Jeroen van Gils is the founder and CEO of EcomContent and LiFi. Both companies help businesses with their growth in different ways.
EcomContent is a content curation company that helps businesses grow traffic and sales with conversion-focused content. And LiFi sells alternative communication technologies to WiFi.
In this interview, we talked with Jeroen van Gils about e-commerce and SMBs, and he shared some powerful insights. He loves helping businesses grow and also provided some strategies below that can help businesses grow.
Q. Let’s start by getting to know you better. Tell us a little about yourself and your professional journey.
A. My name is Jeroen van Gils. I am the founder and CEO of two companies.
EcomContent provides content writing services for online stores, and LiFi.co is a distributor of LiFi products.
Q. Tell us about LiFi. What are your business’s core offerings? What has been the biggest accomplishment for you at LiFi?
A. So, LiFi is a wireless communication technology that utilizes light to transmit data. This new technology is up to 100 times faster than WiFi.
That’s why many people consider it a powerful alternative to WiFi and potentially the future of our internet. LiFi technology comes with several other benefits, such as improved security and better energy efficiency. We are the authorized distributor of the largest LiFi brands.
Our mission is to improve the public knowledge of LiFi and promote the implementation of LiFi solutions.
And I would say our biggest accomplishments are the many partnerships we have with market-leading companies.
Q. Your consultation experience is quite interesting. How did you get into consultancy, and how has been your experience with it?
A. I got my first consulting clients through EcomContent, which helps eCommerce companies grow their traffic and sales through conversion-focused content.
Then I saw that some clients sought additional help besides our team’s content writing services. I consult them on growth hacking strategies and scaling their eCommerce business.
It’s been a good experience thus far.
Q. Ecommerce is the talk of the town in contemporary times. What inspired you to start your own ecommerce business?
A. I am in love with the game of online business.
In my opinion, it’s amazing that we can make money online selling products or services, no matter where we are or what we are doing at the moment. Personally, I love to travel. Ecommerce provides me the freedom to see the world and live as a location-independent entrepreneur.
Q. Holiday season is just around the corner. How do you plan on using this time to your business’s advantage? And what are some tips for ecommerce entrepreneurs that can help them make lucrative profits this holiday season?Â
A. The holiday season is a great period with huge marketing opportunities and potential for sales.
I’ll use this period to end the year strong and create a plan and set up strategies for the new year. To eCommerce entrepreneurs, I’d recommend using the holiday season to create holiday-focused marketing campaigns.
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Q. Customer acquisition is one big challenge for businesses these days. What are some strategies that can help businesses acquire new customers? Also, is there anything they can do to retain their customers?
A. A great starting point in acquiring new customers for your business is looking at what your competitors are doing.
Find out what marketing and sales strategies your competitors employ and learn from what they are doing. You can grow your business by copying their ways of reaching and influencing the audience.
Q. How big of a role does hosting play when it comes to seamlessly run an ecommerce store?
A. Hosting performance greatly impacts conversion rates. I think an online store’s speed is crucial in having a high conversion rate, and it can be a deciding factor for visitors. Research has found that conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time.
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Q. The ecommerce industry saw a massive transition post-covid. According to you, what is the scope for SMBs in the online space, and how can they benefit by going online?
A. The most important reason to transition from a traditional business to an online business, whether that’s with an online store or a different online presence, is that you instantly greatly expand your potential customer base.
When you’re just selling to local consumers or businesses, you simply don’t have the growth potential that you would have if you moved online.
Q. Scaling up with limited resources is often a problem for SMBs and Ecommerce businesses. How do you think they can solve this challenge?
A. I recommend focusing on just one or two growth channels in the beginning. Usually, new businesses try to work on many different marketing or sales strategies.
For example, just after launching their website or online store, they will get started with SEO, advertising, blogging, social media, and more.
Investing in all these strategies altogether might work for fast-growing companies but not for new businesses with limited resources, especially if they haven’t yet validated their business idea or don’t have a big audience yet.
I think it’s better to set up one growth channel, validate it, reinvest money in what has proven to work, and only after that work on expanding into other growth channels.
Q. Marketing the business is at the core of its growth. What are some effective marketing strategies that can help businesses scale up fast? Anything in particular that worked the best for you?
A. In my opinion, content marketing is the best way to grow an online business for both new and established companies.
It’s an amazing way to drive traffic, generate leads and sales, build trust with your audience, and develop relationships. Both my businesses primarily rely on content marketing for acquiring and retaining customers.
Q. What are some important tools that you use at your business and would want people to know about them and use?
A. I love Zapier! We use this online platform to automate workflows by connecting apps and services. It saves me a lot of time and hassle. For example, we have set up a lot of automation in our marketing and sales processes.
Q. Every business has some challenging phases. What has been the biggest challenge for your business so far? And how did you overcome it?
A. My biggest challenge has been learning to delegate. At first, I wanted to do many things myself.
After some time, I learned that the only way I could scale my businesses was to set up systems and teams. It saves me a lot of time and stress and allows businesses to grow much faster.
Q.Do you have any advice for young and budding entrepreneurs?
A. I’d give new entrepreneurs the advice of reinvesting all profits into their business. In the beginning, I made the mistake of saving the money I made instead of reinvesting this into marketing and sales.
Don’t be afraid to take risks and experiment with new ways of reinvesting your profits. After all, you can only grow your business by scaling your growth channels.
Q. Thank you so much for your time! One last question: where can our readers follow your work?
A. I’d be more than happy to connect with people on LinkedIn.
Shoaib Israr
Shoaib is a passionate digital marketer who believes creativity is everything. His interests lie in content, digital marketing and he loves to help agency and ecommerce business owners in growing and expanding their businesses. In his free time, Shoaib loves to play football or binge-watch some interesting shows on Netflix.
