The Importance of your online presence.

What does online presence even mean? In simple terms, an online presence is your representation on the Internet. The word online presence came into widespread use in the last few years. To better understand what it is, we can refer to an online presence as the process through which we expose a brand to internet traffic. Within the chain of this process, we have several components such as content, website design, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, pay per click marketing, directory listings, link building and so on. We can explore these avenues to create a long-term profitable online presence for a person, a channel, a page, almost anything.

Importance of Online Presence

We often say that numbers don’t lie. To fully understand the importance of your online presence, we will briefly look at some statistics for the year 2019 that can give an analytical understanding. 87% of shoppers start product searches on the Internet. Mind you, that is a huge 10% increase from last year. About 44% of potential home buyers started looking online for properties for sale. A whole 99% of millennials search online first.

Reading positive or negative online reviews can influence buying decisions. Ninety-seven percent of people read reviews for local businesses on the Internet. The percentage of people who use their mobile phones to research and then complete the purchase of a product or service stands at ninety-three. Excellent reviews about a business will cause customers to spend more money with the business. Ask for those reviews, if you don’t ask you won’t receive.

According to Google, sixty-one percent of consumers prefer to shop with brands that have a physical location than with brands that are online only. Also, nearly eighty percent of shoppers go in-store when there is an item they need or want immediately.

These figures have shown us that your online presence is very crucial. The journey of a customer often starts from the Internet and ends in the physical store for businesses that have one.

Components of Your Online Presence

Your presence on the Internet can be in various forms. We will discuss these components, but first, let’s highlight them.

• Website: This is your home, this is who you are. The essential components of a website include an “About Us” page, a contact page, Blogs, Testimonials and a call to action (CTA)
• Social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, and TikTok. We’ll only talk about a few of these as I am not familiar with all of them. This goes to show we all always have something to learn.
• Paid Ads - Paid advertising is a great way to drive more traffic to your website and to get those views.

Now, let’s discuss each of these components in a little more detail.

Website

A website represents who you are online. Use it to show what makes you different from everyone else.

It is crucial to obey the “above the fold” rule when designing your website. Above the fold is the part of a web page that is visible when the page first loads.

To generate leads, you can use forms to get the minimum amount of information needed. Depending on your business, you might need their email, phone number, name, address, etc. A general rule of thumb the more information you require, the less the form gets filled out. Make sure your lead magnet gives a lot of value, this is your first impression.

What are lead magnets? They include newsletters, discounts, free shipping, free reports, or anything of value that can build and strengthen the relationship. Have someone fill out a form and you send them the lead magnet. Easy as that.

Let me give you a bonus tip here. Install either Google Analytics or Google tag manager and a Facebook pixel to gather valuable website user data. You need this if you want to run pay per click ads.

Social Media Channels

Facebook

Facebook is the king of social media, with 2.41 billion monthly active users worldwide. That’s huge. It sure presents an excellent opportunity to gain traffic to your store, either physical or online.

In the United States alone, Facebook has 169.5 million users, out of which seventy-four percent use it daily. Interestingly, forty-five percent of people get news from Facebook. It takes up twenty-two percent of the internet time Americans spend on mobile devices, compared with eleven percent on Google search and YouTube combined. Two hundred million people are members of meaningful Facebook groups, and seventy-eight percent of American consumers have discovered retail products to buy on Facebook.

Instagram

Instagram is one of the social media platforms under the ownership of Facebook. Instagram boasts one billion users worldwide, seventy percent of which lookup brands on Instagram. About sixty percent of users find out about new products through Instagram. Over two million users go through a business profile at least once a day. About thirty-three percent of Instagram users have bought something through the platform on their mobile phones. About one-third of Instagram users are millennials. Users collectively upload over a hundred million photos on Instagram every day. That’s a damn lot of selfies.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn supports the largest network of professionals with about 610 million users. For professional career men and women, LinkedIn is the place to be.

