The evolution of marketing has changed from telling customers to buy a product to customers doing their own research. So, what does it mean for your small business? First, you must make sure you appear where your customer is searching and that your business engages the proper messaging. Your online presence is a mix of content, keyword strategy, responding to posts and messages, amplification, social media, advertising, and more. It’s a lot to take on, but it’s essential to increase your web presence and grow your business. Creating a successful program may call for website builders, content writers, ad specialists, and more. For small businesses, you can outsource these roles to a digital marketing company for the best results.
8 Tips for Increasing Web Presence
Know your audience
We say this a lot, but knowing your audience is a cornerstone to many key aspects of your digital marketing strategy, including messaging, advertising platforms, solution offerings, and more. You want to give the right message to the right customer at the right time.
Create a professional “store site”
Remember all the effort people used to put into advertisements, sales materials, lobby displays, presentations, or other impressionable items? This is now all combined into your website and is the first impression of your company. An effective website goes beyond appearance and includes navigation, user experience, lead generation, and branding for your business. A basic website may be a DIY project, but creating an effective and attractive website is a professional project. Be sure not to neglect your mobile site either. Buyers don’t always purchase on a mobile device, but they often start their search and buyer’s journey there.
Develop a content strategy
This is a major point, so let’s break it up. Your content strategy presents your brand, engages customers, builds loyalty, and everything else you need to move customers through the buyer’s journey toward purchasing. The way to actively develop and implement content strategy is through planning, creation, delivery, and management. We go deeper into this topic in our blog “What is a Content Strategy?”
Use an effective keyword strategy
Remember, your potential customers are in control, so you need to be wherever they search for solutions. The rules for keywords, content strengths, measuring methods, and tracking are constantly changing and hard to stay on top of. But doing so can help your business appear at the top of lists among search engines and is one of the ways that your customers find you. An effective keyword strategy can be more effective than advertising if done correctly, and engaging a digital strategy agency can bring better results at fewer costs.
- Planning – creating content calendars, goals, metric measurements, and determining keywords
- Creation – writing blogs, web content, social media posts, press releases, white papers
- Delivery – managing schedules and deliverables across multiple platforms
- Management – updating strategy to adjust to non-performing pieces
Be an informational resource or thought leader
The more you can answer customers’ questions, the more they’ll engage with you. Ways to do this include writing blogs that answer questions, offering innovative solutions, and creating entertaining content. If you can create enough value for your customers, they’ll share the content, providing your business with links, traffic, and other earned media.
Implement an email marketing strategy
Email marketing is part of your content strategy and can be an effective tool for engagement, nurturing leads, and driving sales. Therefore, we put it as a separate tip. And, while email marketing doesn’t cost that much, it must be effective in getting customers to subscribe, open, stay, engage, and go to the website where they can become qualified leads or make a purchase.
Create, update, and maintain Google My Business
If you are a local service provider or want to drive traffic through the local market, then your Google My Business profile is essential. Here is where you update your service or store hours, monitor your reviews, answer questions, and create appointment settings.
Stick to your plan!
Have you ever gone to a company’s blog page and seen that they haven’t posted for over a year? Or visit their Facebook page and notice that the last post was from a holiday eight months ago? Or land on a website and see a business that is promoting specials and coupons that expired years ago? We see companies that go into a digital marketing strategy with great intentions, but then their activity fades. Consider the customer engagement or organic search results these companies are missing, or the image presented to potential customers.
Maintaining your online presence is your advertising, customer engagement, lead nurturing, and storefront. In other words, it’s essential to your business.
We’ve touched on many ways to maintain and increase your digital presence. Still, without proper management, you’ll slowly start to fade from search results, customer engagement, and other tools that establish lead generation and grow your business.
The management needed to increase web presence is time-consuming. To build your business online, you’ll need to know the strategies and tools used by successful digital marketing agencies. Contact The Light Digital to learn how our agency can manage your online presence successfully.
