How to do business in a global market?

Trade right now is heavily reliant on online platforms. Despite the enormous setbacks caused by the Covid19 lockdowns, it can’t be denied that the pandemic had pushed the world faster into the digital realm. Small businesses relying on word of mouth and local patronage had to quickly follow the online retailers that had already established their niche in digital markets.

If you’re among the business owners who met with your lawyer to file for bankruptcy from the lockdown losses, it’s smart to move your operations online instead of trying to resume your operations now.

It might seem daunting, especially if you’re not as technology savvy as the younger generation of entrepreneurs you’re competing with. But you can start by identifying which parts of your operations can be moved online. Now is not the time to be clingy to your business traditions. You have to think out of the box to survive.

The good news about going online is that you can hire remote staff. You won’t be limited to the pool of skills in your base town. Let’s take a look at some of your business processes and how you can transform them with the worldwide reach of technology.

Your product:

Product development and testing can be decentralized. It’s even better to make your products location-specific. Since you can reach new populations that had not been within the radar of your small shop before, you can customize your goods into something more adapted to their cultures and traditions.

Think about the international food chains. It’s wrong to think you’ll be eating the same McDonald’s food in the U.S.A. as you will in Indonesia. It’s fried chicken, but the spices are very different. Additionally, in many countries in Asia, the chicken is served with rice and fries or potatoes.

So when you’re thinking of expanding your market, you also need to evolve your products. Use locally-sourced ingredients to bring down your costs. If you’re not ready to localize your production, you can think of varying your packaging. For this, partner with some local distributors to make it easier.

Marketing:

Since you’re looking at moving online, your target buyers are the digital nomads and digital natives. In this case, it will be irrelevant to think about traditional marketing like billboards and posters.

It’s great to imagine how your marketing can reach any part of the world with online marketing. However, remember that the contexts of the people are still different despite the globalizing market. A marketing strategy anchored on the youth’s freedom might not be effective in countries with stricter and controlled societies.

The advantage, though, is if you want to reach these areas, you can hire from these countries.

Although social media platforms have their analytics and insights, you might want to get additional tools. Topping most lists for this are Buffer Analyze, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite. The three all provide analytics for the major social media sites, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Sprout Social and Hootsuite also do analytics for Pinterest and LinkedIn. For marketing using the vlog format, Hootsuite also gives data analysis on YouTube.

You can get from these marketing analytics insights on how far your postings reach, the frequency of people checking out your posts, and how they interact with it. But your social media accounts are not enough to establish your online market. You need these to direct buyers to a website where you can create catalogs, menus, and FAQs to make transacting with you easier.

While some small retailers make do with the direct messaging features of the social media platform to handle orders and shipping details, it’s much more convenient to have these forms programmed into your website. All you need to do is check one file for orders and shipments instead of looking at individual messages.

Grievances and customer relations:

Like marketing, it is best if your staff handling complaints, queries, and other customer concerns will be based within the localities you are selling to. Some concerns can be context-specific.

You don’t have to set up an office in the place where you’re selling your goods. You need online staff. Platforms like Slack and Microsoft Office allow you to monitor your staff remotely and share documents conveniently.

Shifting to online transactions may not be that fast if you haven’t started it before the pandemic. Some big institutions even take a year or so to fully digitize their operations. But you can start with understanding how these channels and platforms operate then match them to your on-site processes. Once you know which digital technologies you need, it will be easy to hire a consultant to work with you in establishing the rest.