Due to socio-political unrest, most people await the ideal moment and opportunity to launch an online business. But the business community recognizes that waiting can never bring better times; you must instead take action and keep moving and growing forward, even if this process takes time or is slow.
The Best Way to Expand Your Business Online: Some Effective Steps
Keep reading to learn more about online Business ideas in Pakistan:
Select or Switch Platforms
Pakistan’s eCommerce industry is experiencing rapid expansion. Technology services companies and eCommerce marketplaces provide great opportunities for online businesses to expand. If you need help tapping the Pakistani eCommerce market, perhaps choosing an incorrect platform for your business. Finding answers about expansion will become much simpler once you are on the right path.
Establishing an online store on platforms like Daraz.pk, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram Shop, OLX ShopHive, or HomeShopping may give your business a head start; however, they cannot ensure a steady source of income as listings belong solely to these marketplaces. Your products could become delisted or unranked immediately without warning, especially as soon as your products gain popularity on certain platforms and more sellers emerge with similar listings for low quality and prices. As this competition intensifies, growth on these platforms may become limited or impossible altogether.
Establish your brand by hiring reliable eCommerce development services that create an online space tailored to the unique nature, niche, scale, and needs of your business. Experts select an eCommerce platform suitable to your needs, such as WooCommerce, Shopify, or Magento, before customizing it according to your specifications.
Engage in speed and performance optimization
Online shoppers rarely spare a second thought for online stores that load slowly or perform poorly in their browsers, and various factors can impact this aspect of your store’s operations.
If your webshop relies on a marketplace model, your options for improving page load speeds may be limited. But if you run and manage an eCommerce website instead, various strategies or expert developers could help speed things up significantly.
Generate Organic Traffic
Online stores in Pakistan continue to rely heavily on search engines as only some multivendor stores meet buyers’ needs. By default, most buyers turn to search engines for specific items such as names, keyword phrases, voice notes, or image search results.
SEO services provide an effective means of climbing to the top of search results and increasing organic traffic, positioning you at the forefront of searches and driving organic growth. Search Engine Optimization works to help search engines comprehend your store and index it against relevant search queries. However, doing it all on your own may prove daunting – for this reason, it is wiser to hire an agency experienced with providing such services for similar online stores.
Utilize Social Media
Pakistan Today reported in one of their articles that Pakistan boasts over 71.7 million active social media users as of January 2022, providing you with an enormous and engaging target audience to draw in via social media. Start developing content around your business that can engage users on these channels to make the most of social media!
Start with YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, as these are among the most commonly used social apps in Pakistan. If you are seeking ways to expand your business, make sure your presence on these top three platforms is guaranteed. People also love spending their free time watching short-form video-sharing apps such as TikTok, Snack Videos, or Likee that allow easy targeting through advertisements, influencer collaboration, or short and interactive videos about products you offer.
Consider Digital Advertising.
Google and Facebook are premier platforms for expanding your online business presence. Securing top search positions organically takes time; an easier and quicker solution would be to launch a pay-per-click campaign instead.
Signing up with Google Ads, creating promotions, and reaching out to a specific community are easy tasks with Ads. Once your budget has been allocated, your ads begin showing up on mobile and desktop screens of target customers immediately – select an avenue where most of your target clients reside for maximum impact!
Build Trust
Employ social proofs to gain trust and credibility among your target market, which could include customer testimonials and feedback posted to your online store, Google My Business profile, or third-party review and rating networks.
Encourage satisfied customers to share their shopping experience by posting or tweeting about it, displaying their testimonials on your store or social media, or using likes, shares, comments, tweets, watch hours, etc, as social proof to draw in more clients. It is one of the best strategies for expanding business both online and offline.
Create Flash Sales
We all appreciate great offers and discounts at our favorite stores, making flash sales an effective business growth tip. People tend to wait for special events such as clearance sales, Ramadan offers, or Eid gala to receive discounts; offering them can boost conversions in your store and improve customer retention rates significantly. Daraz has made 11.11 and black Friday sales an institution among online buyers; invent similar opportunities or go along with what works for maximum business growth!
Be Available
Provide around-the-clock or prompt customer service to encourage customers in Pakistan to reach out. Like their counterparts elsewhere, online buyers in Pakistan also tend to have multiple queries before placing orders, so make yourself available by providing them with convenient methods – whether that be call, email, chat, or widgets connecting their WhatsApp Business page and Facebook Page with your website for easier customer interactions using social accounts such as WhatsApp Business or FB Official Pages.
Create an Email List
Establishing an Email list will create an engaged community of loyal customers ready to experience any of your new offerings through email updates. Existing customers of your online store tend to convert more successfully than new visitors.
Not only can marketing efforts focus on acquiring new customers, but you should also look at ways to retain and reactivate existing ones by building an email list. Investigate different techniques for how email can grow business; for instance, collecting emails with customer consent to send the newsletter or creating different lists based on order history or preferences to make marketing efforts more fruitful and efficient.
Strengthen Your Community
Pakistan’s youth are always eager to tackle challenging tasks; unfortunately, they often lack guidance. If your online business has proven profitable enough for you to expand and you have seen enough returns on it, now is an opportune moment to step further ahead in its niche – such as selling cloth. Start educating the young to join you, selling it under commission as an affiliate partner – in exchange for learning something and earning livelihoods for themselves and their families while expanding your enterprise!
Helping the community pays dividends in terms of increased sales and public relations. Starting this strategy for the sole purpose of helping and growing people around you is an effective approach to expanding online businesses. Are you curious about how to expand online? Expand this idea across WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Facebook groups, as well as forums and discussion boards to spread business nationwide.