Ninety million senior-level executives and sixty-three million chief executives use LinkedIn. LinkedIn is responsible for eighty percent of business-to-business (B2B) leads from social media.

If you want to communicate with the most senior level of management in any organization, LinkedIn can make that possible. LinkedIn has become the most important network of professionals in the world. Of the five hundred million plus LinkedIn users, only three million share content weekly – a huge opportunity to gain a following. Forty-five percent of users earn $75,000 yearly, and fifty percent of college graduates in America use LinkedIn.

YouTube

YouTube occupies the position of the second-largest search engine in the world after Google. YouTube boasts about two billion monthly active users. Over ninety percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and forty-four watch YouTube. Of the ninety percent of users, sixty-eight percent of them make a purchase decision based on a YouTube video they watched. Another amazing fact is that the cumulative duration of product review videos watched on YouTube through mobile devices in the past two years amounts to fifty thousand years. More than half of senior American citizens (age seventy-five or more) that use the Internet watch YouTube videos.

Google

Google is, without doubt, the largest search engine in the universe. Google users makeover three billion searches daily. About thirty-five percent of searches for products happen on Google

Thirty-four percent of local searches done on laptops and tablets result in visits to the local store.

There are various cool and useful features that your business can enjoy when using Google services. The following are just a few:

Google My Business account - A GMB account puts your business in front of people who can interact locally with the business - eCommerce businesses can create one too. In simple terms, it puts your business on the map. People can literally see you and get directions to you through their GPS-enabled mobile phones or vehicles.

SEO metadata - With SEO metadata, Google can determine if your website is relevant enough to the served as a result of a search query. I hope I haven’t lost you. That is just a techie way of describing how Google determines who to show your website to and when.

Paid Ads

Paid ads, as the name implies, are adverts that you pay for. Paid ads are available on all the social media channels we mentioned previously. The two ad channels you should prioritize are Facebook and Google ads. This avenue allows you to communicate your message to the people that matter to you or your business.

Paid ads are effective for awareness and traffic. Typically, businesses earn $2 for every $1 spent on Ads. Pay-Per-Click visitors are more likely to buy something from you than organic visitors - they have shown an interest in what you are advertising by clicking on your ad.

Seventy-five percent of users engage with ads. It helps them get the information they are looking for more easily.

Forty percent of online brands want to increase their PPC ad spend, showing that this is a lucrative tool to use for marketing. Eighty-two percent of people who use smartphones are actively looking online for businesses near them. Interestingly, seventy-six percent of these people who search for something nearby on a smartphone will go to the physical location of a business within one the next twenty-four hours. In a nutshell, paid ads puts you or anything that you associate with in front of your users wherever they may be.

Generating Revenue with Online Presence

So, you have done your due diligence in ensuring that you have a solid presence on some or all of the channels we discussed earlier, and now you’re wondering how that helps you to generate revenue steadily. To generate revenue through your online presence, you need digital skills. When I say digital skills, I mean digital marketing skills. These include copywriting, graphic design, online market research, video editing, and other digital skills you may need to create and deliver your story across Facebook, and Google platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, YouTube, and LinkedIn among others.

We will briefly look at the goals of online advertising sequentially. To do that, we will discuss sales funnels - what it is, why you need it, and how to set it up (using Facebook as an example).

The Sales Funnel

What is a sales funnel?

Typically, sales funnel refers to the process potential customers go through when they make purchases. First, you need to find your buyers, let them know what you exist, and then sell to them. I believe the reason we use the word “funnel” is because of its shape. Looking at the normal funnel, it has a large opening at the top, which narrows as you go down the funnel. In the digital marketing world, you figuratively pour in leads (web traffic). As these leads move down the funnel, some will drop off, while others will convert (continue through the smaller opening at the base of the funnel). A smaller proportion of those who came into the funnel will end up converting (taking the final action such as purchases, link clicks, form fills, video watched, etc).

