Complete Guide to Start and scale business online in 2020

POSTED ON NOVEMBER 3, 2019 BY SNEHIL PRAKASH

03
Nov

When you talk about owning a business, you ought to sense the feeling of responsibility. Business is not only about making money but it also holds commitment for people who are working for your business. So, to meet such responsibility, you need to grow your online business to meet the needs. How do we grow the business then?

Business is categories either as B2B or B2C which means they are serving other businesses or directly serving the customers. In this article, we shall focus on businesses that are willing to grow online. These businesses which we shall discuss would fall under both the above-stated categories. We shall understand how we can grow a B2B or B2C business online. So let’s begin.

What are B2B and B2C businesses? What is the difference between B2B and B2C businesses?

B2B stands for business to business where a business produces products or services to serve any other business. While B2C stands for business to customers. In the B2C sector, one business develops products or services to serve the customers directly. So, let’s find out the complete differences between B2B and B2C.

Business to Business	Business to Consumer
Marketing is more complex (clients and prospects need to understand how products work and integrate with existing systems)	Simple marketing and sales cycles
Prices highly variable	Fixed prices
High volumes, wide product range	Low quantities
Need for flexible shipping and logistics solutions	Easy shipping
Tax and regulation has a high impact on sales and therefore large workforce employed to work within these restrictions	Little regulation and tax complexity
Wide product range and high volumes	Products easy to showcase and market

When we talk about which sector is difficult to serve? Then a common answer you will hear often is “Depends” but we shall make this answer a bit clear.

Serving a B2B Sector.

When we serve our product or service to another business then we have the following advantages.

• They are more professional in dealing with you.
• Getting big contracts or high ticket clients are easier.
• You can handle requests without any abusive experience.
• You can also get practical and archivable deadlines to meet.
• Finally, you shall also get an opportunity to a long term business client which can become your major source of recurring income.

Those were some advantages of working in a B2B sector. So, you can look to build your business in this sector if you are planning to start a business with an idea.

We do have some disadvantages of working in a B2B sector like

• It is difficult to get a client with high-end businesses as your market leaders are already ahead of you in bidding, for acquiring clients. So its a bit struggling to get good clients easily.
• You need to create your professional presence to built trust in your sector so that companies can use your services and products. Hence most of the time, you can’t start scaling from day One.
• You need to invest a lot in marketing when you work in the B2B sector (Not necessarily but most of the time it is true) and marketing in the B2B sector is comparatively higher as already the competition is higher but it also has that “Depends” factor in it.

But, it is always a great experience working in this sector.

Serving a B2C Sector.

It is one of the most crowded sectors as there are many challenges when you are directly serving a customer. Let us have a look at the pros and cons.

Advantages of working in a B2C sector

• You can sell out quickly to your customers, there is not much to nill round meetings, or follow-ups so it gets easier to pull revenue quickly.
• You get an ample amount of opportunity to pitch your products to get sales.
• The target audience can be approached in multiple ways without following any standard procedure or hierarchy.

These were some common advantages but with that, we also have some common disadvantages as well. Like

• You may encounter abusive instances with your customers.
• Fraudulent cases are very high in the B2C sector.
• You may find yourself working with very low margins.
• Being a smart salesperson is important when you directly deal with unprofessional customers.

There are plenty of advantages and disadvantages of working or serving the above-mentioned sector but the question remains the same. If you want to scale your business by serving any of the above-stated sectors then how would you do that?

In this blog, we will be discussing “how to scale business online”. This will comprise of scaling

• B2C businesses online.
• B2B businesses online.

What are some Prerequisites Before scaling any business online?

Whenever you accept the challenge of scaling a business online, there are few prerequisites. We call it a competitor analysis. You need to know who you are competing in an online space. To outrank their business, you need to study their marketing strategy. With that, you get two growth ideas.

1. The marketing strategy that is making them the market leader
2. Steps that you can do better than them and provide a better value to consumers or businesses being served by them.
3. Building strategies that can scale your business growth.

