Strategy is fundamentally important if you want to succeed online. One of the reasons businesses don’t succeed online is because not only do they not have the right strategy, but they don’t have the right knowledge on how to create a winning strategy to succeed in this digital world.

In reality, very few businesses have a clear strategy, hence the reason they’re not achieving results, and have so much competition. Not only is this bad for business, it disrupts all the available opportunities, and the goals you set for yourself.

That’s why nailing your customer strategy at the initial stage of your business is a must to ensure you’re reaching the right customers who value your products/services.

The first stages of strategy you need to focus on

The first stages of digital strategy can be separated into parts – Customer strategy, Competitor strategy and, Service strategy.

Understanding each area and how they benefit business will help create a holistic strategy that covers all areas of your business’s sales and marketing.

The most fundamental aspect of designing a successful strategy is understanding your ideal customers and their needs.

Knowing your ideal customers will enable you to pinpoint your value proposition and position your business apart from competitors.

Bridge the knowledge gap

To create a winning strategy, you need the right knowledge to make informed choices and implement your strategy effectively.

When netStripes conducted a survey with over 8,000 small businesses, we found that lack of digital knowledge was a major problem for small business owners.

Keeping up to date with digital knowledge ensures a strategy integrates the right steps to benefit business.

Once you’ve got knowledge, you have the confidence to redefine your existing strategy to suit your ideal customer which is fundamentally important to succeed online.

Understand who your ideal customers are

This is an area that even experienced business owners can get wrong, and it’s often a very eye-opening moment when it becomes clear.

Your ideal customer is the person you love working with and vice versa. This is because you’re resolving their pain points, and as a result they value your business.

The people you don’t like working with are the ‘anti-persona’ – they consumes all your time and energy, and impact business negatively by devaluing it or trying to haggle on services. 

Most importantly, they affect your confidence, and this is one of the biggest issues people have. To learn more about identifying your ideal customers and understand their needs, read our blog Customer Personas 101: How Well Do You Know Your Customer?

Fine-tune your services for a unique value proposition (UVP)

After identifying your ideal customer, Fine-tune your services to suit their desire and create your UVP. Then, conduct a competitor analysis to position your business apart from them. This rarely involves any big changes, and you’ll notice your list of competitors reduce when focusing on a niche market.

An example of this is the gym ‘Sterling Results Fitness Club’, instead of competing against other gyms, Sonia Wray concentrated on her ideal customer, people over the age of 50 who wanted to be fit and look great, and redesigned services to create her UVP ‘Fit, Fabulous and Over 50’.

This created her own niche and positioned her apart from competitors. This is what really made a difference for her business and helped triple her revenue within 18-months.

Create trusted branding before building a website

Once you’ve finalised your strategy, you need to embody it in branding that customers will see on your website and social media. Consumers are time-poor and want to make quick decisions.

They have to be convinced within the first 2 to 4 seconds of opening a website! To do this, your branding should communicate instant trust and credibility.

The biggest mistake that people make is skip the earlier steps before building a website, hence it doesn’t resonate with your ideal customers. Don’t promote and drive traffic to a website that doesn’t deliver results!

This was the issue Sonia Wray had, the website she created on wix didn’t clearly communicate her value proposition or build trust, and hence her business struggled for nearly 2 years. Today, she is an award-winning business owner who has been featured in the Sydney Morning Herald.

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Nailing your customer strategy will help your business find the right audience, create services for profitability, and build a trusted brand that resonates with your customers, and drives the right traffic to convert leads into wins.