There are three general progress points along the customer’s journey to a conversion. Let’s highlight each of them before we explain further:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Conversion

Awareness

Awareness refers to the period when a buyer comes in contact with you or your business on the Internet for the first time. It is the first progress-point in the journey. This is the period that defines how the buyer remembers you. You want to ensure that they get a memorable experience. What type of emotions do you want the buyer to feel whenever they think of you or your business? This is where you answer that question. Another thing you should pay attention to here is how often you post. Try to post daily and consistently, or weekly and consistently, the major key alert is to post consistently. The idea is to keep your audience engaged with your brand.

Consideration

The consideration progress-point is where you have to establish yourself or your business as the solution provider, or the subject matter expert. Customers have needs that you or your business can meet. Ensure that you position yourself strategically and visibly. Re-targeting ads are most useful at this point. The idea is to remain visible without appearing desperate. Perhaps you’re wondering what’s re-targeting ads. Re-targeting ads are paid advertisements that you send specifically to people who have engaged with your previous ads or site, or with you or your business in any way. To do re-targeting, you must have a means of tracking your engagements.

Conversion

Conversion is the end goal of every paid advertisement. Conversions can be in various forms. It could be a free e-book download, a newsletter subscription, content views, and purchase of a product or service. To drive conversions, use a call-to-action (CTA). 

Social Media Marketing

In this section, we will look at the benefit of social media in revenue generation through your online presence. 

To keep things simple, we will discuss marketing strategies on three major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Facebook Marketing

As we have established earlier, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world, with 2.4 billion active users worldwide. This positions Facebook as the focus of every advertiser serious about generating revenue online.

Facebook advertising is a great way to generate income through Facebook. Sign up for a business account, create an ad account, and a Facebook page. There is something you need to note here. When you create your Facebook page, ensure that you take time and think seriously about what you fill in. This page is what your future customers will engage with on Facebook, therefore, you must make it easy for your customers to interact with your business. Understand that Facebook’s priority is to serve ads to its users, if your business activities do not support positive user experience and drive people off the platform, Facebook will not think twice about dropping the ban hammer on you.

To build awareness for your brand on Facebook, contests and promotions will go a long way to help you achieve that goal. Another way to build awareness is through boosted posts. When you create a new Facebook page, you will to tell a short origin story about your brand. Boost that post for a few bucks a day. Facebook will show that story to several people in your target location. With that, it will be easier for those people who have seen your brand to interact with you. 

Facebook has also made it easy to track your visitors from your Facebook page to your website or store or both. You can do that by installing a Facebook pixel into the header section of your website (super easy to watch some YouTube tutorial videos or let us do it for you). What is a Facebook pixel? It is a code that you place on your website. It will gather data on all website visits such as location of your visitors, the device they used to visit your website, and some demographic data like gender and age. You can also track events like purchases and downloads. There are two ways to track events, 1. install an event code on the page that signifies the completion of that event the same way you will install the pixel itself. If you want to track a purchase, for example, you can install the event code on your “Thank You” page since every visitor who ends up making a purchase will see the page. 2. You could create events by entering URLs in the Facebook event creator.

* Pro gamer move: Create an event when someone lands on a particular page. Use ads to drive link clicks to the page. In this example, someone lands on a red teddy bear page. Now you know they’re interested in red teddy bears. You use the event to create a custom audience and then you create a video talking about how cool red teddy bears and why they should buy yours. And you use that video to retarget the custom audience and boom you got a working funnel. 

Instagram Marketing

New data on Instagram engagement for 2019 tells us that the platform has one billion monthly active users and twenty-five billion business profiles. Instagram is not “just another” social media platform anymore. It is a place for real business. On Instagram, you can recruit, display your products, give life to your website content by sharing quotes, and inspiring your audience. Instagram is also very good for brand awareness.

