7 Digital Marketing Tactics For Increasing Your Online Presence
In an ever more crowded online world, astute business owners are constantly looking for new marketing strategies to increase their online presence.
A strong, confident online presence can translate directly into sales revenue, so establishing a clear web marketing strategy is vital for online success. Here are some tips from the professionals that will help with increasing your online presence and grow your online visibility.
7 Awesome Tips and Strategies for Increasing Your Online Presence
Tip #1: Engage With Your Customers
A business that doesn’t actively engage with its customers and potential customers will alienate its audience very quickly. Respond quickly and positively to all questions, comments and complaints.
A confident and consistent online voice is needed to ensure that you stay in control of online conversations, whilst still presenting a friendly and professional image.
Tip #2: Share, Don’t Push
A company that solely promotes its products via its social media posts will never grow its online presence significantly. It is OK to highlight products via social channels, but this should be just a part of the content distributed socially.
Include fun updates from the company and share relevant content that is not directly related to your business. As an example, a company that sells art materials could share content relating to gallery viewings, tutorials and artist profiles.
Tip #3: Use Graphics & Video For Maximum Punch
It’s a fact that nothing works as hard online as graphics and video. From beautifully-styled lifestyle shots of your company’s products to fun Vines filmed in the office, images and video content boost views and click-throughs in a way that simple text can never achieve.
It’s worth spending some time learning about the various image sizes for different social media platforms, so that when you add an image to a tweet or Facebook post, it appears online in exactly the way you intended, and not with key content cropped out.
If video appeals, YouTube is an obvious choice to build your audience, by providing high quality product info videos or Q&A sessions, for example.
Why not go all out and use Twitter’s new Periscope app to provide a live video stream of an event or product demonstration?
Tip #4: Invite Your Audience To Connect
Always bear in mind that effective online marketing is a two-way street. It’s not enough to simply push content towards your target audience. You have to work out how to encourage that audience to actually have a dialogue with you.
As an example, try experimenting with a company-specific hashtag to build a Q&A session on Twitter, where customers and potential customers can literally ask you anything about your products or brands.
This could be a one-off or a regular feature. By tying it to a hashtag and channeling all questions to a set time, the impact will be greater, and you can ensure you have all relevant experts on hand to answer questions during the Q&A.
Tip #5: Optimize Your Conversations
Most business owners are already fully aware of search engine optimization, when it comes to their website content. It is likely that they have employed specialists to help identify target keywords and to tweak their website in order to improve their rankings for those keywords.
When it comes to social media, however, many business owners do not think in terms of keywords and optimization, and are therefore missing out on potential opportunities to find a targeted audience and deliver highly-relevant information straight to that audience.
By spending some time identifying potential keywords and then searching various social platforms for those keywords, it should be possible to find individuals and groups of interest to your company.
Follow these, engage with them, and offer them real value from your content. Also, make sure that you use your researched keywords in your social content.
Tip #6: Track Your Performance
Putting time, effort and money into web promotion is all well and good, but you really need to know whether that investment is reaping any rewards. Analytics are key to building a successful and profitable online marketing strategy.
The simplest place to start is by integrating Google Analytics into your website, ensuring that e-commerce conversions and social click-throughs are both fully tracked, as well as standard page views.
Many social media dashboards also have robust reporting tools built in. Spend time planning what you want to get out of your analytics, so that you build a strong platform for analysis that can help you to refine your online strategy over time to produce optimal results.
Tip #7: Use Offline Marketing Strategies As Well As Online
It’s all too easy to focus on web-based marketing strategies to increase your online presence, but offline activities can also play a major role. Advertising a specific hashtag at a cafe or bar, for example, could encourage offline customers to start following, and engaging, online.
Similarly, using a till receipt or a printed invoice to ask customers to go online and leave a review of a product or service could prove fruitful.
Having lots of positive, genuine online reviews is a powerful boost to a firm’s online reputation, so it’s worth putting some effort into sourcing them.
It goes without saying that companies should have links to their social profiles on their websites, but many overlook the other contexts in which those profiles could be publicised.
Social links could be displayed in shop windows, on company vehicles, in printed marketing materials and even on staff uniforms. Once you adopt the mindset of pushing awareness of your online presence at every opportunity, it will become second nature, and almost compulsive.
If you’re tracking your activities effectively, you’ll be able to see just how much impact those activities are having, which will hopefully drive you to extend your efforts.
In the fast-paced online world, no business can afford to stand still. The drive to increase your online presence is fundamental to business success nowadays. Whether you choose to build your online presence using in-house resources, or to buy in digital marketing services, it is absolutely essential to keep moving forwards with novel and creative ways in which to engage, inform and entertain your customers.
