Building an online presence is a challenging, time-consuming, and lengthy task. Many fail at it from the beginning. Others stop working on it as soon as they establish some online presence and notice their brand growing.
If you want your brand to survive and thrive in the online market, which it can definitely do these days, you need to learn that growing an online presence is a work in progress. You need to put a lot of effort into creating an online presence for a new brand. Then, you need to continue putting effort into keeping your online presence good.
This is not something that happens overnight, but you should not give up on the idea to be active as a brand online.
Why do you need a great online presence?
Most of the marketing these days is done online, as well as a big amount of the purchasing decisions and communication with customers. We are talking about an incredible, massive reach. Just on social media, there are over 3.5 billion active users today, so imagine the opportunities that this offers you.
People spend hours of their time every day on the Internet. So, whether you are a small or big business, service-based or software company, an exclusively online store, or a brick-and-mortar shop, online presence is everything nowadays.
We are not just talking about putting your company on Google so that customers can find it if they search your name. One of your first steps should be to create a Google business profile but to build a strong online presence, you need much more than that.
You need to get your brand’s message to the target audience. The idea isn’t to wait for word of mouth to do the marketing for you. It’s to get your content to the right people, build relationships with them, and grow your brand.
Today, 83% of customers will visit a store based on the info they found online. They’ll look for information in different places to make sure that your business is safe and good for them. Even local consumers search online for products and services in their area.
While online existence such as having a website or a Google business account gets you on the map, you need an online presence, too. This is tied to your visibility, consistency, quality of content, credibility, as well as your reputation.
Tips on how to grow your online presence and boost customer relationships
Making your brand discoverable is one thing. Making it recognized and trusted is another level of an online presence. Below you will learn about the most useful tips to achieve both.
Provide quality, versatile content
Brands need to be very present online to attract more customers. We are not just talking about creating content regularly. We are also talking about being present in many places including your website, social media, emails, links on other sites, forums, etc.
If you want your online presence to yield results, you need to consistently create quality, valuable content. Since you’ll be using different platforms for this, you need versatile types of content, too.
You can create blog posts, and podcasts, write ebooks and guides, post multimedia on Instagram, and creative tweets on Twitter. The options are never-ending these days, but if you want to really appeal to your audience, you need to find the trending types of content that work at the moment.
Let us help you with this.
Videos enjoy more popularity than ever
Today, videos make over 82% of all consumer internet traffic, which is 15 times higher than it was in 2015. As a result, most marketers use this as a strategy to attract more leads and build their online presence.
That being said, videos should definitely take a big part of your content creation.
Automatically generate subtitles for your videos
If you want to boost the SEO of your video content, you need some written text to complement it. What better way to do this than to add subtitles to your videos? There are guides that can teach you how to automatically generate subtitles, as well as provide you with the tool to make it happen.
Transcribing your text for hours is no longer necessary, and adding written text to your videos will take minutes of your time. In return, you will get a better SEO ranking because you’ll be using your keywords, as well as making your content more inclusive. Subtitles are recommended because they make your content more accessible, easier to understand, and can be used by people with disabilities.
Written content is still king
Have you heard the phrase: “content is king?” This should be your motto when creating content to build your online presence. While videos and quality images are trending today, written content remains your best way to rank highly on search engines, as well as provide more information to your consumers.
Don’t publish any content that you don’t feel is the best version it can be. Even if this takes time, it is totally worth it when it boosts your online presence.
Join forums and be present across the web
Creating content solely for your website or social media channels is a big mistake. If you want to build an online presence, you need to widen your reach. Join forums and share your knowledge and content in communities. Use them to communicate with your consumers and learn more about them. Use this to establish your credibility as a brand.
One great idea is to create content for other websites and social media channels. We are talking about guest posts where you may or may not build links to your site. The idea is to put your brand out there. If you can also add link building into the picture, even better.
Publish other content, too
A mix of 70/30 or 60/40 is a great rule to follow these days when it comes to social media. Just like you can create content that others will post and publish, you can use others’ content to have a more active online presence.
This makes your job much easier since, when your brand gets bigger, you’ll need tons of new content to keep your online presence great. The idea is to share content from other sources and other people 60 to 70% of the time, and share your own custom content for the remaining time.
Naturally, if you are sharing someone else’s content, you need to make sure to inform readers that it’s not yours.
Do UX research regularly
The size and success of your online presence depend not only on the amount of content but also on its quality. If you want to get closer to your customers and grow your presence online, you need to learn more about them.
How do you do this? You do it by performing UX research.
The task of businesses is to know as much as they can about their consumers and provide them with the solutions they need. To do this, you can use tools like Maze that facilitate the data collection process and have tests that you can customize in no time.
With the data you collect through UX research and testing, you can decide on your next products, improve your offerings, select the right price, and create valuable content that works.
Be engaging and social
Posting on social channels and your website is just half of your job. The other half is to be social and engaging. When people want to communicate, you should be available to them. After all, you’ve been using all those strategies to grow your online presence and get their attention. Don’t lose it once you get it.
When you have channels and profiles that you regularly post on, make sure to use them to engage with the consumers, too. Respond to their comments, talk to them in messages, and start conversations wherever possible.
Your online presence has the goal to turn potential customers into buyers. The thing in between are your leads, and it is your job to take them from leads to actual customers.
Optimize it all for mobile
At this moment, there are over 5.3 billion mobile users in the world. It is safe to say that the majority of them use smartphones. THey use them on a daily bases, so they do most of their searches, and even their purchases from their phones.
So, if you want a massive online presence, you need to consider the mobile consumers, too.
Everything you create online needs to be optimized for mobile. With social media, your job is already done by the platform developers. However, your site needs to load quickly, have optimized images, and the design needs to be highly responsive.
Be patient and it will happen!
The most important thing to know and remember is that this takes time. Don’t give up – the outcome of a great online presence can be tremendous for your brand! When it starts working, you’ll know it. The most important thing is to be persistent, learn from your mistakes, track your progress, and listen to your customers.
