With technology becoming an integral part of today’s business, the various components of your pack can interact among themselves to achieve your objectives only via a carefully selected electronic channel.
A good e-business strategy model must be carefully planned with clear-cut vision. You cannot leave the objectives vague. Most businesses are engaged in various electronic processes without any defined objectives. So, at the end there is no evaluation done to ascertain the success or failure of whatever was implemented.
The composition of your e-business solution should then be a set of tools that will help you achieve the set goals.
In composing your solution, always keep in mind the various business relationships that will ensure good information flow.
Planning with you as an e-business strategist
When a strategist sits in the middle of the planning process, his/her focus should be how best to bring the enormous units of your business and technical requirements together in order to achieve set goals.
E-business model acceptance has always been a big struggle between business and technical teams, as to what will work or is more appropriate. The formulated solution should sit well with these two important units of your organisation. It is best to strike a good balance between these two departments for any success to be achieved.
Thorough research is required to know your peculiar business model in line with your expected margins, personnel, sales or outputs etc. to formulate a solution.
The strategist should always call into action the following key areas: user-friendliness, brand image and positioning, available and needed infrastructure, and multichannel capabilities.
Some Critical Focus Areas
- Target Audience
It is necessary to define your audience while you think e-business. Putting together a team made up of technical and business-minded people and trying to coordinate them to achieve customer appreciation of your platform is no easy task. While there is so much noise out there on the web, your offering should be unique to stand out. Even if it’s the same as others, your methodology should make you distinct from the competition.
Although your website or platform should be elegant, it is good to make your electronic platform appropriate for the target audience. For example, a website targetted at providing health advice to older people should be very simple; buttons and sections and font should be big and easy to read and use. An understanding of these things comes to mind when one puts together a proper project requirements document.
- Great Copywriting
Content, they say, is king. Creating the right content that resonates with your target audience and making them want to use you platform and make purchases where needed is critical. Here, the strategist can do the copywriting him/herself. In some cases, other professional copywriters are hired to help build some great online content. Created content should also be easy to share, where possible, across various platforms.
- Personal Effect
It is true that we have all become digitalised, but your website or platform should not make you hide your inefficiencies. Customers are continually looking for a ‘human’ kind of experience somewhere in your e-business model. Finding out the appropriate tools which can give that to users should be key. Simply sending an SMS, for example, to thank customers after engaging them will go a long way to give them that personalised experience they have been looking for.
- Multiple Platform Engagement
Simply having a website cannot be enough to regularly engage with consumers today. You should strive to have some mobile feature where most people are now accessing the Internet. Most big companies are considering having mobile apps which customers are downloading to enable them access and use services easily. Services you can offer include click to call customer service, real-time transaction details, etc.
- Simplifying the value chain
Proper engagement along the various sections of your business chain is also a critical consideration in deploying the right e-business tools. The advantage of having to decrease or eliminate totally some intermediaries between yourself and the target audience should be emphasied.
Aside from middlemen coming between yourself and customers, there exists some unnecessary bureaucracies – making it difficult for partners, especially those down the ladder. Re-sizing the value chain helps to improve efficiencies in engaging with your partners. Sometimes, a simple integration with a partner’s system will drastically enhance business dealings.
Having a website alone won’t do it for you; call an e-business consultant to help put together your pack of tech tools properly to achieve your objective during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
