Building a digital presence is key to succeeding as a business in the modern day, no matter how big or small you really are. It ensures you can be found when someone taps your brand name in or comes across an article you wrote, and recognition amongst the market is the number one thing you need to secure in order to make a profit.
But how can you build a reliable and efficient digital presence? And beyond this, how can you ensure it’s built to last? All those social media posts will disappear down the timeline, and one day your website may not even work anymore - what can you do to prevent these issues from occurring? Here are our tips for building a digital presence for your company that’ll actually stand the test of time.
Become Easy to Find
Your first concern, as a digital entity operating in the digital age, is how easy you are to find. You want someone to be able to type your name into a search engine and instantly pingback results that connect to you. You don’t want them to have to hunt you down, searching high and low for a website, and simply coming up with a scant Facebook page that offers them nothing!
So make sure you can be contacted. Make sure there’s a name and a face out there for any and all consumers to come across. Make sure there are clear descriptors about what you do and what you sell, and where someone can go to purchase an item from you. Above all else, don’t make it hard for your company to be found, as a simple lack of a trail is the best way to kill your brand recognition chances from the start. Just be proactive!
Refine Your SEO Strategy
What are you offering, as a company? What do you want people to know you for? These are the two main questions you need to answer if you want to be able to build and refine an SEO strategy. The more keywords you come up with as a result of brainstorming these points, the better!
The more keywords you have to work with, the better your chances of cornering your niche. You’ll be able to really narrow down the keyword/phrase that works best for you, and without having to run up against too much competition either. And ultimately, once you know what you’re trying to rank for, you can play with the SEO terms you come up.
Why does this help? Because it ensures you build an organic trail; you build a content backlog that makes sense, and is worth linking to, and all without trying too hard. You come off as less than a keyword stuffer and/or a bot, and more as a company that has something genuine to offer its customers.
Focus on Your Website User Experience
A great website speaks for itself. After all, people aren’t going to have an issue using it, or navigating through it, and they’ll never worry their details are at risk when checking out via your payment portal. And that counts for a lot in the digital world! Which is why it’s key to focus on optimizing your website user experience; you need the quality of your website to shine through in any review a customer leaves behind.
So, what do you need to do here? It’s a good idea to start with the speed of your website; you may need more server space if your website is laden with images, for example. After all, this’ll slow the page right down, and customers hate having to wait around for a website to load. They’ll click off in about 2 to 3 seconds if the page takes longer than that to buffer.
Alongside this, you’ll also want to focus on delivering the perfect checkout experience. Working with an Optimizely Commerce Cloud Partner is a good way to get started with scaling this portion of your website - it’s hard to pull off a personalized experience for every kind of customer that clicks through to your homepage on your own.
Produce Useful Content
Now you’ve got the website optimized, and you know what you’re ranking for in the search engines, it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. You’ve got to start producing content on a regular basis, whether you’re simply focusing on social media posts or you want to start up a blog that’s connected to your website.
But most of all, you need to produce content that’s interesting to read through, and will provide some use to the reader in question. Maybe some how-to guides relating to your product or service wouldn’t go amiss? Maybe throwing up an infographic or two will appeal to both market consumers and other businesses alike? Simply adding in a dollop of helpful information here and there will help people to start recognising you as a trusted source. Your audience is also much more likely to come back for more in the future, and will start to expect a grain of quality from what you put out there.
Work with Well Known Faces
Known as ‘influencer marketing’, it’s often a good idea to get in touch with well known faces around the internet. Whether these are people with 100,000 Twitter followers, or a few million subscribers on Youtube, or they’re a blogger who gets around half a million reads per month, pitching some paid content ideas to them can cause a huge step forward for your business.
Of course you may get ignored right out the gate, but the more you target your efforts here, the better your chances of a successful collaboration will be. So if you sell a new beauty product, talk to beauty influencers. If you’re selling a new pair of headphones, talk to technology and/or lifestyle influencers. If you’ve got a mobile gaming app that needs some downloads, look into gaming influencers - Youtube is usually your best bet for these.
It’s not hard to get in touch with these people either. You can usually send them a private message via their social media accounts, or they’ll list a business enquiry email someone on their profile that you can ping a message across. If you don’t get a reply, wait a couple months and try again, or take a look at the message you sent and see if you can refine it somehow.
Get to Know Your Competitors
Finally, take a look around the internet and see what your competitors are up to. You want to find out how they’re marketing, and whether they’ve got a good idea you can follow the same lies of. Obviously you won’t pick up a marketing attempt word for word, but you can be inspired and/or spot flaws or gaps you can iron out in your own campaign.
Most of all, look into what’s worked for a competitor in the past. Can you do something similar, but add a more beneficial twist to it? Can you avoid the marketing mistakes they’ve made as well? Learn from those around you and apply the lessons liberally; it’ll help to ensure your digital presence foundation is laid without a hitch.
Building a lasting digital presence is an ongoing task, and it can seem very tricky to pull off. However, with a bit of research and plenty of outreach, your business has the chance to carve out a portion of the internet.