I believe the first thing to learn when getting ready to put your business on Instagram is how to create your business account. It’s a single button you need. Go to your settings and click on “switch to business profile”. Follow the instructions from there and you’ll be fine. Having a business profile has several benefits. With a business profile, you can create Instagram ads without using Facebook’s ad tools. Instagram’s analytics tool (called Instagram Insights) is also available to provide you with relevant statistics on your posts. The potential of marketing on Instagram is vast. You can use subtle ways to sell your products without making it obvious that you want to sell to your followers. A simple video of you putting on one of the shoes you sell will suggest to someone that the shoe is great, and that will prepare them for a gentle nudge in the right direction later on. It’s like teasing someone with something you know he or she might want. The person will decide on his or her own to buy. Even if they don’t buy, they will like, comment and share with friends.

You can also use sponsored ads like Facebook. I might have forgotten to mention that you can also set up your Facebook ads to appear on Instagram with or without an Instagram profile.

YouTube Marketing

YouTube is the home of online videos. There’s a chance that you’ve wasted an afternoon on YouTube watching one funny video after another. Current statistics tell us that every sixty seconds, YouTube users upload 300 hours of video on the platform. The information you need to get as a marketer is that YouTube can also be a marketing tool. About fifty percent of marketers have included YouTube in their marketing strategy over the last twelve months. People spend about thirty-three percent of the total time spent online watching videos. This reality, coupled with the fact that YouTube has about two billion active users, gives you an idea of the immense potential that YouTube has for marketing. Being the second-largest search network after Google search engine, you can improve the SEO of your website with YouTube videos. YouTube makes it possible for you to create unique video content that you can easily share with viewers from all over the world.  

If you plan to add YouTube to your marketing strategy, there are a few challenges you need to know about. The first one is about how unique your video content must be to stand out. The thing is that there are over fifty million content creators on YouTube. The other challenge is about how to communicate your products and services with your major target audience while also entertaining or educating your viewers. In case you don’t know, most YouTube users don’t come on the platform looking for something to buy. They go on YouTube to get entertained. Let me highlight the major steps you need to take for you to have a solid ground on YouTube:

• Create a YouTube channel for your business
• Optimize your channel to reflect your brand (design a channel art that reflects your values).
• Understand your audience
• Learn about your competition.
• Advertise on YouTube using sponsored ads and influencers
• Edit your videos for SEO.

LinkedIn Marketing

LinkedIn is a highly specialized platform. Through LinkedIn, you can connect with over 450 million professionals around the world. To be a successful marketer on LinkedIn, you need to start by setting up your own profile. No matter what your advertising goal is; brand awareness, lead generation, building strategic partnerships. All these are achievable with LinkedIn. After you have set up an all-star personal profile, the next thing you need to do is create a company page. Your company page should make it easy for users to learn about your company. How it started, what you have set out to achieve, the people working there, and other relevant information should be available. Setting your goals and defining your audience is the next thing you want to do. Now you can start inviting people to follow your company page. Anyone who visits your page now will know exactly what your business is all about, and it won’t be difficult for them to accept your invitation. Remember that you will have to add a “follow” button to your page first.

It is now time to sell without selling. Let me explain what I mean by that. From experience, people naturally resist when you’re trying to sell something to them. The same thing applies on LinkedIn. Avoid publishing content that is all about selling. Instead, focus on helping your followers address their business and personal needs. Address their pain points. Answer their questions. There’s no rule that says you must only share your own content with your followers. You can share content from other businesses with your followers. You are giving the impression that you care more about what your followers need per time than what you can get from them.

Let’s go over everything we have discussed so far.

We said online presence is the way you’re represented on the Internet - your personality or image. When people think about you or your brand, what do they think about it? What emotions do they feel? Do they even think of you at all?

We also talked about the importance of your online presence, the major one being you want everyone to have the same emotions no matter where they see you online.

We established the components of your online presence as a combination of your website, social media channels, and paid ads.

In the previous section, we discussed the role of a sales funnel in revenue generation through your online presence. We also dealt with social media marketing as a way to generate income through your online presence and we discussed four social media platforms that marketers use.

My goal for writing this article is to help you achieve a solid presence on the Internet and translate that presence into revenue.