having a good marketing strategy, we are talking about dissemination, that is: a strategy for attracting new customers.
But that's not all, within marketing, we also encompass customer retention strategies (post-purchase actions), which are the actions you must create to have a customer relationship.
At this stage, it is important to know who you are, the qualities of your product/service, your differentials, those things that differentiate you from the competition, you know? Being able to put the value of your product into action for the right audience is essential to getting results.
Within marketing, there are some things you can choose to use in your on and off strategy:
- Social networks – Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.;
- E-commerce or Institutional website;
- blogs;
- Product landing pages;
- Email marketing ruler;
- Personalized WhatsApp and SMS messages (maybe you want to use Telegram too);
- Invest in paid ads on Google Ads and/or Facebook Ads;
- Hire digital influencers to promote your product;
- Conduct online or face-to-face events for dissemination;
- Partnerships with other brands that serve your niche;
- Off Media (flyers, business cards, etc.);
- Others.
You can even hire a specialized agency to help you choose the best strategies according to your audience and goals.
To find out what you need to do and where you need to be, take a deep look at the data you collected in #4. And why is this so important? Simple: if your persona is 17 years old, the language and marketing strategy you should use to reach them are very different from the strategies for talking to a 50-year-old person. Do you agree?
This takes us to the next step!
Choose the platforms you will use
We decided to put an item just for Social Networks, because, currently, they are the "superior" of digital marketing. They don't work alone, nor will they promote results if you don't use them strategically, being a key communication channel to get your business digital.
Each social network has a different purpose and different connections, lo, here is a brief summary of the focus of some social networks to guide you better:
- YouTube: one of the online platforms that have been perpetuated the most over the years, YouTube tends to connect you with very different audiences. The impact that the platform has is gigantic. In 2021, there were more than 5 trillion views on YT shorts and 40% of active channels had a turnover equivalent to US$ 10 thousand per year. In the age of influence, the platform has invested heavily in content producers, but the space for infoproviders is also big with YouTube Edu.
Short videos or long videos, it doesn't matter! As long as you have a good camera and good acoustics to make a clear, clean, quality video and use strategic titles and descriptions with good copy when posting, it's worth investing.
A very nice thing about the platform is that you can also mix the size of your videos between short and long, since YT is also a platform for people who seek to learn more, that is, who are willing to watch longer videos .
- Instagram: With over 1 billion active users (and growing), Instagram started out as an image platform a few years ago; currently, it has images, videos, reels, stories, highlights, DM and several other features that can help you get even closer to your customer.
All this happens because the tool has a very large possibility of interacting with the public through comments, likes, reactions, shares and messages via direct. And here's the point: it's no use having the page, but not being active in these communication channels! And that goes for any other social network.
- Facebook: predecessor of Instagram, Facebook earned 29.01 billion in the last quarter of 2021. A lot of people believe that Facebook "died", but between us: a dead social network wouldn't have this revenue, right? Well, around the world, there are more than 2.91 billion active users, about 60% of people who use the internet are connected to the tool. In other words, there is still a great potential to be worked on: sales groups, communities, service pages. Just understand if your audience is in it, in fact.
- LinkedIn: Focused on companies, IN is a business network. It's a social network, but it's not that kind of social network where you have to post your daily step by step or the "look of the day". It's a network for professional content, searching for professionals and things like that. In it, you can share news from the business world, prospect potential people to buy your product/service, generate relevant content and even write short articles for sharing.
- Tik Tok: the "novelty" is on Tik Tok; this relatively new social network has become a fever for its dances and the irreverent way that brands have used to bring content. It is a network considered young, but to give you an idea, in 2021, it already had 1 billion users around the world.the second country in the world that uses the platform the most, with more than 4.72 million active users (2021).
The challenge of using Tik Tok is to be able to transform the content into something relevant, fun and that conveys the right message, after all, not every type of product matches dances, right? But that's not why you shouldn't be on the net; you should, yes, but using it correctly.
Choose where you should be and get your hands dirty!
To finish our list, it's time to choose the networks you want to be in and link each of them to your Inbound Marketing strategy.
Within your inbound strategy, it is important to keep in mind strategies, such as email marketing (which we talked about above). A suggestion that we give here is to use a CRM like HubSpot to help you fully control the results of the online strategies and campaigns you are going to do.
This CRM will help you to launch campaigns, analyze KPIs and define strategies based on the behavior data of your leads and customers, and this data provided by the platform will also allow you to work in a predictive way.
And if your business is small, don't worry, you can also use the free version of the platform, and the features are amazing.
As we said before, you need to use resources wisely and strategically, in fact, regardless of the size of your business, you can use intelligence in your favor from the beginning, you know?
If you are interested in learning more about it, check out this post from our blog: x trivia about the CRM cycle and artificial intelligence. It will certainly help you learn more to start working on the internet with more assertiveness!
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