Building a Digital Presence that Works for Your Business
Building a digital presence is a top priority for businesses today. However, you must know that building a strong online presence is not an easy task but one that requires effort, time, skill, consistency, and dedication. You should also know that businesses today recognize the need for online visibility and positioning; hence, newcomers and established digital brands must know that the market is even more competitive, making it challenging to retain their position and online visibility.
You are about to read a guide on building a solid digital presence and actionable tips on improving your online reputation.
Why Do You Need a Digital Presence?
Have you searched for a brand online and ended up with nothing? How did this make you feel? It can be a red flag because it makes the brand look like a scam. If this happens with your brand, then it will likely lose trust, and the desire to buy your product suffers greatly. This is why you need a digital presence.
The goal of building a digital presence is to increase your online visibility and make it easy for people to find you on the internet. This way, regardless of whether customers are looking for your business in particular or need the type of service you provide, they can find you and eventually become your clients.
However, the success of your digital presence includes not only your online visibility but your reputation as well.
So, how to build a strong digital presence and stay on the customer’s radar online?
Here are some of the best ways to make it happen in 2022:
How to Build and Manage Your Online Presence
1. Invest in Market Research
Your customers might not be the best content marketer or creator but their pain points matter a lot in the success of your content. To be able to do so, you need to learn what they like and dislike, analyze their behavior and preferred devices, and find out when and how they spend their time in the digital world.
Your audience’s needs are constantly evolving; hence your market research must constantly evolve. So to make your online presence relevant and ensure you will not be wasting time and resources barking up the wrong tree, you should regularly update your data and customer profiles.
2. Build a Top-Quality Website
If you are serious about building a solid digital presence in 2022, you need a top-quality well-functioning website. This is your online business card and digital home, and to make a good impression it needs to be well-made.
Below are a few guidelines to define your site;
- Informational. Your website is the digital channel you have the most control over, and, as such, it has to provide concise and user-friendly all the information the customer may need. Otherwise, people will turn to third parties to find the answers to their questions, and what they learn about your brand from these sources may not be verified, comprehensive, or true. What’s more, while they are researching you, they may choose a competitor.
- Modern. A quality website gives you credibility and authority. We all know the feeling of distrust that an old-fashioned website inspires, especially if, on top of that, it loads slowly, isn’t mobile-friendly, and is confusing to navigate. All these are red flags that may cost you paying clients.
- Optimized. User experience is not only about the people but matters to search engine bots as well. If your website doesn’t deliver, you will find it difficult to rank and build a presence in organic search.
In nutshell, your website has to be user-friendly, functional, good-looking, and tailored to your business needs. To that end, you should consider hiring a WordPress agency or other professional development company to build and maintain your website. Of course, you can always contact a freelancer or try to make the website yourself, but this arrangement, more often than not, results in quality and usability issues that may hurt your business, reputation, and your overall digital presence.
3. Play the Long Game with SEO
Nowadays, people interact with online content in two major ways — using a browser or an app. When they frequent a website, they bookmark it or memorize the domain for direct access.
However, when they can’t recall the domain or are looking for something new, they google it.
Search engines provide businesses with the best kind of online visibility — a natural way for people to discover your brand. What they want in return is to match their user experience, quality, and technical standards.
The good news is that optimizing your websites for search engines will not only make your content more appealing to search engines and your website more user-friendly but will also improve the overall digital experience you provide.
The catch is that Google’s regulations are constantly changing, and to stay relevant in organic searches, you need to keep up with them.
Overall, this means that, nowadays, SEO is not a one-off job but a strategy that requires consistent work and improvements by marketers, SEO experts, and developers. However, it shouldn’t be underestimated and sidelined as it plays a pivotal role in your digital success.
4. Focus on Social Media Branding
We all know that social media is imperative for digital presence. However, it’s not important only to build profiles on all the social networks that your customers frequent but also to use them to reinforce your connection with your audience.
The best ways to leverage social media in your digital strategy and build a strong brand are:
- Social Listening
Social listening is a convenient way to track brand mentions, “spy” on your competitors, and stay in the loop of topics that concern you. Furthermore, it can help you build your presence and brand identity on social media, as it makes it easier to join conversations with customers on third-party pages and shine with witty comments.
On a more practical note, it can also help you to monitor for and avoid negative backlash on your campaigns, manage word-of-mouth, and discard unflattering information.
