For the past two decades, having an online presence has been an important part of promoting your business and connecting with customers. The pandemic showed just how essential an online presence is for almost all businesses as the world adopts a more hybrid way of living, working, and shopping.
Having an online presence is more important than ever when it comes to building your brand, increasing your credibility, and managing your reputation. If you’re not active online, sharing customer reviews, engaging with your audience, and keeping an eye on your online presence with services like website monitoring, you’re restricting how new business prospects can learn about what you can do for them. Whatever sector you’re in, adapting your marketing strategy to combine both online and offline can help you to seize the opportunities presented by the ever-changing digital world.
What Is An Online Presence?
Your online presence can be defined by how easy it is to find your business when searching for relevant keywords online, or how many virtual touchpoints a customer can interact with when they want to find out more about your brand, products, and services. If you have a strong online presence, then you will be very visible on the internet and on social media, making it a lot easier for potential new clients to discover you.
At its most basic, having a website and making sure you’re active on relevant social media platforms are both important. Creating a Google Business listing can also quickly display your contact information and encourage people to head to your website when they search online.
Beyond this, you can also use online tools to create other digital spaces. This can boost virtual connections with your customers and even help you to facilitate online service delivery. Platforms like WhatsApp, TikTok, YouTube, and Zoom can all be used, as long as they are relevant to the audience that you’re trying to reach and the nature of your business.
During the pandemic, it became even more important for a lot of businesses who couldn’t rely on their physical space to find and retain new customers. Some owners of companies were able to quickly adapt and build new revenue streams, such as fitness studios that ran classes online, restaurants that offered home delivery, and estate agents used video platforms to give house hunters virtual tours of properties they were trying to sell. It’s predicted that online sales will have reached levels not previously expected until 2035 by 2025. This rapid acceleration will have a lasting impact on our economy.
Companies that didn’t adapt, suffered. Large companies were able to recover, but for a smaller business with less of an infrastructure to fall back on, a big loss could be crippling.
With lockdown restrictions ending around the world, now is the time for businesses to build on the technology investments that were made out of necessity in order to sustain and grow their longer-term futures.
For a lot of retailers, this will mean offering customers a choice of ways to browse, buy, and return products, and to connect and communicate with your brand. Businesses will need to merge e-commerce, mobile commerce, and social channels, potentially alongside a physical store experience. Here are some ways to help to increase your online presence.
Optimize Your Website for Search Engines and Mobile
Most people search online for a product or service. Most businesses understand the importance of having a website, but it is vital to make sure that this site is optimized to make it as visible as possible on search engines.
When you write your website copy or listing products, make sure you use relevant keywords that your customers might be using in order to find a business like yours. You should also create a Google Business Listings page and fill in every information field on there as accurately as you can, including your phone number, address, website, location on maps, images, and reviews. This can show that your brand is legitimate and improve your chances of customers seeing and clicking through to your website.
You also need to make sure your website is optimized for mobile. More and more people are using their smartphones to complete everyday activities, including mobile searches and mobile payments. This is an essential step for user experience, but as people increasingly search for products and services on smartphones, rather than desktops, it’s also important to make sure that potential customers can find you. You can see how your website performs by using Google’s Mobile Friendly Test page.
Develop Your Content Marketing Strategy
Most B2B buyers consume branded content through a business’s website and consume thriteen pieces of branded content a month.
Content is a really good way for any business to improve its online profile, interact with the customers and build up trust. Content can mean creating a lot of engaging assets, such as blogs, videos, whitepapers, or social media posts. By hosting content like this on a series of digital channels, each one will also highly boost your chances of being discovered online.
The kind of content and the right place to post it will be unique to your business and audience. Whatever you create, it must share your brand’s story and purpose or clearly communicate the benefits and value of your business. This could also be a good way to monetise your expertise and improve the core product or service that you offer, as a lot of businesses did over lockdown.
If you are a B2B business, you should keep in mind that most B2B buyers will see your website as one of the most important content channels. Use the insights that can be provided by your website and social media analytics to keep track of how well your content is performing so you can make sure that what you produce is tailored to your audiences.
Use Video As Part Of Your Online Presence Strategy
More and more businesses are using video as a marketing tool. Video marketing has been rapidly growing in prominence over the last few years, with more and more marketers across a wide range of industries starting to use the tool to their advantage. During Covid-19, this became very important for a lot of businesses as a way to engage with their customers in spite of physical restrictions.
A survey carried out by Semrush in 2020 showed that 41% of marketers said that video was the most efficient marketing tool they used, while 61% praised repurposing old content. If you are just getting started with using video, you could turn a dormant blog post into a video, or showcase the benefits or features of some of your products in a new and engaging way.
Build A Community. Focus On Brand Purpose
Most consumers want brands to use social media to help to connect with each other.
Now is the time to make sure that your brand values really shine through. Sharing a clear, consistent, and compelling brand story across your content and the online channels that you use is vital, with social media being a key platform.
The trick is to focus on the channels that are best suited to your customer. For B2B customers, that could be prioritizing LinkedIn or Twitter, while for other types of business with younger audiences, this could mean exploring newer platforms like TikTok. As lockdown showed, it is possible to create strong relationships with your customers online, so find some new way to include them in your virtual world.
