Your business needs a web presence. It’s stating the obvious, as every potential customer in this day and age turns to Google prior to making a purchase. They will search for information about your company, seeking the likes of product descriptions and positive reviews.
As a result, you require a strong web presence. When those potential customers search about your business, you want them to find everything they need to ensure you’re the right fit for their needs. You also want to attract those who are not currently aware of your company.
To do this, here are five important steps to follow when building a strong web presence from scratch:
1. Have a plan
First of all, you have to devise a robust strategy. Any chance of succeeding is extremely limited if you wing it from the offset. After all, there are many different elements to building a web presence, and all of these require care and attention.
To help come up with a plan, you should first define the goals you want to achieve with your online strategy. These goals will likely change as time goes on, but initial targets are important for knowing which direction to take. As for what these should be, consider the following examples:
- Increasing brand awareness.
- Generating sales.
- Building connections with other businesses.
- Supplying information about your products and services.
If you’re not quite sure where to start with an overall plan, it could pay off to enlist the help of a web consultant. They have the experience and expertise to design a comprehensive strategy that will place your business on the path to success.
2. Get your website right
Your website is the hub for your online presence. This is the destination where potential customers will learn more about your business and what it has to offer, purchase your products/services, and contact you for further information if needed.
As the headline act, it makes sense to place an emphasis on the design of your website. It needs to be modern, responsive, and optimized for all devices. The latter point is especially pertinent, as more than 50% of people are browsing the Internet on mobile compared to desktop – and that number is only going to rise.
When crafting a website, there are many different options available. If money is tight, you could use a site builder and go it alone. Yet if you desire a website which truly fits your vision and objectives, hiring a professional design company is advised. For example, Digital Silk is a brand development specialist who can produce a high-quality website and fashion it with SEO in mind.
3. Promote with social media
When developing your web presence, one of the most effective methods is with social media. You need to go where your customers are located and, in the current climate, nearly everyone is on the likes of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Setting up accounts on the aforementioned platforms is free and easy. Although when doing so, always take the time to convey a professional appearance. This means your logo should be clear to see and optimized for the image dimensions of each platform. Also select background imagery which is eye-catching and representative of your brand.
The main objective with social media is to create content that’s engaging, evocative, and/or informative. You’re competing with essentially the rest of the world, so your posts need to stand out from the crowd. Here are a few tips:
- Utilize visual content like videos and GIFs.
- Don’t stick to only posting about your business. Create discussions about the industry, share helpful tips, and other content your audience will appreciate.
- Post about trending topics and try to link them to your business in a creative way.
- Keep it informative yet succinct. The less wordy your posts are, the more impactful they will likely be.
- End your content with a call-to-action. ‘Click here’, ‘Read more by visiting our website’, and so on.
- People love engaging in social media competitions. You could run a simple one where everyone who ‘Likes’ your post enters, and the winner will receive a prize.
Another point to remember is to directly engage with your audience. If someone sends you an enquiry, make sure you respond to the comment. It shows you care and this, obviously, reflects well on your brand.
4. Maintain consistent content creation
You’ve created a website. The social media accounts are ready to go. Now it’s time for the difficult part: consistently producing content.
When taking into account all the work that goes into running a business, it can be easy to put content creation on the backburner. However, a strong web presence can only be concocted and maintained with frequent blog posts, social media content, and other marketing efforts.
Going back to social media, this is arguably the easiest starting point regarding this subject. As the content is generally short in nature, you can easily fire out multiple posts within a short space of time. With that said, it’s never advised to release these all in one go. They should be scheduled across the day/week. Thankfully, there are specialist all-in-one platforms available where you can manage all of your social media accounts and schedule future posts with ease.
Producing blog posts is trickier. You will need to spend time not only on writing and researching the post, but also sourcing relevant images and videos to complement the written content. Although keep in mind that, while you should make daily social media posts, blog posts don’t need to stick to such a stringent schedule. Try and aim for a blog post every week or two.
5. Analyze the results
Whether it’s website visitors or social media follower numbers, you need to constantly track and analyze statistics. By doing this, you can figure out what is working and what isn’t with your content creation.
For instance, your website might receive a surge in traffic after posting a blog post revolving around a recent event that happened in your industry. Now knowing your audience is searching for current news events, you could place a focus on that with future content.