Develop An Online Strategy In Just 5 Steps

In today’s Covid-19 era, it is a great challenge to acquire new customers. Even without Covid-19, it is not always easy to approach or find new customers. But even worse, the companies believe they know their customers and their needs and only have to sit on the phone or email until the orders come in. From my personal experience, this is especially true for B2B companies.

But ask yourself how you choose products in your private life: have you always bought from the same company for 30 years? When looking for a new product, do you always know who is offering it well and cheaply? Not really, right? This is also true in business life.

They are looking for information and reviews about you. If they find little or nothing, they come to the following conclusion: you don’t exist, or your company is neither modern nor innovative.

What do you do?

First of all, you shouldn’t come in a rush shot. Merely starting a digital channel without a strategy behind it is fatal.

Sales, marketing and communication, have to work closely together to develop this strategy. If these functions work in silos against each other, it does not show your company’s strong face externally. This online strategy must also cover the five areas of customer acquisition :

1. Attention
2. Consideration
3. To buy
4. Customer loyalty
5. Fan

This Is How You Work Out Your Online Strategy In 5 Steps

1. Customer Analysis

The following questions should be answered here:

• Who are your clients
• What kind of problems do you have?
• What products and solutions are you buying?
• How were the reviews you got from customers?
• What suggestions did they give you for improvement?

2. Define Topics

Based on this, you create a list of the topics you want to present online to address customers and exchange ideas with them. It should be around 10. An important point here is the focus. You can generate a lot of content from 10 topics.

3. Define Channels

Here is the most critical step: which channels you want to use. As in step 2, it says “less is more”. Having a strong strategic focus on specific media does a lot more than trying to be everywhere.

Everyone can find all the information about your company here. It is also effortless to link to it from the social channels. Select a maximum of 3 other channels to start.

Here is an overview of some of the channels that could be considered:

• LinkedIn: a very powerful channel to reach customers in any industry. Focus here on business topics instead of private issues.
• XING: in the German-speaking area, an additional channel to address customers. Like LinkedIn, it focuses on business topics instead of personal issues.
• Facebook: Still powerful in many countries, but more for B2C companies. If you have a B2B company with very technical topics, Facebook is not a channel for you.
• Twitter: a news or service channel.
• YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok: video platforms for all kinds of topics. TikTok is more for younger customers or the B2C area.

4. Create Content

Based on the defined topics, you can first check what content is already available. Customer stories, pictures, videos, product information, are to be reviewed here:

• Do they match the customer analysis and defined topics?
• Are they too long?
• Are they telling a story about a topic or your company?

Every company already has a lot (often way too much) content, but that helps get started on social media. You don’t always have to create new content immediately.

5. Testing and Measuring

It takes patience here. You won’t see what topics or channels are best right away. But success comes with patience. You have to test different content and measure how customers or potential customers receive it.

Tips for testing:

• Choose 3-5 topics.
• Post the same content with 2-3 different titles to see how readers react.
• Publish content on other days.
• Regularly observe the channels in the daily routine, answer questions, exchange ideas.

A condition for this last step is a person in the company who can do the whole thing. This is a conscious statement in the company. Surrendering this process would be fatal.