Developing Business Relationships in Cyber Space

Written By: Francisco Lingad, ANCL Export Import Canada, LLP, Vancouver, BC, Futurpreneur Canada Mentor 

Cyber marketing through social media networks and communication platforms provide chances for you to reach out to a wide customer base as well as develop valuable business relations.

The following are leads on what you have to focus on for effective and positive interactions:

1) Like any business, work out a market plan. A cyber market plan will determine your target markets, demographics, goals, margins, social media, and calendars. Calendar your activities, observe the times when your friends, your friends friends, your friends relatives, and followers/customers are most active online. Take advantage of these moments.

2) Start a conversation on cyber space. When you notice comments on your postings don’t forget to reply or comment. This is an opportunity for you to reach out online. Also make sure you network, a good conversation will be a trick in sparking the never ending litany of word-of-mouth referrals.

3) Be professional, honest, straightforward and consistent with your communications on the net. If there are inquiries, reply immediately. Never make these inquires wait for your answer. If they ask for technical information, give them this info immediately. You have to be objective, brilliant, and riveting so that people will not simply leave you in oblivion or ignore you.

4) Define your purpose and create your team. Find out who works best with specific tasks, look for like-minded people who can share the same passion as you do and someone who gets by with a little help from their friend. Brainstorm on issues and challenges within your industry and work on the idea of building your team on the internet.

5) Define your missions, visions, and goals with your team. This is a starting point of knowing individual strengths, opportunities and weaknesses.

6) Subscribe to social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ etc. to reach out to your customers, followers, friends and potential customers for customer care.

The big target market in cyber space is the “Millennials”. Recent Canada demographic reports introduced “Millennials” as the new emerging power group of consumers. Millennials also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y are those born after 1980 with an age range of 14 to 33. They are a bigger consumer group than Baby Boomers, comprising of 25% of the population in North America.

I had talks with a young entrepreneur who developed game apps. He is taking his master’s degree in a Canadian university for computer engineering and animation to improve his craft. He informed me that his research revealed that millennial women are willing to pay $10 or more for challenging computer games. Thus his market plan for his games focuses on this specific target.

The “Millennials” are groups hooked on social media like Facebook, interact through Twitter, and spend very little time reading magazines or traditional media. They spend lots of time each day browsing the web and playing video games. They virtually sleep with their smartphones, iPod, and/ or tablets. Further survey reveals that 97% of these Millennials students owned a computer, and 94% owned a cell phone. Collectively they have an annual purchasing power of US$200 billion with indirect buying power of US$500 billion. Barkley’s US Millennials’ generation report predicted that Millennials’ spending power will increase as their earning power grows, and they are expected to remain the most affluent generation.