Fact: Every modern business needs some kind of online presence. Any business, both established or fledgling, will eventually have to take on the challenge of creating a website, a social media account or other online presence.
When it comes to online marketing, or establishing an online presence, it’s easy to believe that you need to spend a lot in order to get an online reaction. This couldn’t be further from the truth. My advice to start-ups and small businesses is to maximise the resources you have and stretch your budget in innovative ways so that you get noticed online for all the right reasons.
At one end of the spectrum, your online presence could be an all-bells-and-whistles e-commerce platform or it could just be a simple website that gives customers more information about you.
While big companies can afford to chuck heaps of time and money at their online marketing and advertising, the same doesn’t hold true for start-ups and businesses that only have limited resources. And yes, while being able to throw money at your online presence can have positive benefits for your brand’s visibility, it’s not absolutely necessary in order to start building a meaningful online presence.
One of the great things about starting a business today is the potential to get your ideas heard no matter what your budget. With a bit of creativity and a lot of hard work, tools such as social media can help even the smallest entity reach a huge audience.
The downside to all these opportunities is there’s also now a lot of noise out there. So, as creating an online presence for your brand or business is all about capturing the attention of your targeted audience, if you want to make yourself heard, you need to stand out from the crowd.
Start with the basics
When you start a new business you don’t need everything at once. The same is true for your online presence – having all the bells and whistles would be a nice-to-have but they’re not needed all at once. Much better to simply focus just on what you need to get going. Think of it as if you were setting up your first home. You’d focus on the basics, right? The nice-to-have stuff would be added later. So your online presence at first might be nothing more glamorous than a simple landing page with a contact form. Easy!
Here are 12 tips to help you create a strong online presence even on a shoestring online marketing budget.
Create your website
Building and maintaining a website is one of the most important marketing tools for any business.While this step may seem obvious, the thought of creating a website is often a daunting prospect for many business owners. The good news, however, is that building a website is more straightforward than you might think. There are a number of free online tools that allow you to drag and drop design elements into ready-to-use templates.
Remember, your initial goal is to build a website just so you can be found online. You can refine the look and feel and functionality over time – let your website grow up together with your business.
Start a blog
Blogging is one of the most effective ways to improve the online visibility of your brand.In addition to cultivating relationships with customers and other influencers, thereby increasing your reach, blogging does a lot to promote the authenticity of your brand. It also greatly improves your search engine ranking.
Go where people are
A great online presence isn’t just about having your own website or writing a blog. To raise awareness about your business, you need to go where people already are on the web and connect with them there. This is where social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ come into the mix.
Social media marketing is one of the most effective and cost-effective ways to promote both small and large businesses. As well as building relationships and making new connections, you can also use social media to drive people back to your website or blog – for example, by letting people know that you’ve posted something new.
Be visual with video
Businesses of all sizes and scale can benefit from video marketing, e.g. YouTube or Vimeo. Posting branded videos relevant to your niche market is a very effective way to promote your business, drive traffic to your website, and get your brand noticed in front of a targeted audience. See our recent article about live video streaming for more about the ease, simplicity and power of video.
Be social
Don’t underestimate the power of social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. If you regularly update your profiles on these sites with engaging content that is relevant to your business you’ll generate interest. If your customers appreciate your content then they are very likely to share it with their networks too.
Make sure to follow other relevant businesses in your field as well. Not only will this help to increase your social media presence, but it will also help you see what content they are creating on social media and how successful it is with their audiences.
Commenting about and on other relevant blogs and social media posts can be a good way to get your name out there and start building a positive reputation. However, don’t see it as an opportunity for a sales pitch; rather see it as a chance to add value to the conversation, be genuinely helpful and ultimately build relationships.
Share rather than sell
We say it again – don’t make the mistake of seeing social media as a sales channel. See it as a place to start conversations and build relationships. Try to make your blog and social media channels a place where people want to come for inspiration or advice. Keep your audience in mind and create helpful and relevant content that they would search for or want to pass on.
So, whenever you’re posting on your blog or social media channels, keep promotional posts to a minimum and think more in terms of sharing useful content, such as tips, news, and opinions. In this way, you’ll not only get people reading your posts but you’ll also start to establish yourself as someone knowledgeable that people will want to hear from.
Be strategic
Think about how you can use your various channels to complement each other and strengthen your overall online presence.For example, once you’ve got your website and social media channels set up, cross-link where you can. Here are a few suggestions on how to do this: if you’ve just posted something on Facebook, tell your Twitter followers to check them out; add a link to your website on your LinkedIn profile, and add social sharing buttons to your blog to make it easy for people to share your posts on their social media channels.
Focus on quality
We’ve said it a hundred times and well say it again –creating quality content is the
best way to gain visibility online and effectively promote recognition of your brand. Refresh your content regularly, make it interesting, make it useful, make it fun, keep it short and succinct and, if you use imagery, make sure they’re good quality. Put yourself in the shoes of a possible visitor to your website or social media channel and ask yourself, would I find this interesting and useful, and would I bother coming back for more?
Update regularly
Irrespective of whether you’re posting on social media or your own blog, sticking to a regular schedule can help to build trust and expectations. Having regular, fresh content can also help improve your websites search engine rankings. It’s better to have a more considered, regularly updated presence on a few sites than to spread yourself too thin.
Measure
It’s vital that you continually monitor your progress when developing your online presence. Keep an eye on whats working and whats not, and keep making tweaks.
If you have your own website or blog, Google Analytics is your new best friend. It’s a free, powerful tool that helps you monitor the performance of your website.As well as telling you the number of unique visitors and page views, you can see which content is the most popular, and where your visitors are coming from, e.g. Google, Twitter or Facebook.
On your social media channels, keep watching as to what sort of updates generate the most interest among your followers, then focus on delivering more of the same.
Be patient
Finally, be patient! Building a high-performing online presence is hard work and takes time. Don’t give up if you don’t get the results you want straight away.
Help is only a phone call away
If you are looking to kick start your online presence, but not quite sure where or how to start, feel free to contact the team at Net Branding.
We can help you build an effective online presence around any budget, whether its training days to get you started, a consultancy service to assist and guide your marketing efforts, or full management to give you the peace of mind that someone is looking after you online while you can focus on getting on with the business of generating revenue.
