Building a Thriving Online Presence for Your Business

Maximizing Your Company's Online Presence: A Guide to Building a Strong Digital Footprint

Overview

As a business owner, you know that having a strong online presence is critical to the success of your business. It's more important than ever to have people find you online. How do you build a professional online presence that accurately represents your brand and attracts new customers?

Building your online presence from scratch is like making new friends in high school. Back then, it would have been nice to have one of the cool kids show you how it's done. Today, finding a tech expert or marketing guru that is affordable can be just as hard. So here is a starter's guide that explains the five steps to a good foundation.

1. Define your Branding

The first step to building a professional online presence is defining your market, defining your brand, and creating your brand assets. Take time to research your target market before creating your brand assets. In many cases the brand is created around what the owner likes and that works well if the owner is part of the market demographics you are trying to reach. However, it becomes a problem if the market is different than the owner and their taste and styles conflict. Define your brand around your market and not just your personal preferences. Brand assets include but are not limited to: a logo, two to three brand colors, and one font that will be used consistently throughout all of your online and offline marketing.

You need all your branding assets ready to go before taking the next step. That means you have:

• a 600x600px logo with a transparent background.
• a 200x200px favicon.
• high quality photos of your product or service.
• a text file with the list of fonts and color swatches.
• a simple description of your company.

2. Build a Website

Your website is the foundation of everything online. It should accurately reflect your branding and clearly communicate what your business does and what makes it unique. Above all, you need a landing page that invites people to sign up for your offer. Your site can even be just one page explaining what problems you solve, who you are, and how to sign up for your offer. When people are searching for you, or searching for the solution for their problem that you can solve, your website is like a landing strip at the airport, guiding them on where to solve their problem.

With social media, it's a little easier to have an online presence but without a website you're relying on other platforms you can not control to manage your business.

3. Optimize your Website for Search Engines (SEO)

Once your website is built, the next step is to optimize it for search engines. People can’t find you if your site doesn’t show up on Google or other search platforms. This means making sure your website is visible to the top search engines. Setting up your SEO can get complicated really quickly. To learn more on how to do it, I suggest you read my article SEO 101.

4. Set up and Manage Marketing Campaigns

Before you can do any marketing online you need the first three steps. The goal for a marketing campaigns is to attract new customers and build brand awareness. Campaigning is like asking a friend to introduce you to their friends so you can make more friends. When you are ready for marketing, you can contact me for a free strategy call. In that call I will help you identify your target audience, develop a marketing strategy, and help you set up a step by step guide to execute your campaigns.

5. Create Content and Manage a Social Media Presence

The final step to building a professional online presence is setting up and managing social media platforms. This is really a part of SEO but it can be a full job all in itself. By creating social media profiles on websites like Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, or Reddit you are doing three things.

You are:

- Setting up backlinks to your website that build credibility for Google search engines (SEO).

- Providing a place for potential clients to stumble upon your work.

- Creating a way for your raving fans to talk about you with their friends.

Setting up your social media includes developing a content creation strategy plan, creating engaging content, scheduling times to post that content, then managing the messages on the accounts. Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and connecting with customers. It isn’t marketing unless you are paying for ads and have a funnel in place to guide people to your shopping cart.

Conclusion

There you go, a full online presence. It can be a lot, but what’s nice is a lot of it doesn’t need a lot to manage after it’s all up and running. If you would like help setting up your online presence, set up a strategy call with me here. I love helping people set up their online presence and I’ve built a team to help you do just that.