The average internet user spends about seven hours every day online, whether conversing with friends on social media, working remotely, or playing video games. With the rise of online activities, almost every form of business must adapt to catch the attention of virtual audiences. Businesses that do not establish a strong internet presence are likely to fade into obscurity.
This article will provide you with all of the tools you need to establish your company’s digital presence and capture the attention of a larger audience. Whether you own an eCommerce business, a physical store, or both, this advice will help you improve your online exposure.
What is Digital Presence?Â
When trying your hand at marketing, you may have heard terms like “online visibility,” “reputation,” and “engagement”. But what exactly is digital presence, and how does it apply to eCommerce?
Simply put, your digital presence determines how visible you are online. In other words, how easy it is for customers to find your brand and organization using search engines such as Google or Bing. You can have a website or a social media page, but this does not imply you have a digital presence. You must actively work to boost your visibility, from developing your brand to putting your business on Google.
Building your internet presence is akin to yelling the loudest in a crowd. To stand out from the crowd, you’ll need the right tools, such as a megaphone.
How to Boost Your Digital Presence?
You’ve certainly built a good digital marketing strategy that works for your current objectives, but it’s always worthwhile to put in some extra time and effort to futureproof your marketing strategy.
As you create your content marketing strategy, the following suggestions might help you be more effective and explore new methods to interact with your target audience:
1. Invest in Customer Persona Research
How well do you understand your core customers? Do you have an idea of the types of clients you’d like to reach but haven’t made a solid connection with yet? Customer persona research could be one of your most profitable marketing initiatives in 2024. Effective user research can help you gain a better understanding of your target market’s demands and needs, generate content that is more precisely suited to their interests and aspirations, and clarify your position in your niche.
Questionnaires, surveys, usability tests, and A/B testing can all provide useful information about your target clients. Create many client profiles based on the data you’ve collected over time to establish who your greatest consumers are, how they spend their time online, and the best ways to reach them with effective marketing campaigns.
2. Expand to New Social Media Platforms
Almost every business has a Facebook page by now, but other social media platforms can be extremely useful for engaging with different audiences. Instagram and Snapchat may be great locations to showcase new products and share video content snippets. They’re also wonderful for pictorial content, and Twitter is the go-to site for hot topics and the most recent news updates. Alternatively, Twitch or another streaming platform may be the way to go, allowing you to connect with your audience in real time and develop it to stream across various platforms.
Determine where your potential clients spend their time on social media and try to build a following on a new platform in 2024. Spend some time fleshing out client profiles and deciding which social media channels are most likely to appeal to them.
3. Increase Your Brand’s Authority
Is your audience aware that they can rely on you for the most recent industry news? Do they routinely leave comments on your blog entries, expressing how useful and valuable they are? Brand authority grows as you connect more closely with your audience.
When you constantly supply your audience with relevant material and demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about, you naturally create authority. One strategy to develop brand authority is to provide your staff with professional documents demonstrating your expertise. For example, you can create your own business cards to provide a consistent, polished appearance across all of your marketing initiatives.
Your brand authority has a huge impact on SEO, so seek for ways to demonstrate your status as an industry leader. For example, if you submit material to your site and simply label your contributing authors as “staff” without developing detailed author profiles for them, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to enhance your authority and gain some simple SEO points under the new EAT update.
4. Start Leveraging Voice Search and Planning for NLP SEO
Search engines are becoming smarter, and Google’s most recent round of upgrades incorporates BERT, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. This new system is a natural language processing (NLP) system that is intended to more accurately interpret user searches, particularly voice searches, which generally contain more longtail keywords and filler words.
Read Also: 10 Key Benefits of Using Cost-effective Digital Marketing Methods
While you have most likely already adopted a mobile-first strategy to site development and content creation, make sure to apply those lessons to prepare for the growing number of voice searches. Begin searching for methods to add more NLP SEO features, such as longtail keywords and more fleshed-out keyword strings with filler phrases that people will likely say into their devices while conducting voice searches.
5. Invest in Video Content Creation
Content remains the most important factor in good SEO, but the content you’ve created may be dated in comparison to what other brands are delivering. Video content has tremendous potential for almost every brand. How-to films, product demonstrations, facility visits, “meet the team” interviews, and behind-the-scenes looks are all options. Video material is also widely shareable, making it an excellent way to increase your social media profile.
6. Get influencers to promote your product
Influencers’ recommendations are what the great bulk of the audience listens to. If you want an organic way to connect with your audience, use social media influencers. Invest in influencer marketing and encourage them to promote your brand, whether you’re offering a product or a service. As soon as an influencer endorses something, their followers are more likely to notice and execute the desired action. Given your funding limits, you can use micro-influencers to promote your new brand.
7. Analyze Your Results
What’s the point of having a digital presence strategy unless you’re willing to evaluate the results? In the digital age, everything moves at rapid pace, and you must stay up with the times. This also implies that you will need to periodically adjust your methods; what worked yesterday may make little or no sense today. The easiest method to accomplish this is to keep an eye on the analytics.
