It is essential to have an online presence for your business. Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar, service industry, or eCommerce company, it’s important that people can find you on the internet. This chapter will show you how to create and maintain an effective web identity for your small business!
Here are the main topics of these chapter in case you want to jump forward.
First, let me explain exactly what an online presence means.
What Is an Online Presence?
An online presence is a digital footprint your company has on the internet. This includes websites, blogs, social media accounts, and all other marketing platforms you may have. Your goal should be to reach potential customers in as many places as possible! Statistics show that 89% of consumers will buy, 85% will recommend and 91% will visit the website after following a business on social media.
What Does an Online Presence Do?
In short, it drives traffic to your website (or mobile app)!
For example, if you create content shared on social media or have a catchy headline, it will attract potential customers who want to learn more about your company. But how do they find you? By searching for your business name! It’s important to ensure that when people search for what you offer and where they can buy from, your website is one of the top results.
What Are Some Other Benefits?
Aside from driving traffic to your site, a strong online presence will help you build brand awareness and be more memorable to potential customers. If people see your posts every day, they’re likely to remember who you are! And if someone needs something, in particular, the chances are that they will remember your company name and find it faster than someone who has never seen you before. According to Google, 97% of consumers search for a local business online
Analyzing Your Current Online Presence
But before you create your online presence, it’s important to analyze your presence online by doing an online presence audit (OPA). An online presence audit will provide you with important information about your presence and how to improve it.
To analyze your current online presence, you’ll need to do an audit of each platform. For example, if you have a website with social media links or are active on various platforms like Facebook and Instagram for marketing purposes – this will be considered part of your digital footprint!
OPA basic steps:
- Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each platform.
- Figure out what is missing and find a way to fill that gap (e.g., create a blog, start using certain hashtags).
- Create an action plan for each platform based on your audit!
You can also get a professional online presence audit by experts that will analyze every aspect of your presence online. You will also get a marketing strategy with step-by-step instruction personalized for your business, industry, brand, and goals.
How To Create an Online Presence
Now that we know the benefits of a strong online presence let’s talk about creating one for your business!
There are many ways to build an online footprint for your company, but let’s begin building your online business identity on the most important platforms. Then we will explore how to make sure that your web presence creates a strong online presence that consumers will find and see when they’re on the internet.
Creating Your Web Presence
Nowadays, if your business doesn’t have an online identity on platforms, it will make it nearly impossible to be found online. So creating your web presence on multiple platforms is the first step to creating an effective web presence.
Create Your Business Website
The first step in creating an online presence is to build a website. This is the most effective way of attracting traffic since it will be the first place people look for your company! In fact, most consumers will not consider doing business with a company that doesn’t have a website.
The first thing you need to decide is what kind of site you want – do you want something easy to navigate, or are you looking for something flashy? If your business has specific needs that require a specialized website, you may want to consider hiring a web designer.
If your needs are more general and you’re not sure about what kind of site would work best for your company – fear not! Many websites offer free or low-cost templates that can be customized with pictures and information.
Here’s an example: if you’re a coffee shop, the site might offer you templates with different pictures and colors for your website.
I suggest hiring a professional website design company that will help you build your business website on WordPress. A business website requires not only web designers but SEO experts, graphic designers, sales copywriters, etc.
Start a Business Blog
The next step is to start a blog! A successful blog will help grow your online presence by driving traffic back to your business’s home page or sales pages. Plus, it helps create brand awareness – people who are subscribed to your blog will start to feel familiar with you and become more interested in what you have to offer.
Keeping a consistent posting schedule is crucial for success when starting a blog! If people know that they can expect new content from your company regularly, they’ll likely come back often or subscribe.
Start Social Media Accounts
Now that you have your website and blog set up, it’s time to get on social media!
Social media is an effective way of building brand awareness since people will feel like they know who you are. It also gives potential customers a chance to interact with your company in real-time – this can be especially helpful if someone has a question and wants to find the answer.
There are many social media platforms that you can use, but Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube tend to be most popular – plus, they’re free!
Choose one platform that will best suit your company’s needs (for example, if you want something for more personal interactions with customers or something that will help you generate leads) and start building your presence!
It’s important to make sure that all of your social media channels have consistent branding to match your website so that people will recognize your logo, colors, and tagline anywhere they see it.
But designing your platforms and managing your daily posts can be overwhelming and time-consuming. That’s why I suggest you hire a social media marketing company that can help you grow your social media presence.
