Online Presence
Your online presence is just as important as your physical presence to the customer. The way your company is positioned on social media, website, business email or even blog influences the image that your brand conveys to the final consumer.
What is Online Presence?
It's how your business appears online. This involves posts you create on social media, your website and blog, and even content you don't control, like customer reviews on search engines. A good digital presence can lead to growth of up to 80% in a company's sales volume.
As is the space your company occupies on the internet, online presence is the space your company occupies on the internet and includes:
- Your site
- Accounts on different social media platforms
- Search engines like Bing, Google or Yahoo where your business appears
- Any Paid Online Advertising or Per Click Ads
- Profile your business in business directories and directories (such as Yelp and Google My Business)
There are so many channels that the biggest difficulty for small and medium-sized companies is to adopt a really effective and consistent strategy to strengthen their digital presence. This is because the options on the internet are almost endless and it is very easy to end up investing in too many strategies or platforms at once.
What are the fundamental elements of a Online presence?
As we mentioned, digital marketing channels are numerous and constantly expanding these days. This means it's important to have a solid marketing strategy to develop, implement and manage your digital presence across these channels. For this, you need to have some basic channels for customers to find you in the digital environment.
Website is the showcase of your business
Your company's website is the centerpiece of a digital presence. When potential customers want to know more about your brand or business, your website is often the first place they go. As such, everything from the About Us page to the landing pages for products and services needs to be optimized and refined.
This means that consistent branding, useful information, responsive design, and streamlined page navigation are important for a high-quality customer experience. With these attributes in place, you can help shape your brand image as authentic and trustworthy, making a big impact on users and driving sales.
Social networks and the online presence
A social media presence is essential to a modern day digital marketing strategy. When it comes to humanizing your brand and increasing recognition, social networks are the ones that weigh the most in the balance.
It is estimated that, worldwide, there are more than 3 billion active users on social networks. And, if we consider data from a survey carried out in 2021, stating that 45% of these users turn to social networks when looking for a product or service, we are talking about a market of more than 1 billion people.
Importance and benefits of a strategic online presence
Having a well-established online presence is critical to attracting new customers and developing your business, be it any size or industry.
When this online presence manages to be very strategic, well developed and elaborated based on data and behavior of your customers, it is possible:
If you don't already have an online presence, you need to be aware. Your competitor not only has an online presence, but also a very well-planned and strategic one. Therefore, by being present on the web, you can compete with another company on the other side of town, in addition to another city, state and even country.
You may even think it's too much but know that your potential customer is on the internet, and he is being bombarded daily by these other companies.
To generate good and constant sales, it is necessary to communicate with the customer. For that, you need to create a strategy that can strengthen the image of your business.
The best part is that digital marketing gives you the chance to segment your publications, meaning you can only communicate with people you know are more likely to convert to customer status.
Whether through content, publications or even direct messages on social networks, the ability to communicate is an excellent conversion booster.
Web visibility allows your business not only to be visible to those who are looking for you, but people who don't even know about your brand, using strategies such as SEO and an optimized and strategic website to attract customers.
Thus, in addition to always achieving visibility even further, it is possible to always be offering informational content and dealing with the bond of trust between your brand and your customer.
Have you ever Googled a brand and didn't find it? If so, it is normal to have that feeling of distrust: “Does this company really exist?”. This is normal.
It is an almost understood knowledge of ours that what is not in Google does not exist, after all we are talking about the largest search engine in the world.
Having a well-established online presence then gives you that authority and credibility.
Imagine that earlier downtown analogy. Having a online presence is not just having a store located strategically, but several, which will manage to reinforce the image of your business as being very visible and with authority in what you do.
Know that not having a online presence does not prevent a customer from talking about your brand online (positively or negatively) but being there not only gives you the right to respond, but also gives you visibility.
When we look at the sum of all the previous benefits, it is very clear that the sales numbers tend to increase as a consequence of the previous actions.
Being able to be present in the market, communicating well with people, having a strong brand and more, will bring much more sales to your company.
In a more connected world, most of users search the internet before buying and this includes physical stores. In other words, the online presence impacts all channels.
The 3 pillars of online presence
When designing and planning your business' online presence, don't forget the four fundamental pillars:
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Quality of content
Selling is important, but your goal should be focused on really helping your customer, producing content, whether on the blog or on social media, that is of interest to him and really helps him. Sales will be a consequence of this!
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Transparent positioning
The content, posts, intentions, marketing campaigns and other points more, need to have the identity and real values in which the company believes.
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Monitoring
One of the main qualities of online marketing is the ability to work with metrics and objectives. Make use of the data and information, like the number of visitors, products or services sold the most, etc to build your strategies based on monitoring and reach consolidated results.
Conclusion: Go Online or Go Home!
Contact us! ON IT HUB team will prepare an adequate plan specifically for your business to enter or even reinforce your company's online presence.