Almost every social media site includes native analytics tools that you may employ. Third-party programs can also be beneficial for analyzing metrics. The best way forward is to set goals that can be tracked. For example, aim for a certain percentage of click-through rates and review your results every quarter. Bear in mind that the key is to remain patient as establishing a digital presence is not a one-off event.
8. Publish customer testimonials
Along with influencer recommendations, your audience will take peer recommendations carefully. That’s why testimonials are so vital in building your digital profile. Your words alone are insufficient; hearing them from another consumer can make a difference.
When you have a consumer who is extremely satisfied with your items or the service you gave, ask for a testimonial from them. Instead of a text-based testimonial, which is easy to fabricate, go with a video. There’s something about seeing a human being on screen express their opinions about a product. It has the potential to elicit a response that a typical text-based testimonial cannot.
9. Invest in email marketing
Email marketing can really help to build your web presence. Reaching your target audience’s inbox and enticing them to open your emails can be an effective approach to direct traffic to your website. However, few business owners grasp the difference between spamming their clients and giving them emails that they want to read.
Concentrate on growing an email list. Use your creative copywriting talents to ensure that your emails always reach the intended recipients. Keep in mind that your customers receive hundreds of emails daily. So they’re looking forward to receiving an email with some unique information.
10. Optimize your website for mobile devices
A vast majority of your audience may be looking at your website on their cell phones. This means that your website needs to be specially optimized for them so they don’t have to strain their eyes. Your website needs to have the correct resolution to lure in the audience.
11. Have a value-first approach
Having more followers does not ensure a solid digital presence. Your goal should be to establish a significant presence on your own. Make certain that you are attempting to establish a high-quality, unique group of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Only then will it result in more likes and comments on your social media postings, bringing you the desired traffic. User-generated content is highly vital for increasing your internet visibility. As a general rule, focus on providing more value rather than simply increasing your following.
12. Make use of online listings
There are several options to list your business online and build your digital presence, including Google My Business and Facebook Pages. In fact, increasing your digital presence through internet listings is entirely under your hands. You don’t need an audience to know that you exist. If anything, these listings will increase your visibility and provide an extra source of visitors.
Embracing the potential of virtual events is yet another approach to boost your digital presence and connect with your target audience. Webinars, virtual conferences, and live streaming allow you to demonstrate your knowledge, share useful insights, and form true connections with your audience. This, in turn, increases brand loyalty and improves your reputation in your sector. Collaborating with a virtual event production company may help you create professional, immersive, and engaging events that will leave an impression on your audience.
Tools to Improve Your Digital Presence
1. Hubspot
Whether you want to develop stunning landing pages or maintain comprehensive customer relationship management, Hubspot can help you optimize your digital presence seamlessly. You can also utilize Hubspot to improve your email marketing efforts. HubSpot, for example, provides an email marketing solution that includes an online form builder and pop-ups to assist you in building your email list.
2. ActiveCampaign
Increasing your digital presence is all about having greater insights into your customers’ journeys so that you can tailor your campaigns and marketing efforts to their activities. ActiveCampaign is a tool that can be really useful in this situation. It provides total visibility into each customer’s journey, allowing you to make informed decisions regarding your business strategy. This cloud-based software platform is ideal for smaller and medium-sized organizations.
3. Buzzsumo
Having trouble deciding what content to post this month? Buzzsumo can assist keep these issues at bay. It can search millions of articles and postings on the internet to recommend popular subjects. As any marketer will acknowledge, creating content topics can be a really stressful task, so what better way to get some help?
From popular terms to often asked questions by your target audience, you may use Buzzsumo’s features to impress them and increase your social media presence. If you are unsure about obtaining a membership right away, you may always try the free plan, which is offered for a short time.
4. Google Analytics
Keeping an eye on your statistics can help shape your future plan, so using Google statistics to improve your digital presence makes perfect sense. It’s a free analytics tool that delivers a wealth of information about your audience. It is especially popular for medium-sized retail websites to thoroughly evaluate various client behavior metrics. You can use the appropriate actionable insights to increase traffic to your website and convert prospects.
5. Brand watch
Ever wanted to discover what your consumers are saying about you and what they anticipate from your company? Such information is highly useful for developing your marketing plan since it allows you to build a strong presence in the digital realm by speaking in the language that your clients prefer.
Eventually, this can lead to increased conversions. More significantly, with Brandwatch, you will be able to identify dangers as they emerge and build an effective strategy to combat them. While these services are obviously pricey, they are well worth the investment.
Final Thoughts
In today’s harsh competition, there is no doubting that your brand’s digital presence may make or destroy its future. When done right, your web presence can generate leads worth thousands of dollars. And the good news is that you don’t have to go all in right immediately to establish your internet presence.
You can always start with something simple, such as a website or a social network account, before expanding your options. Businesses who fail to build a strong digital presence are simply missing out on paying consumers and the possibility to grow their revenues. Don’t let your company become one of them; instead, implement the tactics outlined above and watch your business rise.
