When you know where your customers prefer to buy, you’re better positioned to drive the right traffic to your business.  The right traffic is the group of customers you can most easily convert and retain.   These people represent the who in your business, your target customer.

Driving the “right” traffic is tied to the customer’s transaction location preference.  You won’t complete a sufficient number of profitable sales transactions unless you are where your customer wants to transact business.  Fail to be where they want to buy, and your business profitability model will fail.

The core question you must ask relative to where your business is placed involves how your customer wants to make their purchase.   Do they prefer a physical location to buy, or do they want to purchase online?

If your business is dependent on a physical location, the in-store experience you offer must be better than their online experience, or they won’t come back.  This means you need to engage employees who will provide your customers with a service experience they can’t get online.  It also means you must maintain a product inventory, so they’ll leave your store with the product they came for in hand, sealing the great in-store experience you gave them.

Why place has two organizing principles in your business model comes down to the implications of “when” people need what you do and “where” they want to acquire it.  If the answer to “when” is today, they aren’t likely to get the product they want online.  If they have time on their side because they planned for their needs and are willing to shop, you must be cost-competitive with what people are offering online, not just down the street.

If your customer wants to buy online, you must maximize your SEO

Before the web, customers depended on the Yellow Pages to locate small businesses. Now customers find your business through Internet searches where SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay per clicks) will be the driving forces.  SEO refers to the process of improving traffic to your website by increasing your site’s visibility in search engine results.

You improve your website SEO performance by continuously investing in your content, ensuring that your pages can be indexed correctly and that your content is unique and genuine. When you do this, you are more likely to increase traffic to your site because the site will appear higher in search results for information that pertains to your site’s offerings.  Junk sites with poor content will not rank as well.

SEO is tricky, yet it is key if you rely on the internet for your business.  If the internet is where you primarily conduct business, you are likely to be investing in pay-per-click (PPC) to drive traffic to your site.  PPC is an advertising model implemented by search engines like Google, Firefox, MS Edge, and other websites that charge businesses for advertising each time a site visitor clicks on your specific link.  When the site visitor clicks on your link, the click is registered in a system, and a pre-determined charge is assessed.  One of the most popular pay-per-clicks programs is Google’s Ad Words.

The historical challenge with making your marketing mix decisions associated with place was the best location for placing your brick and mortar.  Now it’s about cost-effectively using the internet to drive traffic to your business.  This is 100% true if you only transact business online and is nearly 100% if you need people to come to your physical location to buy from you.  Either way, mismanage your place for transacting business, and your business will fail.

Would you like some help making more money?

If you are struggling with knowing whether your online or physical location is most important to the people who buy from you, click here to speak with a marketing and sales expert at no charge for the answer.   Fail to know this, and you will lose money.