Drastic economic changes have occurred over time and so it the face of businesses. Optimizing technological tools will be essential in grasping online opportunities and starting your online business and more on maintaining its success. What will be your staying power in a pool of digital marketing?

How will you stay ahead of your current and future competitors? How will you grasp more opportunities online to keep your businesses saleable? Let’s narrow down it for you.

1. Clearly, Define your Ideas

Successful business comes from a person’s own experience. It a problem developed into a necessity and converted into a service or product. You can solve this by thinking of an immediate solution to make your life easier and better. What sets you apart from other business will be your business’ clear definition, thorough planning and effective implementation.

Creating a business plan is essential but is a traditional way for start-up businesses. However, it can be easily outdated due to extreme changes in e-commerce. You need to be flexible enough to create alternative solutions to be in the loop of digital marketing. The best approach for this will be the Lean Canvas which is created by Ash Maurya. It is divided into two spheres: product and market. The first section is product specific elements like problems, solution, budgeting and competitive advantage while the second section deals with customer segments and revenue streams. This type of marketing plan is cost-efficient, flexible and can save you more time along the way.

2. Validate the Market & Product

Identifying your target consumer is critical to your marketing strategy. You must recognize the composition and size of the market to know who are catering to. A smart strategy is to use a Keyword Planner tool provided by Google that will help the user distinguish the frequency statistics of Google keyword searches completed worldwide. You can also stream on existing products to immediately determine if there is a market and if your similar product or service is in demand. Moreover, you may use tools such as Typeform, Zoho Survey, Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo to gauge the public interest.

Product validation is an attempt that your initial marketing plan in the Lean Canvass are correct. You can attend networking events, ask individuals, describe your idea and how it can solve the problem for your specified market. If you’re not comfortable interacting with other people, you can create an explainer video that may last up to 90 seconds or a landing page that is a simple web page for product and service advertising. It will help you pitch your ideas in a clear, visual and persuasive form.

3. Designing your Minimum Viable Product

After the product validation and determining that there is an existing market to delve into, you must get a primary version of the product into the consumer’s hands. In this phase, you’ll be able to gauge how the market will respond to the actual product. The idea of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is intertwined with another concept called Validated Learning where you test an individual hypothesis in segregation. Here are the different types of MVP where you can measure and test the product:

• Wizard of Oz – Known as the “Flinstoning”, where your purchase the product from a vendor once it is ordered by your customers online. This will lessen the risk of buying large number of products only to be stored on your stock rooms. Online business-like fashion clothing line fits on this category.
• Concierge – This works for services. It can be administered through web or app interface. Book rental services are the best example for this where you’ll be able to determine the customer acceptance and retention rate base on their monthly subscriptions.
• Piecemeal – A combination of Wizard of Oz and Concierge approaches which is particularly useful for scalability. Commonly used 3rd party apps are MailChimp, GetResponse or AWeber.

4. Analyzing Your MVP Results

Data analysis is critical to fine-tune your overall marketing strategy. In this method, you’ll be able to see which area of your approach you need to focus and improve. Data collection is easier nowadays with technology advancement. You can easily capture this data using these platforms such as web apps (e.g. Google analytics, Heap Analytics and Piwik), mobile apps (e.g. Google, AWS, Facebook, AppAnalytics, Facebook, and Flurry) and desktop apps (e.g. Revulytics and DeskMetrics). Moreover, data interpretation can easily be observed on ratings, reviews, and direct feedback. In this stage, you’ll be able to evaluate overall patterns and trends in your product’s consumption.

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