To Canadian Businesses that want to sell Online

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| 6 Nov 2013 |

During an interview with BC Business, BDC chief economist Pierre Cléroux pointed out a few fascinating, yet horrific facts regarding Canadian businesses:

Only 20% of Canadian small businesses sell through the Web although 84% of Canadians are online. This has subsequently influenced Canadians to buy from American companies instead.
UK sells twice as much through online channels as Canada.
30% of Canadian small medium enterprises (SME) don’t even have a corporate website.

Though Canadian companies such as HootSuite and Lululemon have found success through digital channels, other companies are lacking far behind. To encourage other Canadian companies to join the digital side, we’ve come up with 5 benefits of using digital platforms:

Extensive reach

Collectively, Facebook and Twitter have 1.5 billion users worldwide. That’s equivalent to 1/7 of the world population. Simultaneously, Canada has 19 million users who access Facebook at least once a month and 14 million users who check their newsfeeds daily. Moreover, we have over 10 million Twitter users. Together, Facebook and Twitter users account for 83.1% of our domestic population. (Though some accounts may be duplicated.) This subsequently creates an astronomically profitable opportunity for businesses. Whether you want to target local Canadian consumers or foreign markets, using digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter enables you to showcase your offerings, your brand, and your company conveniently to boundless consumers.
Reduced advertising costs

By creating a website and using social networks to promote your brand, you can advertise your products or services cost-effectively to millions of Canadians. With a website and social networks, you can promote your sales events and company activities digitally to your patrons. This ultimately removes the need for expensive, traditional advertising mediums such as newspaper, magazine, and radio. With the development of a company website a few popular social networks, you can practically run an entire advertising agency in-house!
Reduced overhead costs

With the creation of an eCommerce site, you’ll be able to lessen your need for a brick-and-mortar store. This subsequently reduces your cost for rent, sales representatives, infrastructure, CRM system, and other hidden costs. Additionally, by reducing your overall overhead costs, you can allocate more of your budget to advertising, website development, and product development. This in turn will help you improve your advertising content, enhance your website’s user-friendliness, and develop products that simply wow consumers. This will allow you to gain competitiveness against other companies in your space.
Generation of consumer data

By creating a website and installing analytics tools such as Google Analytics, you can gather an abundant amount of consumer data. You can determine your audience’s traffic source, geographic location, time duration, and other valuable information that’ll help you make your products and web content even more appealing to your consumers. Conversely, with offline stores or traditional media, it’s nearly impossible to conduct such detailed analysis regarding your shoppers. If you want to use Google Analytics for data mining or analysis better, attend Smartt's 2-day Google Analytics Success Training Course.
Improved communication abilities

Social platforms such as Twitter have become the telephone of the digital age. By creating a Twitter account, you can respond to customer inquiries, resolve customer complaints before they escalate, and answer customer questions all in real-time. More importantly, you’ll be able keep a track of the different issues or inquiries that customers have so that you can continue to improve your offerings, website, and brand in the future. If want to learn how to increase social traffic, read 4 Tips on How to Generate Social Traffic.
Become visible to consumers

According to MarketingProfs, 91% of adults search online to find information they need. Hence, if you’re a business, you definitely have to be online in order to improve your brand awareness. To enhance your exposure, your website has to be on Google because after all, Google is the Yellow Pages of today. Moreover, your website must be user-friendly, intriguing to your audience in terms of relevant content, and SEO friendly. To ensure your website is search engine friendly, include SEO factors such as meta description in your website so that you can boost your search ranking.

Digital media is key to companies’ success today. By using digital tools such as Google, Twitter, and websites, you can convert millions of Canadians into your customers in a short span of time. To ensure your digital marketing performance is optimized, develop a P.A.C.E Digital Marketing Roadmap. The Roadmap is used as an evolving blueprint that illustrates and measures marketing programs so that you can allocate resources accordingly to improve future results. If you want help with developing a P.A.C.E. Digital Marketing Roadmap, contact us and speak with one of our experts at our digital agency.

To Canadian Businesses that want to sell Online

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To Canadian Businesses that want to sell Online

Extensive reach

Reduced advertising costs

Reduced overhead costs

Generation of consumer data

Improved communication abilities

Become visible to consumers

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