- Active Engagement
Posting from time to time and hoping for the best is simply not enough.
Social media algorithms track both topic relevancy and user engagement, so you need to keep the conversation going for your content to show in their feeds. This means that you have to know what may attract the customer’s attention, and once you have it, you need to find ways to keep it for as long as possible.
- Consistency
Social media branding is about consistency — it makes you recognizable and helps you “train” your followers on what to expect.
Also, the more consistent you are in providing content that they like and enjoy, the more likely they are to engage and, as a result, see more of your posts in the future. This not only keeps you at the forefront of their minds but contributes to your overall digital presence.
- Don’t Underestimate Engaging Platforms like TikTok
Regardless of whether you are in B2B or B2C, TikTok is becoming more relevant for businesses.
Consider researching the platform and figuring out how to position your brand there according to your business needs, online personality, and overall digital presence.
This will give you access to an incrementally growing audience of people of all ages and provide you with new tools to impress and win them over as clients.
- Leverage User-generated Content
Encouraging user-generated content (UGC) is a great way to build a solid online presence.
You create buzz around your company by encouraging your audience to talk about your brand, post pictures, and videos, tag you in comments, leave reviews, and join discussions.
Furthermore, when people research you online and find out that others care enough about your brand to go out of their way to say something nice, this shows that you know how to treat your customers and provide a good experience. This is the best kind of recommendation you can wish for.
5. Work on Your Online Reputation
Your brand reputation plays a key part in your digital presence. You may be all over the internet, but if what people say is not in your favor, this will negatively affect your business.
You must manage your online reputation to ensure you make a good impression on the web.
Here are some tips on how to do this successfully in 2022:
- Monitor Review Platforms
Negative reviews can ruin your online reputation and drive customers to turn to competitors.
Even when you work hard to deliver top-quality products and services, unhappy customers will always be. While you can’t control what people say about you on third-party review websites, you can and should try to resolve the issues that bother them.
This way, you show that you care about your clients and are ready to go the extra mile to provide a satisfying customer experience.
- Leverage Branded Keywords and Searches
When a person keys in your brand’s name in a search engine, your website, and social media profiles need to be the first thing they see.
However, this becomes increasingly difficult with so many companies with similar names trying to stand out online.
Failing to take hold of your branded keywords can be a serious issue in your digital presence and online reputation and should be fixed as soon as possible.
- Be Active in Relevant Communities and Forums
Be Active in Relevant Forums and Communities. Industry communities are a great place to show your expertise and build credibility. However, make sure to join discussions only to contribute with your knowledge and opinions, not to advertise. Otherwise, you may achieve the opposite effect.
- Get Listed on Directories
Nowadays, the value of directories is undermined because they are deemed to be next to worthless SEO-wise. However, getting your company listed in relevant directories can give you credibility and make you discoverable to people searching for businesses like yours. This makes you seem more legitimate and trustworthy, and that’s enough for some customers to consider you.
- Update and Maintain a Google My Business Presence
The Google My Business listing carousel is usually the first thing people see in local searches. Showing up there is a great way to find new customers and boost your digital presence.
If you don’t own your listing, you should take steps to recover it so that you can use it to provide accurate and up-to-date information.
Furthermore, this will allow you to answer reviews and sort out any misunderstandings that affect your rating.
- Create Thought Leadership Content
By creating a blog and being active on social media platforms and forums, you can show your knowledge, expertise, and business insight and stand out as a thought leader. This helps you gain the respect of the people in your industry and builds up your authority and credibility.
You can leverage these assets to create your online brand and appeal to both customers and search engines.
6. Don’t Underestimate Digital Advertising
While all the inbound tactics of building a digital presence have undisputable benefits and deliver results, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of advertising.
Placing and optimizing Pay Per Click marketing (PPC), display, retargeting, and social media ads are a great way to create the feeling that your brand is everywhere the customer looks and consolidate your online presence.
Use the data from market research and customer insights from your inbound channels to refine your ads and make them count.
Bottom Line
Building a digital presence in 2022 is all about focusing on the right channels and being consistent in your efforts.
However, how successful you make this presents a good one, largely depends on how well you know your audience and whether you can provide a superb customer experience.
The thing about the digital world is that word spreads fast there, and if you are not working hard enough to satisfy your customers or don’t care about your reputation, all your other efforts may be in vain.
