In an age where everything is done on the internet, businesses can no longer dismiss the importance of creating an online presence for themselves. People look up any service or product they want online before anywhere else, and this is where a brand needs to be in order to reach its target audience.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber or a web developer; chances are, a person needing your services will open Google and type ‘plumber’ or ‘web developer’ in their area. This is why a lot of businesses are investing money in digital marketing, but how exactly can you build an online presence that your customers can’t ignore?
Start with a plan
You can’t just randomly go about your digital marketing strategy. The business needs a solid, well-prepared plan if you want to create a meaningful presence for yourself. This starts with doing market research and thoroughly researching the industry. This is how you will be able to find out what it is exactly that people are looking for and how you can provide that missing product or service. It needs time and planning to get there, but if you do it right, you will be able to identify your target audience, which is imperative in your online efforts to reach a lot of people, because it’s not about how many consumers you reach, but rather who you specifically reach. You want your brand to be visible to audiences who’d interact with it, not just anybody, and that needs thorough research and preparation.
Build a powerful website
Now that you have your plan in order, you need to create a powerful website that ensures you can draw people in, and more importantly, keep them interested. This website will be the first impression people make of your brand, and it has to be perfect. That means including all the details that your potential customers might need, and this information needs to be easily visible and simply accessed. A lot of consumers grow frustrated with websites that force them to go through a lot of trouble to get that tiny bit of information they need, like working hours or location. If that happens, you can kiss that consumer goodbye because they’d just go to another service provider with a better navigational process on their site. This brings us to a crucial detail when it comes to creating a website, and it’s one you’ll have to invest money in, and that is search engine optimization.
SEO
Search engine optimization is how you tailor your website to your audience’s needs. Your content needs to be optimized, meaning it should be fresh and interesting. SEO is how you rank higher on Google search engines, which is imperative for the success of your business. As you can see when you browse this guide, search engine ranking is very important in regards to reaching people, and this is why you should use tools like Google My Business –– which allows you to control how your brand appears in search results. Studies show that most people don’t go beyond the first page of a search engine result, which means that if you are not on the first page, consumers won’t see you.
Investing in search engine optimization strategies allows you to rank higher and in turn, be visible to more people. When you use approaches like improving the loading speed of pages on the site and making the navigation process simpler, as well as backlinking and others, your rank on search engines will gradually improve until you become one of the top results if you do everything right that is.
Hire good copywriters
A lot of business owners take it upon themselves to write the content of their website on their own, which is as much of a bad idea as trying to design the website on your own without having the necessary experience. You need to be able to engage with and address your audience, and that means being a good storyteller who constantly provides interesting materials and intriguing content for them to consume. This is why it’s always a good idea to get experts to write your content, and you need to make sure it’s regularly updated. Your content has to add something of value to readers, and it has to do so consistently, or else they’d just go elsewhere for that kind of content.
Social media
You can’t bring up online presence without emphasizing the importance of social media. It is how small businesses can compete with corporations in this day and age, and all you need to do is create a few pages for your brand on different platforms. People spend hours on end on different applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and you need to reach them on these platforms, or you risk losing to the competition. The great thing about social media is the fact that it gave consumers something that wasn’t there before; engagement with their favorite brands and businesses. This gives you the chance to talk to your target audience and find out what they want, and in turn, tailor your future campaigns to those needs.
Build partnerships and connections
One more thing you need to do in order to have a strong online presence is to develop good connections and build partnerships with other businesses and websites. This will allow you to capitalize on a very powerful SEO technique called backlinking, which is when another website mentions your very own and links back to it. This strategy is very effective because it inspires confidence, and it assures readers that your brand is so trustworthy and competent that other websites are directly referring to it.
While investing in digital marketing strategies and creating a strong online presence is cheaper than traditional marketing strategies, it is still not easy. You need careful planning and a lot of preparation to ensure your approach to the online world will be successful, so you should definitely take your time with it. And remember that any penny you invest in online marketing will result in more leads for your business and a lot more money in return.