Create Your Google My Business Listing
Once you have your website, blog, and social media platforms up and running, it’s time to start thinking about creating a Google My Business listing.
This is an important step in building your online presence because once someone searches for what you offer or where they can buy from – if your business isn’t one of the top results, there’s a good chance they’ll skip over you.
Creating and optimizing your Google My Business listing should be on top of your list when building an online presence for your company – if you don’t have all these other steps in place, it will be difficult to rank well!
A few things to consider when creating a Google My Business Listing are website, phone number, street address, hours of operation, and photos.
Again, make sure that you optimize your GMB by ensuring that all of the information is filled out completely and your brand reflects your website.
You can get a digital marketing company to help you optimize your GMB and even manage your entire Google My Business listing so that you can focus on your business operations.
Build Citations
Next up is building citations. Citations are essential links to your website and blog from other websites (such as industry-related blogs).
When you build a citation, it will create an entry on the bottom of that page or post with information about where they found out more about your company – including the link back to your business!
This is an easy way to grow your online presence because it’s all about putting your business out there and letting people find you. Some of the most popular online directories are:
- Yelp
- Yellowpages
- Foursquare
- Apple Maps
- BBB
- Mapquest
There are many more directories to consider. If you would like to get your business listed quickly, you can use a business listing service. A business listing service can create hundreds of quality citations for your business to help build your online presence.
It’s also important to create advertising accounts on Facebook and Google AdWords.
Create Your Advertising Accounts
Creating an advertising account is necessary for any business, but it’s more important to create a successful online presence.
When using Facebook Business Manager or Google AdWords, make sure that your website and social media channels are also linked to the ad. Hence, people know exactly where they can find out more information about what you offer.
It would be best if you tried to keep your ads targeted so that you’re only spending money on people who are most likely to be interested in what you offer.
For example, if you sell hiking equipment, then targeting “people who like the outdoors” is a good way to save some money and make sure that your ad reaches an audience of similar-minded individuals.
It’s important to create these ad accounts and constantly monitor them so that you’re not wasting money on an audience that will never become a customer. Perfect your digital advertising strategy will take time but can be very beneficial to the growth of your company.
Developing Your Presence Online
Now that you have created your web presence platforms, it’s time to implement marketing strategies so that people can find you online. You will need to optimize your website for SEO, create valuable content like blog articles, how-to guides, social media posts, and ad copy.
Let’s begin with…
Master SEO
Optimizing your website for SEO is a critical part of having an online presence.
It’s important to make sure that you follow these guidelines so that the search engines can crawl and index all of the content on your site:
- Produce unique title tags on every page
- Write compelling meta descriptions
- Make sure to add headings such as one H1 and multiple H2s, H3s, etc.
- Use keywords in page titles
- Check your keyword density (between 10% – 25%)
- Take advantage of keyword proximity (near to each other)
- Add the right keywords to your URLs
When it comes to meta descriptions, keep them brief, so they don’t take up too much space on the page or search engine results pages. You can also use HTML tags like paragraphs to make this information easier for readers to understand with bulleted lists or numbered lists.
Ensure that you use keywords in your page title and ALT tags to help with search engine visibility.
If you feel a bit overwhelmed, you can hire an SEO company to help you rank your website on the search engines, which will bring in tons of organic traffic and more revenue.
Creating Valuable Content
Next up is creating valuable content like blog articles, how-to guides, social media posts, and ad copy.
Create a steady stream of quality content so that people know what they’re going to get if they land on your site, follow you on social media, or see an ad for what you offer.
It’s important to be consistent with the content posted to know what to expect and when new content will come out.
Be sure to review all of your work and make corrections as needed. If you don’t have time to write blog articles, you can hire a content marketing agency to help you.
Post on Social Media Channels Often
Once you have created a steady stream of content, it’s time to create social media posts.
It would help if you were using your company blog as the basis for these posts to know where they can find more information about what you offer and who your target audience is.
Be sure to post new articles with links back to them on Facebook and Twitter so that it’s easy for your followers to read them.
This will help you build a strong online presence and reach people who wouldn’t otherwise know about what you offer.
You can also hire a social media branding company to create contests, quizzes, and more to engage new and existing followers and get more leads for your business.
Create Your Ad Copy
The next step to building your online presence is creating the ad copy for your Facebook, Google, or other types of advertising accounts.