Let us get some ideas about how we can do an online competitor analysis and the methods to scale businesses online.

Steps to follow for doing competitor analysis and Growth strategy ideas

Whenever you start doing your competitor analysis, make sure you consider all the marketing channels and avenues under study. We can categories these studies into the following categories.

1. SEO strategy study.
2. Social Media Strategy study.
3. Email Marketing strategy.
4. Online Paid Marketing strategy.
5. Local business growth strategy study
6. Affiliate Strategy study.

Let us study all these strategic studies one by one.

SEO Strategy Study

Step 1: I would highly recommend you to get access to some of the premium tool like

1. Ahrefs or
2. Semrush

Alternatively, you can also read my blog on how to do competitor analysis using ubersuggest which is a completely free tool to study your competitor’s marketing strategy on the search engines.

Step 2: If you are using semrush for competitor analysis then you first need to figure out your niche keywords which will help you identify your market competitors. Do prefer finding keywords with high volume with low keyword difficulty. For finding the keyword difficulty, i personally prefer Google keyword planner as it is the soul creator of these metrics.

Step 3: Now, with the help of your niche keywords, you can find your competitors who are in the top 10 positions of search engines. They are your actual competitors. Scrape all those top 10 websites for all your niche keywords and study their top pages.

Step 4: When you study their top pages then make a note of the following data.

1. What are the keywords for their top pages for which they are ranking high and getting higher traffic? Make sure that those keywords must have good volume as it may happen that those top ranking keywords are LSI keywords with low volume. Getting ranked on such keyword is not so difficult and many times google too, index your pages or blog on such silly keywords. So, be wise in filtering those gem keywords. I call them millionaire’s keys.
2. Check the backlink of the top pages of your competitors and when you prepare a similar or even better than the competitor’s top-ranking content then you can try acquiring backlinks from those webmasters by outreaching.
3. Check your competitor’s blog to identify how they have segmented their SEO strategy to target different categories of your niche.
4. Study your competitor’s website navigation. This will help you in understanding the best UI/UX that converts. It will help you save time in A/B testing that is not working in your target niche.

So by these 4 steps, you will be having

1. Your millionaire keywords.
2. Your competitor’s list whom you want to beat online.
3. Backlink opportunities.
4. Competitor’s best keywords.
5. Blogging ideas.
6. The landing page design ideas.

With SEO strategy study, you are ready to outrank your competitors on search engines. Since your potential consumers and clients are present in other online avenues also, hence we need to study how your competitors are using those platforms for their benefits. Let us understand, how to do competitor analysis using social media.

Social Media Strategy study.

Social media is a place where your potential customers come online to spend their free or leisure time. Any businesses can use this opportunity to pitch their products or services to a targetted set of people using these social media advertising platforms or other ways of unpaid marketing on social media. Depending on the audience, social media platform and your offerings, you can segment your marketing strategy. So let’s have a look as to how we can leverage social media as our money-making machine for online business.

Step 1: Again, i would highly recommend you to have access to the following tool before jumping into the tussles of social media marketing.

1. Crowdfire ( Free auto-posting tool to social media channels )
2. Semrush
3. buzzsumo.

They have paid versions as well as you can try any group buys services if you are a newbie and can’t afford these tools. If you have good money with you even being a newbie, then you must prefer subscribing to their services.

Step 2: You can use a social media strategy template to follow your post scheduling according to various holiday calendars designed for different countries.

Step 3: Grow your social media fan following on different channels.

Let’s discuss this in detail.

In this article, we will be covering four major social media platform that can give you exponential growth online. Using these four platforms, you can use all paid, unpaid methods to increase your business visibility. So the four platforms that we shall be talking about and ways to use it for business growth are.

1. Facebook.
2. Instagram.
3. Quora and
4. LinkedIn
5. Recent growing platforms.

In the recent growing platform, we shall tell you about the current trending social media platform which you can utilize for your business growth purpose.