What makes successful businesses tick?

May 25, 2018

“If you are not online, you might as well be dead” – This much is pretty obvious to people of today’s day and age who breathe online. From social media to businesses, blogs dedicated to any topic you could think of, it is mind-blowingly easy to have spent 5-6 hours on the web without having realized how time flew or what exactly you were doing.

So, it is a no-brainer that having your business expanded online and having its presence felt across all social media is not a choice anymore. It is a necessity. And it is happening too. The world has, over the years, shifted online and internet has suddenly become the number one source for shopping, entertainment, communications, actually everything!

For example, do you even remember the last time you stood in queue to buy movie tickets. Or do you remember how you used to go to the cinema hall every Wednesday when the ticket bookings opened and stood in queues to get tickets to your favourite movie just so you could see it on the first day? All you millennials will definitely have an “OMG YESSS” running through their heads right now! So when was the last time you did that? You don’t remember, do you? Ok, let us ask you this: what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you want to buy tickets to a movie? Did we hear a collective “BookMyShow”? Even with an array of other ticketing sites such as MeraEvents, Kyazoonga, TicketGenie offering the same services?

Ok, here’s another question. This one is a piece of cake. What do you do whenever you have to decide where you want to go for a meal? Look for options on Zomato, right? But do you still go to a few restaurants that have an award given to them for exemplary food by “Burrp”? Remember how large Burrp was a few years ago, before Zomato came in and changed the history of Restaurant Finder apps!

So, here’s what’s common in both these examples – successful online businesses! Sure, there are a host of different apps and websites providing the same kind of services, but there’s a reason these websites are now the benchmarks that have created a niche for themselves in the market. And the reasons for success that all these super-successful online business share are the same:

They create a user-friendly website for smooth navigation and a promising consumer experience. Most of the successful blogs we see are super-easy to navigate and clutter-free with proper sitemap and seamless integration
They know when to and what to give up. Snobbery and ego and a know-it-all attitude only has de-merits. These companies learned from Nokia’s and Yahoo’s example and were not afraid to give up, be it an idea, a person or an entire unit.
Outsourcing. You cannot be good at everything. You are not the most perfect person in the world. There are few things that you are amazing at and no one can take that away from you or beat you to it. But a business runs on a lot of different set of skills and to be successful, you cannot compromise on any of them. The best way to ensure that is to outsource the work that you are not the best to the people who are and instead concentrating on your strengths.
Social media is their primary address. With an average person spending more than 2 hours of their day on social media (a number that is only increasing with every passing day), not having a strong presence across all social media is the worst thing you can do to your business. In the times of “out of sight, out of mind” it is essential to have a very strong and continuous social media presence, which is evident with all successful businesses. (Infographic – http://www.adweek.com/digital/mediakix-time-spent-social-media-infographic/)
They distinguish themselves. From the word go, they ensure that they have at least one defining factor that sets them apart from their competitor even though the basic service they provide is the same. In the sea of a trillion-dollar market spread across 12 million online stores, had these businesses not differentiated themselves, they would have gotten lost in the depths of the web. (Infographics: https://blog.lemonstand.com/just-how-big-is-the-ecommerce-market-youll-never-guess/)
They believe in the age-old saying that the customer is the king. One negative remark can make or break your business and these successful businesses understand that. They understand the value of a good support team and timely query resolution and more than anything else, they understand the importance to listening and implementing the suggestions and recommendations given by their customers because who knows what works best other than the people who actually use it?
They invest heavily in SEO. Successful businesses all agree that it is important to analyse trends, get traffic on their pages, grab eye-balls, generate leads, get high rankings, to appear in the first page of the biggest search engines, assess their own website to check what works and what doesn’t, and they do not underestimate the cost involved in doing all this.
They don’t let failure get them down. If you don’t fail, you don’t know what success actually tastes like. And it takes a lot of failures to finally get there. So, it is okay to fail as long as you get back up again, reassess your strategies and get working.
They go all in. One common misconception with online businesses is that they don’t require as much time and dedication as 9 to 5 job or a brick-and-mortar one. This is not true! If you treat your online business as a part-time hobby, it will stay that way. Successful businesses have put in the time, dedication and effort to bring themselves where they are and trust us when we say that it wasn’t all possible by sipping margarita at a beach somewhere.
They understand the value of amazing content. One very recent example we can think of is ScoopWhoop. While they started out with fresh, bold and hard-hitting content, after the initial stage, they kind of lost the theme they were working around and started to copy-paste content from different sites which also led them into severe trouble back in the day. Once a market dominant, they fell behind and other sites such as BuzzFeed India started gaining more popularity with their original and relatable content.

So, to put it in brief, while there are abundant online businesses out there, in every sector, every industry and every nook and corner of the internet, there are a set of ethics, behavioral patterns and vision that sets successful businesses apart. And to anyone who wants to build a successful online empire, you must get started on these values now!