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Building a solid online presence is imperative in the digital age.
It’s where your customers are finding you. Even if your core service requires a brick-and-mortar establishment, individuals will turn to the internet to discover your company.
Here’s precisely why and how you should approach solidifying your brand’s online identity.
Put simply, if a business can be found anywhere on the internet, it has an online presence.
A robust online presence generally consists of an excellent website and fascinating social media accounts. Investing in your online branding in the early stages of your business can skyrocket your success.
More often than not, a business will have an online presence regardless of whether they are actively creating one.
Can your customers find you on Google Maps? Can they geotag on Instagram? Or leave a review on TripAdvisor? If any of these apply, then you already have the foundations of an online reputation.
Most businesses will struggle to achieve great success without an excellent online brand.
Because viewers convert to customers.
So, the most profitable businesses spend a great deal of time and money, developing an excellent website and engaging social media accounts. Providing customers with valuable information helps to build trust and shows readers that your product or service is the best around.
A strong online presence makes your business more credible, accessible, and helps to support the overall branding.
A flawless website is the fastest way to show the integrity of your brand.
First and most obviously, the website needs to look incredible and accurately represent your business. A website is a crucial building block in your overall branding, so the aesthetic must encompass your company identity.
Next, the website should function without fault. It should be fast to load and free of broken links. Customers will quickly leave a website that is full of glitches or slow to load.
Finally, your website must be discoverable. Unfortunately, most people never venture further than the first page of Google, with the majority clicking on one of the top three links. Therefore, you must implement a robust SEO strategy to enable potential customers to find your website.
Building a social media presence is the next building block for your online company.
However, especially in the early stages of your business, mastering all of the platforms is near impossible. The options include Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Tik Tok, requiring written, image, and video content combinations. Attempting to provide your audience will value on each of these will undoubtedly be unsuccessful.
Spend time considering the content that fits your brand and focus on one or two platforms. For fun, snappy video content, opt for Instagram and Tik Tok. On the other hand, if words are more your vibe, Twitter or even LinkedIn may be preferable. Pinterest is perfect for infographics and beautiful imagery, and the platform is well known for excellent click-through rates.
One of the best, organic ways to reach whole new customer bases is to create shareable content. Essentially, your readers will then do the marketing for you, sharing your blogs or social media posts to their followings.
However, you should be aware that there is a very fine line between enticing content and clickbait. Whilst headlines may draw people in (especially on social media), only valuable, interesting content will lead to shares.
Infographics work exceptionally well and can be created easily as an addition to your long form work.
When building your brand online, it’s easy to get bogged down with the numbers.
Reaching 100 website page views per day, or 10,000 Twitter followers, can feel like the key to success. But this is not necessarily the case.
The trick is to engage genuine customers, who are likely to convert to sales. This can, however, be especially difficult for service-based businesses, where location is crucial. For example, a viewer in Edinburgh will not utilise a hairdresser offering their services in Manchester.
This is where local SEO becomes even more critical. When search engines precisely understand where you are based, they can show you to your ideal customer base.
Building a relationship with other businesses and social media influencers can be a great way to get yourself noticed online.
Social media users are wise to constant paid for advertisements, which can look try-hard at best, and tacky at worst. Also, affiliating your company with another brand that doesn’t align with your beliefs can have serious repercussions later down the line.
However, authentic relationships will hugely help with your online presence. You will undoubtedly notice a flurry of additional viewers if another company mentions and links to your website.
Ensure you are reciprocating and keeping open communication channels to allow these relationships to organically blossom.
You can build a mailing list by taking the email address of your customers (with their consent) and storing them in a database. This helps create a personable relationship between yourself and the customer, allowing them exclusive insights into new products and sales.
Every email sent to these customers increases the chance of them heading directly to your website and making a sale. Ensure there is a call to action on every email issued, and monitor the response from your customers to help figure out which tactics work best for your audience.
Here at ClickSlice, our expertise is getting brands noticed online. We are SEO fanatics, aiming to boost your search engine rankings, drive new readers to your site, and convert them into customers.
We pride ourselves on being consistent, using data-driven and reliable techniques that have proved successful time and time again.
For a no-obligation chat about building your online presence, contact our friendly team today on 020 3287 3638 or hello@clickslice.co.uk.
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