9 Tips on How to Build a Strong Online Presence for Your Business
A quick research will show you one thing most successful global businesses have in common – they’ve built a strong presence online that makes them recognizable across all platforms.
The internet is a goldmine, and only businesses capable of harnessing its potential will reap the massive rewards, which include global recognition, a huge customer base, and mouthwatering revenue.
This article discusses important tips to build a strong online presence for your business and enjoy the many rewards the internet offers its users.
Why You Should Strive to Have a Strong Online Presence
A strong online presence is essential for your business’s growth, as it determines how well your brand is recognized. Solid brand recognition is vital for acquiring and retaining customers and enhancing your business success.
With over 5 billion people online, visibility and reach are gold, and smart businesses will go any length to acquire them. Imagine having your products or services displayed before 5 billion people. Even a conversion rate of 0.0001 percent (5,000 people) is enough to transform your business for good.
A strong online presence also enables you to stay competitive in your industry, as many competitors are likely online. That means any slack in your online presence could mean losing your customers and potential customers to your competitors.
A strong online presence has numerous benefits; only smart businesses understand and strive to achieve them.
9 Tips on How to Build a Strong Online Presence for Your Business
Here are vital tips on how you can establish a strong online presence for your business:
- Create a Professional Website
Websites are among the most important tools to build a strong online presence. It performs the same role as your on-field sales rep, giving visitors a rundown of your business, offers, products, and how they can benefit them.
Ensure you build a responsive and relevant website for your business. This ensures your website visitors gain the value they seek and don’t have to leave immediately because of a bad user interface. For instance, research shows that 40% of people leave a website when it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Building a website with a great user interface that provides all the information your target audience seeks easily earns you their trust and helps turn them into customers.
- Have a Social Media Presence
There are approximately 4.6 billion social media users worldwide. A strong presence on social media enhances your overall online presence by a great margin.
Identify the social media platforms where your target audience is more dominant and make them your home. Maintain an active presence by consistently publishing posts relevant to your target audience, engaging with your commenters, and posting user-generated content. Also, conduct polls, give freebies, and do everything you can to get recognized by your target audience on your chosen platforms.
- Build an Email List
A McKinsey & Company study proved that email marketing is 40 times more effective than social media marketing. While the study is nine years old, it still holds water, as a recent study by Mailmunch shows that 60% of internet marketers believe email marketing to be more effective than social media.
That is not to undermine social media, as the platform is a huge goldmine for marketers. However, this is to show you how incredibly powerful email marketing is.
Therefore, you must build an email list and send regular newsletters to your customers to inform, educate, and engage them. Personalize your email and use clear and persuasive call-to-action to get a high click-through rate.
- Have a Strong Content Marketing Game
Content marketing is vital to building a strong online presence for your business. Your target audience, at different stages of their buyer journey, seeks relevant information.
Develop a content marketing plan that includes different content types, such as blog posts, infographics, images, videos, etc., that provide answers to the questions your target audience asks.
By publishing relevant and helpful content daily, you’ll stay relevant online, attract high-quality leads, and increase your conversion rate.
- Be Active Online 24/7
Another trick to building a strong online presence is to be online 24/7. That is, making yourself available to your audience by posting and engaging them at all times.
There are many tools available to help you maintain an active online presence. Chatbots and virtual assistants, for example, can provide your customers with the required information when you’re not immediately available.
- Go Big on SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) has proven to be one of the best ways to maintain a strong online presence. By targeting relevant keywords, you’re showing up in the faces of your target audience, making them recognize you as an authority in your niche.
Therefore, you must optimize your website to rank at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs).
- Don’t Neglect Paid Advertising
While SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing present cost-effective ways of promoting your business, you shouldn’t neglect paid advertising.
Ensure to have a paid advertising strategy that includes Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads. This helps your business reach a wider audience faster, as the above-listed free strategies require more time and effort.
- Be Consistent with Your Branding
Maintaining the same appearance on all platforms helps increase brand recognition and build trust among your target audience. Therefore, you must use the same logo, color scheme, and tone of voice in all your online channels, from websites to social media and email marketing.
Analyze and Optimize Regularly
Part of building a strong online presence is consistently monitoring your performance to see what’s working and what needs to be optimized.
Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Hubspot, Klaviyo, etc., to track your business’s online presence performance on search engines, social media, and email marketing. Then, use the insights gained to optimize your strategy for more effective performance.
Conclusion
A strong online presence enhances all your marketing efforts, ensuring you gain the right visibility, stay relevant in the eyes of your target audience, and build a recognizable brand identity across multiple platforms. This improves your overall business success, increasing customer acquisition and retention rates.
Hopefully, this article has given you insights on staying active online and gaining enough visibility to drive business goals. See
