Leveraging Your Corporate Website to Build Your Online Presence
Online marketing is a great opportunity for new or established businesses to build their brand and boost financial growth. An online presence represents an individual or business entity on the internet.
The stronger your company’s online presence, the more engagement and visibility you will command across all digital channels, including websites, email, and social media. When you establish an online presence, you can now identify and focus on platforms that are most effective for your business. Here are a few tips to help you use your website to build an online presence.
Target and Retain Customers on Social Media
Social media usage is widespread with billions of social network users across the world. However, you do not have to be present on every social site but focus on those that are popular with your target market. Businesses should register on all social sites relevant to their respective sector to ensure that no one uses their name on other platforms. Having a presence in the most popular platforms that your target market is using will help grow your online presence and tremendously boost your business.
Build An Online Store
If you want to sell products online, you should have an e-commerce solution. You can choose to build an e-commerce platform on your website by incorporating e-commerce tools, use e-commerce packages from web hosts or sign on with hosted providers like BigCommerce or Shopify, or create a store or stores of mega virtual marketplaces like eBay, Etsy, Walmart, and Amazon. You can also choose to use all these options to have a better online presence and widen the market for your goods and services. With most consumers browsing and making purchases on their smartphones, you should ensure your corporate website and online stores are mobile-friendly.
Master SEO
With algorithms changing daily, search engine optimization is one of the best tactics that businesses can use to build an online presence. Mastering SEO is the first step to showing up online when consumers are searching. SEO can either be off-site SEO or on-site SEO. On-site SEO deals with content, where you use keyword research, including external and internal links and develop educational content that matches the search queries of your target audiences. Conversely, off-site SEO pays attention to the more technical things such as ensuring your website is correctly set up, loads quickly, and has a simple URL structuring. Off-site SEO also includes using backlinks to build credibility and optimizing off-page and on-page SEO using website audit tools and SEO tools.
Build Brand Awareness Using Content
Content is still an essential element for businesses that want to build an online presence. The more relevant content you create and post online or on your website, the more opportunities your target consumers will have to discover your business. Ensure you continuously add content to your social channels and corporate website. You can also do guest posts for websites that your target customers use to help spread brand awareness.
Ensure Your Business is Updated on All Online Directories
Today, customers increasingly rely on online business directories, which is an online listing of businesses to discover services and products they need. You can begin by claiming your free listing on Google My Business. Your business may have a listing already, but if you have not claimed it, then it may be incomplete or not correct. You can use Google My Business data to create listings on other local maps and search directories. You can start with the top online directories such as Google My Business, Yahoo, Bing Places, Foursquare, and Yelp. Some industries may have their own online directory such as TripAdvisor and Houzz.
Be Active Online
For you to show up online, you need to be active online. This includes regularly posting on your owned properties, including social media accounts and your website. In addition, you can also be involved in other areas as well. For instance, you can engage your subscribers and followers on social media. If there is anything that everyone is talking about in your niche industry, ensure that you engage in the conversation.
Use Online Reviews to Convert More Customers
Ensure you claim your listing on online ratings and review websites. Most consumers discover new businesses when looking up other businesses. These websites help to build your online presence because consumers will frequently refer to these websites. You should take the time to respond to all reviews across different platforms, good or bad because your customers want to see you engaging with both negative and positive feedback to have more confidence in your ability to offer excellent customer service.
Build An Email List
One of the best ways of building your online presence is creating and growing an email list. An email list will help you engage with potential and current customers on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. To grow your email list, you should create gated content that users can sign up to receive. You can also utilize a call-to-action or CTA on your social media pages and website to promote your email newsletter. With newsletters, you can collect leads and emails and show you the customers and leads interested in your content. You can also utilize tools in your content management system to develop popups or slide-in CTAs designed for collecting email addresses.
An online presence means how easy it is to find a company or brand online. Because consumer behaviour has transformed over the years, businesses need to meet them online where they spend most of their time. An online presence is crucial for building your company’s reputation, providing visibility to your services or users, and increasing brand awareness when consumers are searching for businesses like yours.
Always remember that building a solid online presence needs effort, but will pay off over time with better brand awareness and increased sales in your industry.
