The Common Challenges and Mistakes You Face when Starting Your Online Business and How to Avoid Them
It should be mentioned that starting an online business and succeeding in e-commerce is not an easy mission anymore; it is a difficult task that requires spending a lot of efforts and money. Hence, anyone wants to start a new online business, such as launching an online store should be aware of all the most common challenges and mistakes he might face in the future.
Additionally, if he wants to achieve great success in e-commerce, he should be aware of all the ways and solutions that can help him in solving any problems and facing any challenges.
Build on that, we try to collect all the most common mistakes and challenges that faced most of our clients when they starting their business in e-commerce by launching their own online store.
1- Work without a marketing plan
Every online store must have a clear marketing plan covering all the rules, and it must be clear that some channels will be more effective than others. Some big companies and businesses see that the best result comes from pay-per-click (PPC) ads, while some are sparkling with SEO or social media platforms, or through e-mail.
2- Study the target audience incorrectly and inaccurately
Conduct marketing research on the product and its characteristics and study elements of competition, in addition to careful study of the customer in terms of understanding the customer and knowledge of the factors that attract him; it is one of the most important elements of success in e-commerce at all.
At the same level, experts say that looking at the figures and statistics gives you a broad view on studying things and through them, you can get a clearer understanding of your audience’s mindset, style, and needs, so you can get satisfaction quickly.
Having enough knowledge of your audience helps you direct your messages smoothly and clearly to your audience and helps you save a lot of time searching around your audience. It also helps you increase the rate of requests on your online storeز
3- Time wasting tasks others can do
If you rely entirely on yourself to launch and manage your online store, this may require a double effort so that you can do all the same work efficiently. You are required to do a lot of important activities, such as developing the store from the technical part, adding the products, Description and then add and modify images and develop marketing plans and implementation of the plan in all its details.
The problem here is that while you are doing everything wonderful, it consumes a lot of time incredibly. This is the time you can use elsewhere – spend it with your family, set up new ideas, or build business relationships, just to name a few.
In this case, it should be noted that you can easily find people who provide you with this service and with a substantial amount of money, in any case, until you devote yourself to your other tasks.
4- Conducting competitions on the store without any prior plan
A number of retailers, traders, online stores owners, and brands believe it’s easy to set up an audience competition to increase store interaction or increase traffic, and they also think it’s easy to deliver through social media platforms or through your website, but what Many people do not know that the idea of a contest is not an easy task that anyone can offer to the public,
But to launch this scientifically, you have to prepare your plan and the main goal of the competition, and to ask yourself these important questions:
- Are you looking to increase interaction on social media platforms or are you trying to increase sales around a particular product?
- What are your evaluation tools for the contest winners?
- How do you award prizes to winners?
5- Give the customer your effort for free
Giving the customer your full effort free of charge without using it as a potential customer and turning it into a real customer is a big mistake in digital marketing as well as e-commerce in general. Giving potential customers free samples of the product or a free trial of the service is important and a marketing tactic for a long time, but mis-evaluation of the samples or the distribution of those samples may immerse you in the list of losers, a process that must be calculated well.
Free competitions, contests, and gifts are an effective means of marketing a product, but they are not always appropriate.
6- Not owning a content marketing plan
It is clearly known that there is no doubt that content marketing is one of the most important tools and methods of digital marketing that is positively reflected in your online store or your business in general.
Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes made by some when starting the digital marketing of the store is not to put marketing content in the list of priorities in the work plan, which most stores owners consider the basis of the marketing plan, by building your marketing strategy about this ideal customer and not about the product, Lots to write about and many ways to communicate with your audience.
7- Marketing your product in exchange for ignoring marketing for yourself
Marketing for a particular product at the marketing expense of the same brand or marketing to the same service provider is not quite true. You must promote and market yourself as a store or service provider.
on the other side, it should be noted that creating and investing in your own brand is one of the most important factors to strengthen and support your presence in the labor market.
Investment in a brand later converts it into a fixed asset that can be sold and converted into a separate investment. For example, sites such as “Amazon, eBay, Alibaba” today are considered a multi-billion dollar brand in the world. And, Amazon as a trademark has become the world’s richest a trademark in 2018 with an estimated value of “188” billion dollars.
8- Ignore knowing the differences between you and competitors
If you sell a particular product and market it in your own ways, it is very important to know the competitive differences between you and your competitors in your job market.
Conducting marketing research on the work and competitors is one of the most important factors for the success of any project at the beginning of the start, your self-conviction of the inevitability of success as a result of your personal intelligence or your knowledge of some vocabulary is not an inevitable proof of access to what you want, the part of investment in marketing research.
Being diligent in accessing information about the nature of the market and competitors and estimating the size of the gaps adds a quantity of information to help you understand the market, placing yourself in a position that favors and helps attract more visitors, providing you with more shipments and orders and increasing sales on your online store.
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