Your ad should be specific about what it’s promoting, include a strong call to action, and, most importantly – be interesting.
If you’re not trying to sell something or promote a sale, don’t make it seem like you are!
This is the one place where you can really get creative with your message so that people will take notice of what you have to offer and want more information.
If you’re not sure what to say or how to promote a sale, talk with your advertising account representative, and they’ll be able to help come up with something perfect for your business.
Build Your Email List
Now that you are creating content regularly and posting updates on social media, it’s time to start a mailing list.
This is an easy and free way for people interested in what you have to offer to sign up themselves to receive the latest information via email.
You’ll need permission (opt-in) before you send out emails, so be sure to include a link for signup at the bottom of every blog post and social media post that you publish.
When it comes time to email your list with something new, make sure that you’re simply sharing content like links or articles – not asking them for anything other than engagement.
You’ll want to send out at least three emails per month to keep your list engaged and interested in what you have to offer.
Create Lead Magnets
To get your email list growing, you’ll need to offer them an incentive that they can’t refuse.
A lead magnet is a great way for people interested in what you have to offer to sign up and provide their contact information to receive emails from you.
You don’t want it to be just any old lead magnet, though – you want it to be something that ties into what your business offers.
Use the free lead magnets offered by OptinSkin as an example of how to create a strong call-to-action and clear benefits for people who sign up. Take a look at How To Create a Lead Magnet that Actually Works to learn more.
Publish Your Content on Other Sites
Next up is promoting your content to reach the people who might not know about your company or what you offer.
Several sites will allow you to post and share your content for free. Still, if you want to use more specialized sites like LinkedIn, where there is an opportunity to reach higher-level professionals than just posting on Facebook all day long, then you’ll need to sign up for a paid account.
Once you’ve created your LinkedIn profile and started posting content, then be sure that each post is focused on one thing – like what it’s about or why people should read it.
If someone isn’t interested in reading the article, they can click away without feeling obligated to do so.
This will allow you to reach a larger audience and build your following more quickly than if all the posts are mixed without any real focus on what it’s about or why people should read it.
Reach Consumers with Facebook Ads
Next up are Facebook ads for lead generation, where you’re able to target specific demographics, such as age, gender, and location.
It’s an easy way to get your Facebook page in front of the people you actually want it to be seen by instead of just hoping that they will find you on their own, and then for them to like or share what others have posted about – such as events happening near them.
Facebook ads are also a great place for you to promote your products or services so that you’ll get more exposure and generate new leads.
Every ad should be engaging, informative, and target a specific audience – not just thrown up without any real thought about what it’s trying to say.
It takes time for Facebook ads to work their way through the system, but once they’ve done so, they’re a great way to generate leads.
No matter what you do, be sure that your ads are engaging and interesting. You can also look into social media advertising services to create the perfect strategy and ad copy.
Reach Consumers with Google AdWords
Google AdWords is a great way to drive leads for your business through online marketing campaigns.
You’re able to target specific demographics like age and location, so you’ll be advertising only where it matters most to get the best return on investment (ROI).
It’s an easy-to-use system that takes time before it works its way through the system, but once it does, your ROI will be well worth what you put in.
There are many different types of campaigns that you can run with AdWords to drive traffic and generate leads for your business:
Search Network only (people type something into the search engine)
Display Network only (people see your ad while browsing the web)
Remarketing Lists for search ads (you target people who have already visited your site, which is helpful to get them back on your website and generate more leads). Google AdWords requires the use of the right keywords, A/B testing, and budget optimization. But you can hire a pay-per-click marketing agency to help you get started.
Use Google Analytics To Monitor Your Traffic
Google Analytics can provide valuable information about how many visitors are landing on your website, where they’re coming from, and what content they’re reading.
This is a free service that you can sign up for to track your website’s traffic, which will help you generate more leads with the right campaigns through Google Adwords or other paid platforms.
The reports are easy-to-read charts so that it won’t take too much time out of your busy schedule to get the information you need to make things work better for your business.
Final Thoughts on How To Create an Online Presence
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this guide, and you should now be feeling confident about how to create an online presence for your business. But there are many other topics that we didn’t have time to cover—and some that will need more than one chapter!
That means it is time for the next installment of our Small Business Marketing Guide series. Stay tuned because Chapter 10 is all about marketing automation and creating effective campaigns with email autoresponders or social media posting tools.
