The online world has supercharged the process of starting and expanding businesses. Access to tools and services, like website builders, dropshipping, and social media, makes it easy to build an online business. These tools, and several others we’ll explore here, also make it easy for businesses to expand their portfolios to enhance their offerings, diversify their revenue streams, and increase profits.
The potential for businesses to expand their portfolios isn’t limited to those that operate exclusively online. Today, all businesses are expected to operate online in some capacity. It’s now standard consumer behavior to begin their shopping experiences online, making it an essential space for businesses to be.
But how do businesses leverage online tools and services to build their portfolios? This article answers just that, starting with a fundamental component: understanding business portfolios.
Understanding Business Portfolios and Their Importance
A business portfolio lists the achievements and assets of a business that make it successful, support its operations, and enable it to achieve its goals. You can consider it a business’s equivalent of both a resume and portfolio. Just as you’d want your professional documents to highlight your skills, achievements, and ongoing projects, a business portfolio should do the same for a business.
The portfolio will outline each product, service, and other assets at a business’s disposal (like its social media presence or website). It serves as an overview of what a business does and what it’s working towards for its current and potential staff and stakeholders.
Like a personal portfolio, it’s an evolving document that businesses want to continuously expand and polish to refine their offerings, operations, and goals. Successful businesses will use it to help them identify opportunities for expansion and optimization to become more valuable and profitable.
Of course, developing new plans won’t rely solely on reviewing a business portfolio. After all, you wouldn’t only look at your portfolio work to expand your skills and create new pieces. You should conduct market research, stay updated on new trends and technology, and be open to exploring new opportunities. In doing this, you’ll develop a comprehensive look at how to grow your business portfolio effectively. You’ll also want to learn different online strategies and business growth methods, such as the ones explored in the next section.
Key Strategies for Diversifying a Business Portfolio Online
These strategies diversify the revenue streams of your business and target new audiences, helping to expand your business’s presence and increase potential profits.
E-Commerce
The online landscape is filled with e-commerce opportunities that can support a broad range of businesses and their needs, from setting up online storefronts to sourcing and storing products.
Using platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, you can create an online storefront and begin marketing and selling products with relative ease. You may want to explore selling your products across multiple online platforms to expand your reach, including places like Amazon Marketplace or more niche marketplaces. Businesses can also integrate their storefronts through social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, allowing customers to shop directly through them.
If you don’t already have products, you’ll find opportunities to create and source them online. Two popular options, dropshipping and print-on-demand services, allow businesses to sell products without holding inventory. These allow you to deliver products directly to customers without handling the shipping process.
If you manufacture or purchase products in bulk, you could consider different warehousing options, such as a 3PL (third-party logistics) provider. They’ll store and manage products, inventory, packaging, and shipping products on behalf of businesses. Depending on your business, this could be an incredible way to expand your operations to fulfill more orders across greater regions in less time.
Subscriptions and Memberships
Adopting subscription and membership models offers another way to diversify your business offerings and revenue streams. Offering this shopping model to customers provides businesses with a more predictable monthly income.
Platforms such as Thinkific, Patreon, Kajabi, TikTok, and Meta allow you to easily set up and share subscriber- or members-only content and services. Through online shops and marketplaces, you can set up subscription-based purchasing options for products.
Digital Marketing and Content Creation
Adding digital marketing and content creation to your business’s assets can be highly valuable. Digital marketing allows you to grow your business online across social media, search engines, websites, and emails. These efforts include search engine optimization, social media marketing, paid advertising, and email marketing. Each method offers different advantages, meaning you can pick and choose based on your needs.
Content creation, a key element of digital marketing, provides more opportunities to naturally showcase products, establish expertise in your industry, grow brand awareness, and nurture customer relationships. Content comes in various forms, including blogs, eBooks, emails, social media posts, videos, and podcasts. You’ll want to shape your content around your business offering and audience to get the most out of content. For instance, if your business appeals to those looking for the best slot website, shaping your content plan to address this want will see more success than focusing on land-based casinos and poker.
Challenges and Considerations
As you expand your business online across these diverse avenues, there are a few additional things to consider. Most notably, you must implement sound cybersecurity and data protection systems to protect your business data and customers’ personal information.
Several challenges come with adapting to the online landscape. The accessibility of tools to expand into these different arenas means there’s fierce competition. You must address how you’ll set yourself apart to keep your business growing. Additionally, developing an established online presence takes time. A significant amount of time and energy goes into planning, implementing, and maintaining each online avenue you choose. You’ll also need to earn the trust of your target audience over time to see long-term benefits, which takes time.
Finally, you’ll need to exercise patience as you expand your business portfolio into new opportunities online. Take the time to study your current portfolio and assess your goals so you can make informed decisions about your business’s direction and which online opportunities to pursue.