It would be a little presumptuous of us to act like we invented the idea that small businesses need a strong online presence. However, what we can do is provide solid advice to make sure you’re equipped with a strategy to reap the full benefits of improving your presence. Here we share seven benefits of a strong online presence with tips to harness their full power and enjoy sustainable business growth.
Benefit #1: You Create Brand Awareness and Increase Visibility
Customers rely on the internet when seeking new products and services. Therefore, when you increase your online presence, you also increase brand awareness and visibility. A website isn’t enough to ensure your brand stands out amongst all the noise. You need to create a brand with a far-reaching presence touching every channel your customers are likely to encounter on their customer journey.
How to achieve brand awareness:
- Improve your website: Your website needs to be current, and user/SEO friendly to raise brand awareness. You need to leverage search engine optimization with an effective keyword strategy with relevant content to elevate your position in search results. Your content then must deliver the level of information that answers customer questions and satisfies your audience’s curiosity so they can achieve their search goals.
- Be on the right social platforms: Along with your website, you need to choose the right social media platforms. Remember that every platform appeals to a specific audience, so you need to be where your audience tends to hang out.
- Be consistent with your brand voice and appearance: All your content and branding should be consistent across all channels in voice and appearance. You also need to include consistent use of contact information and how your company name appears to appear in searches for your local marketing. This improves SEO and ensures there is no mistaking your brand. Accurately representing your brand requires a content strategy that reflects the type of content that resonates with your audience and leverages effective visuals that establish a meaningful connection and emotional triggers that help you carve out a niche for yourself.
Benefit #2: You Build Trust and Credibility
Your online presence is the first point of contact for most customers. Therefore, you need to ensure you immediately come across as trustworthy and credible. Your digital marketing requires a professional design, content free of errors, consistency, and original relevant content to help build trust and credibility. Structure, visual appeal, ease of use and information that answers questions all establish your brand as a company that knows its stuff and can be trusted to deliver.
How to build brand trust and credibility:
- Start with content: Strong, original content using blogs, articles, social media posts, video, infographics, white papers, cases studies and more will provide high-quality information that establishes your expertise. The more insights you provide and the more accurate you are at meeting searcher intent by answering long-tail and voice searches, the better you become at becoming a trusted, credible thought leader. Keep it up, and keep it strong.
- Engage your audience: Create opportunities to engage your audience using digital marketing tactics like asking questions on social media to encourage comments, surveys to solicit opinions, and targeted, personalized content that will meet customers’ needs throughout the stages of their customer journey. Also, be sure to respond and comment to customers who take the time to engage with your brand to show them you care and that their opinions matter. Participating in industry forums, following other influencers, reposting or commenting on posts, and displaying your own knowledge by sharing industry information all work to build credibility and trust.
- Monitor your online reputation: Monitoring your online reputation ensures you are listening to what people have to say about your brand, responding to negative comments that can tarnish your brand, and thanking people for positive feedback. You need to cut misinformation off at the pass and provide quick resolutions to protect your brand.
Benefit #3: You Have More Opportunities to Enhance Customer Engagement
Establishing your online presence also offers more opportunities to enhance customer engagement. As mentioned above, engaging with your audience on social media or comments made on your blog posts is a good start. However, you can also collect email addresses, ask for permission to share information, and request customers to post online reviews.
You have free tools to engage your customers, so your online presence is dynamic, engaging customers in real time. This is also the best way to understand your customers by following their comments, responding to complaints, and actively asking their opinions to understand their preferences.
How to enhance customer engagement:
- Personalized digital marketing and service: Personalization is a given for today’s savvy customers who want you to understand their needs. Leveraging customer data and technology allows you to remain respectful of privacy while creating content, experiences and offers specific to each segment, right down to the individual customer.
- Use conversational marketing: Focus on building relationships with personable, conversational language so you aren’t always focused on selling. Every touch point should be an opportunity to start conversations and learn more to enhance customer experience. This results in improved service and an appreciation and loyalty to your brand.
- Practice active listening: You must show customers you see and hear them. Feedback forms, comment sections on blogs, chatbots, and requests for reviews allow customers to tell you what they want so you can practice active listening to meet needs.
