According to Adaptive Marketing, 97% of consumers use the internet to find a business. That’s why having an online presence is important.
It helps consumers find your brand before they are aware you exist and it helps them learn about your reputation before making a purchase. Eventually, all of this information will play a role in your customer’s purchasing decision.
An online presence can be defined by how easy it is to find a brand or company online. It’s important for building your brand’s reputation, increasing brand awareness, and providing visibility to your products or services when users are searching for related keywords.
How to Improve Your Online Presence
- Produce content.
The more content you produce, the more opportunities you have to show up online. Having an online presence is all about showing up in search engines, on social media, and on sites like YouTube.
To start producing content, strategize what places you want to show up online. Do you want to be on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, etc?
Prioritize the sites your customers are active on (based on customer research) and start brainstorming content that is best-suited for those mediums.
For example, with YouTube, you’ll come up with video ideas — whereas on Instagram, you’ll come up with photo and caption ideas.
- Build an email list.
One of the top ways to build your online presence is to create and grow an email list. An email list will enable you to engage with current and potential customers on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
To grow your email list, you can create gated content that users have to sign-up to receive. Additionally, you can use a call-to-action (CTA) on your website and social media pages to promote your email newsletter. With a newsletter, you’re able to collect leads’ emails — additionally, it shows your leads and customers are interested in your content.
You can also use tools in your content management system (CMS) to create forms, slide-in CTAs, or popups that are designed to gather email addresses. For example, HubSpot offers an email marketing tool, free pop-up forms, and a free online form builder to help build an email list.
- Master SEO.
With algorithms changing every day, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best tactics to build your online presence.
The first step to showing up online when people are searching is to master SEO.
SEO can be divided into two categories — on-site SEO, and off-site SEO.
On-site SEO is all about the content. You’ll want to use keyword research, including internal and external links, and create educational content that likely matches your target audiences’ search queries, While With off-site SEO, you’ll pay attention to the more technical side of things. For example, you’ll want to make sure your site is set up correctly, has simple URL structuring, and loads quickly. Additionally, off-site SEO also includes building credibility with backlinks.
If you want to show up on Google, create a Google My Business account, and use Google’s keyword planner.
- Create value.
Overall, your brand or company’s goal is to make money. But before you can make money, you have to create value and be customer-centric.
One way to create value is to provide educational, free content online. Not only is this helpful for your customers, but it’ll also improve your online presence.
To get started, write out a list of your customer’s pain points and motivations. In other words, take a look at your buyer persona, then brainstorm content that would answer their questions. What information would help your customers? This will be the basis for your content strategy.
Another way to create value online is to give advice. You could do this through guest posting, responding to comments, or appearing on a podcast. Wherever your customers have questions, you should be answering them.
- Be active online.
In order to show up online, you have to be active online. This includes regularly posting your owned properties, including your website and social media accounts.
Social media is a great way to build your credibility and reputation and showcase your brand. When potential customers are researching your brand, the first place they’ll look is social media to see what you’re putting out there and what people are saying about you. If there’s something that everyone is talking about in your industry, you can engage in the conversation.
- Analyze your results.
Once you get started with a few tactics to build your online presence, it’s critical you analyze your results. I would suggest testing your strategies so you learn what works and what doesn’t.
In order to test your results, start out by deciding what metrics you’re using. If you’re working on your SEO, you might track your search engine results on Google. On the other hand, if you’re building an email list, you might track the number of subscribers, plus your open and click-through rates.
Keep in mind that these are long-term strategies. Some may take time to produce results. Additionally, some may be harder to track, like brand awareness. But that’s okay — just because results may be hard to track doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
- Personify your brand.
Building an online presence is a lot like building a brand. One tactic many companies use to build a brand is to personify their brand.
Having a clear brand helps users relate to your company and makes them want to engage with you, whether through a social media comment or by signing up for your email newsletter.
