What it Means For Your Offline Business to Start Doing Some Business Online
The internet is a Trillion dollar marketplace with Billions of worldwide users who may be your potential clients. If you are not using the leverage of the internet to promote and market your mom & pop store or brick & mortar you are missing a tremendous opportunity.
You may be saying to yourself “I run a successful offline retail shop already surely my local store, which depends mostly on foot traffic cannot benefit from using the internet.” Guess what? You’re dead wrong a thousand times to the tenth power! If you own a small business offline you better believe there is a revolution taking place that will eventually close the doors of your successful offline venture.
There are so many new major advances in technology taking place today on so many fronts I cannot even begin to discuss them all in this article. There is not enough paper & pen in my office to dedicate to all the advances emerging and are present that can assist offline businesses in leveraging the internet & social web to get more foot traffic into a local retail store.
The current technology environment is making it so that those who do not lead in the efforts to grow offline businesses online will suffer at the register. Smart phones with GPS tracking incorporated with “smart social business software” are already changing things at this present moment. Downtown redevelopment is springing up all across American big cities and smart real estate developers are using this new medium to create online virtual communities for their offline Lofts & Condos residents.
These real estate developers are finding the new hip & young generation moving back into urban areas with tech savvy dispositions and have a thirst for bringing their offline lives online and vice versa. Connecting future residents with existing tenants online is creating new social networks that are increasing these tech savvy realtors’ bottom lines.
Gary Vaynerchuk took a plain & boring topic as Wine tasting and turned it into a Wine multimedia empire out of the backroom of his family New Jersey wine shop. Gary leverages his social media stardom to selling Millions of cases of Wine to a global market by bringing their tiny offline store online through a You Tube Channel.
Blockbuster is an example of an offline business giant that has fallen to its knees in defeat due to not being a leader of the online revolution. Blockbuster could have been on the leading edge with its Billions of dollars in walk in traffic revenue but it did not see the true value of the internet and the purpose of bringing an offline business online for growth & survival.
The question isn’t whether or not if you should be doing business online with your Brick & Mortar retail shops but how best can you leverage all this new great technology. Local GPS, Smart Phones with Bar Code Scanning to sniff out the lowest prices in a local area, Smart Apps, Social Media, Social Apps bringing friends & family into the same local stores & restaurants, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, You Tube Video, Review Sites like Yelp are just a few things available to build your offline business online.
If you own a successful offline business I would begin to research all the new technologies that are available and create a strategy to implement them in your mix or watch your business dwindle & wither away as Blockbuster. Ask yourself, if Billions of dollars can’t help blockbuster survive what can ignoring the web do to your small business.
Prosperous Life & Business – Shawn K. Castille – Life & Business Coach
http://www.shawnkcastille.com/blog
Author: Shawn K. Castille
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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