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Having an online presence is one of the most important aspects of running a business in this modern, digital age. In fact, with the majority of customers and clients finding and engaging with brands solely online, studies have shown that they are unlikely to support a brand if they don’t online presence.
So, whether you are just starting or you want to improve your online presence, there are several things you have to get in place first. We decided to take a look and unpack ways that you can improve your brand’s digital visibility. We took a look at what companies are doing globally to ascertain what is working for them.
Create a Blueprint of Your Goals and Strategies
The first thing to do is step back and know what you want to achieve first.
Who are your customers? What are their interests and behaviors? What are they responding to?
When you have a clear understanding of who your customers are, you can start creating a strategy and map out a plan for what type of content and marketing will actually impact them. From there, you can start diving down into the particulars. What channels will you be using? What will you be doing on the channels?
Take Instagram, for example. You will need to define goals for your Instagram growth before setting anything into motion. So, look at what kind of content needs to go out and what formats you can post it in. Will your customers respond to Stories? Are they more interested in posts? Do they comment and convert?
The point of social media channels is to create an engaged community, and knowing what that community wants is the first step in converting them.
Focus on Heightening SEO
SEO is one of those elements that just simply becomes more and more prominent and more and more important. And the secret recipe behind SEO is your content.
Not only do you need to ensure that your content is informative and educational for your customers but you also need to make sure that it is rich with keywords to ensure that you are seen on search engines.
Google will regularly scrape your site and social media platforms to understand where to categorize you and where to rank you on search results. So, keyword research is vital to make sure that you have the right keywords for your clients to actually find you.
SEO can be incredibly resource-intensive. Not only do you need to be producing content continuously, but you will need to know the technicalities of SEO to ensure that your pages are totally optimized. Things like word count, H1 and H2 headings, link building, meta descriptions and slugs all count for your SEO.
If you do not have the time or capacity to roll this out by yourself, you can consider hiring professionals who can help you improve your SEO.
Map Out Content and Campaigns Well in Advance
Successful companies do not post content on the fly. Well, the majority of the content that is. In some cases, real-life stories can be shared, which is highly effective. But, campaigns, themes, and content are planned well in advance.
If you have not already, create a content calendar for your company. Map out what is coming up over the next few months. Are there holidays, changes of seasons, or industry-related days? Use this as a guide for your content strategy and work posts and channels from that.
Remember, your messaging needs to be uniform across platforms. So, start with blog posts and flesh out emails, social posts, and paid ads around that. Weekly themes are a great way to get your community engaged and start increasing those conversion rates.
Measure, Monitor, and Track Everything
How will you know what is working and what isn’t without having any data? Many companies rely solely on sales to measure success and that will not help with your future content strategies.
You can get data and metrics from several places. First, your social channels will provide you with click-through, open rate, and conversion rate statistics. Your email platform will also provide you with the success rates of all of your emails.
You can then combine this with your Google Analytics metrics to have a full understanding of where your customer is coming from, how they behave on your site, and what they respond to. Merge all of this information together and use it to create a future content strategy based on what you know will work.
Conclusion
It is important to understand that getting the process right, and getting that visibility will take time. In fact, it usually takes around six months for digital marketing to start working. So, be patient and don’t give up.
