What are traditional businesses?
An organization, which could be a store, a food outlet or an agency, operating out of a physical premise and providing its consumers a certain product or service, is termed as a traditional business.
Problems faced by them:
In recent times, we have seen the decline of many traditional businesses. The biggest reason for downfall of traditional businesses is their incompetency to digitize or lack of interest and faith in digital marketing. Few other contributing factors are:
- High set up cost: The traditional businesses involve a physical space, at an impactful location, from where they carry out their trade. This combination of a suitable place and location usually comes at a high cost.
- Stocking of products: In a physical set up, the seller needs to stock a lot of products for user experience. This involves a lot of investment.
- High marketing cost: In traditional businesses, the modes of marketing are generally print and digital mediums, which come at a very high value and no guarantee of customer conversion.
- Downtime issues: In the traditional business set up. A single day of downtime, due to human limitations, can cost the business a lot.
- Window shopper issues: Not everyone visiting the business space is a customer. A lot of time and logistics are wasted behind these leisurely browsers.
Why is digitization important for traditional businesses?
- Being present online is, being visible: Being online increases the market reach exponentially in contrast to the traditional ways. The younger generation explores everything online first and then decide to venture offline. Being known online can help in establishing a good customer base and hence increase the sales.
- Customer engagement: Digital marketing helps out in customer engagement and understanding the trends. For example, these days everyone prefers home delivery or services, catering to this requirement of the audience helps in business growth.
- Direct marketing: Once you have marked your target audience and understood the market trends, the next step is marketing your product or service. Through various platforms, you can start direct marketing without involving any distributors or agencies.
- Round the clock business: Digitization gives you the advantage of 24*7 business with or without your availability. Since your products or services are listed online, they are visible to the consumers and the trade can continue without your immediate involvement.
- Better customer service: Being present digitally can be helpful in providing better service to the customers. This in turn builds trust towards your business and helps it grow.
- Better product visibility: Through your digital handle, you can conveniently show off your product in a better manner and also without any extra investment. Product segregation into different categories as per customer requirement also becomes easy.
To sum up, digitization is not only a tool to enhance the business, rather it is the need of the hour and extremely important to sustain in the current market. Hence, along with physical presence, digital presence is also equally necessary.