Benefit #4: You can Instantly Improve Customer Experience
Customers want to feel valued and receive top-notch service that shows them you care. You need to foster relationships by improving customer experience through improved communication, using the right digital marketing channels, and being available to offer support promptly.
How to improve customer experience:
- Create a loyalty program: Loyalty programs allow you to increase average basket size and brand loyalty through incentives and rewards. As a result, customers see more value in your offering, feel more comfortable with repeat purchases and look forward to building their points to reach milestones.
- Leverage chatbots: Chatbots can facilitate quicker answers for common customer service issues, help qualify leads, and start customer conversations before determining how to direct inquiries. By setting the right triggers, you streamline support and avoid customer frustration.
- Layout your customer journey: Understanding your customer journey allows you to improve customer experiences and service. You can follow their path, ensuring they always have the information they need at all touchpoints organically.
Benefit #5: You Expand Your Market
Simply put, a strong online presence allows you to expand your market whether you go national or global.
How to expand your market:
Conduct market research: Make sure you understand opportunities to expand so you have a sound strategy that increases ROI. The easiest approach is a SWOT analysis that identifies the following:
- Strengths that make you stand out from the competition
- Weaknesses that can lead to failures
- Opportunities to expand
- Threats that can impact your plans
Increase your product line: You can often expand more easily by identifying markets where a certain product or service is needed. This allows you to increase your product line for quicker growth.
Expand market reach: Adjusting your marketing strategy to improve customer reach in new target areas requires budget allocation changes to ensure you can reach your new target audiences. You also need to research new demographics to understand those targets, trends and potential issues so you can address them. Diversifying your customer base requires research to identify opportunities for your existing products, as this is the simplest way to get your products into new markets quickly.
Benefit #6: You Create a More Cost-effective Marketing Strategy
Despite popular belief among small business owners, digital marketing is often more cost-effective than traditional methods. As a result, it’s ideal for limited budgets because it offers many tactics that are either free or affordable to produce. This also increases ROI for your marketing efforts.
How to create a more cost-effective marketing strategy:
- Focus on existing customers: As the saying goes, it costs less and takes less effort to sell to existing customers compared to trying to find new ones. By focusing your efforts on existing customers through tactics such as personalization you can woo them into purchasing more by making them feel appreciated. Special offers, exclusive pricing, event invites and more all help bring your existing customers back into the fold.
- Leverage inside expertise: Sometimes you have hidden talent you can leverage to highlight expertise through in-house production of social media posts and blogs. Let your own experts produce your content to save money creating authentic blogs, how-to articles, videos, newsletters, and reposts of industry/customer relevant news and information.
- Repurpose content: Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, take advantage of current content such as posting a link to a blog or video, inviting people to download a case study via email or using free images you took at a company event.
- User generated content: Let your customers be your brand ambassadors. Sharing hashtags is the easiest way to find free customer content with people sharing images, comments and experiences related to your brand.
- Look for free publicity ops: Participating in community events is one of the easiest ways to find free publicity ops from food drives to charity runs and throwing experiential events to product launches.
Benefit #7: You Don’t Get Outdone By Your Competitors
The better you become at building your online presence, the more you’ll dominate the landscape. Your strong online presence outdoes the competition, so you always top the rankings.
How to beat your competitors:
- Know your competition: Make sure you know your competitors so you can continue to outsmart them. A digital marketing team can research their SEO strategy to help you outrank them.
- Know your UVP: Figure out your differentiator to make yourself stand out online and market that differentiator consistently.
- Target underserved segments: Find opportunities to carve out a niche leveraging your differentiator.
- Acknowledge your competitors: Honesty about what you can and can’t do builds trust. However, by acknowledging what your competitor does that you can’t or don’t helps qualify your leads and focus on the right segments. You also avoid wasting time with bad fits.
- Personalize, personalize, personalize: Make sure you stand out by personalizing as much of your marketing as possible, so everything feels authentic, meaningful, and sincere.
There you have it — seven benefits of a strong online presence with tips to help you reap the rewards.
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