Regardless of which stage your business is at, growth-wise; whether you are a promising start-up or respectful well-known corporation, boosting online exposure is a critical issue that each business must consider in order to remain competitive.
To help you make the most out of your digital marketing efforts, here are some tactics and tips on how to make your brand more visible on the web.
1. Create a website that is your digital business card
If you want to expand your reach and build a solid brand awareness, the web is where you need to be. Surprisingly, many small businesses are still acting as offline entities, using outdated traditional means to promote their professional activity.
While offline marketing tactics are still important, underestimating the importance of running a professional website is a strategic loss in the battle for greater brand exposure. If you haven’t already, it’s high time that you take that step towards boosting the online presence of your brand.
Tips and tricks to follow:
- Think of your website as your business face – create a design that looks trustworthy and professional
- Build a high impact website with user-friendly features and easy accessibility for your visitors
- Keep it up-to-date and optimised – never underestimate the power of fresh and worthy data provided
- Constantly improve design – make sure it corresponds to your business image and company etiquette
- Create website content that is “selling and compelling” – hook customers to your products and services and encourage them to come back for more information
- Make sure every single page involves a “call to action” – your call to action motivates your visitor to do something and that could be to Buy or Contact you
- Don’t forget to keep an eye on analytics – using a Web tracking tool on your website, like Google Analytics
- Use the right technologies – make your website easy for both users and search engine robots to detect and understand; do not build a flash website!
2. Embrace Social Media
Frankly speaking, the powerful effect of social media is simply undeniable. Social media offers relationship-building opportunities that are virtually limitless.
Businesses are now exploring new alternatives to get a bigger pay off with social media and understanding social media best practices can exponentially grow your online outreach.
Tips and tricks to follow:
- Focus on building a loyal and proactive community – it is great to rely on the support of active community members, lively engaged in the discussions and company social happenings
- Keep in your arsenal a pack of social media management tools – that will help you manage multiple profiles across the major social platforms. Social media dashboards such as HootSuite, TweetDeck, etc., will become your best friends in optimising your time and efforts.
- Initiate personal interaction with your target audience by participating in online discussions – target Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn Groups to exchange valuable business insights.
- Use social media to engage with your email subscribers – insert a catchy signature in your autoresponder to invite new subscribers to follow you on Pinterest, like your Facebook Page, join you on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
- Make it easy to follow you – connect your social media profiles to your website and blog; add active like buttons to all main social media platforms
3. Go deeper into blogging
Businesses of all sizes are using blogging to enhance their digital presence and shine a spotlight on their brand. Blogs now acts as powerful social marketplaces and effective channels for mass communication, sale-oriented marketing content and the flow of business ideas.
Tips and tricks to follow:
- If you’re new to blogging, attend some “newbees” blogging webinars – just surf the topic on the web and you will find handful of tips and tricks on how to start and develop your blog
- Conduct research to find the right blogging platform – there are plenty of them on the market. Blogger.com, WordPress.com, LiveJournal.com might do the job for you.
- Find the perfect niche – then convert your blog into a ”Wikipedia expert” about a very specific area that highly interests your audience
- Target your audience “prototype” – deeply explore the demographics, social status, interests to better please their “contribution”
- Keep your blog integrated to social media – share the links across all the platforms each time you publish new content that will further engage your community in an incessant flow of helpful updates
- Create content that is not sale-focused but customer-centric – 100% guaranteed that people will appreciate your professional manner.
- Always offer Added Value to maintain your blog rocking – it remains one of main rules when it comes to blogging. Give, generously.
- Make sure you post content on a regular basis – pick a day or two of the week and always post an article at a scheduled time. This will assure that your audience comes back on a regular basis to read your new article.
4. Fuel your SEO
In today’s competitive environment, SEO is fast becoming a must in your marketing strategy. The higher ranking you have, the higher credibility your company gains. SEO will make your brand stand out from the crowd on top of maximising your marketing efforts.
Tips and tricks to follow:
- Optimise your online content, posts and discussions with the keywords that would be more likely searchable by your target audience.
- Avoid duplicate content and never forget – unique content is the stepping stone when it comes to SEO
- Educate yourself on how to use meta tags and title tags – that will help you a lot to climb your business up on the “SEO ladder”
- Get your blog integrated with your existing website – it’s a great move to fuel SEO and create back links to get a consistent traffic
- Keep yourself updated on the ever changing search engine algorithms –thus you will be able to timely and effectively meet up the new requirements
- Use a keyword search tool to get the job done for you. Free tools such as Google’s Ad Words Keyword Tool or Google’s Search-based Keyword Tool , might be useful online solutions for your SEO goals.
Wrapping it up
In a nutshell, if you’re leveraging SEO, social media and blogging, you are combining all the best of digital marketing to create a kind of “Perpetual (Pro) motion Machine.”
Once you learn how to effectively manage that mix of tactics, you will be able to make the most out of their advertising opportunities and enjoy way more powerful results in boosting your online exposure!
How many of these tactics are you already doing? Or maybe you picked a few up? Let me know!
20 Responses
I am doing them all, but I must admit blogging has taken a back seat recently – there just aren’t enough hours in the day! And while I’m happy to outsource some website-related tasks (copywriting for instance), I prefer to do SEO, analytics and blog posts myself.
Thank you, Bridie! I agree that in the fast pacing reality of Today, we scarcely have time to get all done out of the busy daily schedule. Great time management is vital to be able to catch up with all the tasks. Blogging is sure more time consuming while social media and SEO are pretty much more flexible and dynamic to get managed.
Thanks Velly this is very informative blog for the beginners thanks again!keep blogging
Thanks for the feedback, Kinjal. Glad you have enjoyed the post.
Nice one. Pretty much sumarizing the best practices that every owner should stick too, when it comes to attaining a good brand awareness. Thanks for sharing, Velly.
Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate your comment. Brand online exposure is an important area we all should focus on, considering the competitve market we are part of. Hope that the post brings some added value in this direction.
We do them all. New to blogging but finding it a great tool to share more details about work we do that may appear to large to write about on Facebook. We pay a Google Adwords company to do our SEO weekly. Found it def helps pushing our ranking up against our competitor as we have a new fancy website we want our customers to see. I’m wasn’t tech savvy but pushed myself to learn more so I can engage more customers through different avenues. And it’s paying off
Great tips as always! Thanks for Sharing
Thanks for commenting, Katie. Blogging is certainly a very beneficial tool to use and the more you become familiar with it, the more advantages you might discover. As for outsourcing your SEO to an expert company- it’s a really good move if you can afford it and it also saves you time to focus on some other elements for boosting your digital presence. Congrats on self-educating and searching new channels for evolving more prospects. That would definitely do the trick for you! A way to go and best of luck!
Hi, just a comment and a question! First, thanks for the article, it’s particularly timely for me as I’m looking to start up a business and I’d like to build my online infrastructure right from the beginning, rather than have to retrofit and correct mistakes later on. Who am I kidding, I’ll be correcting mistakes as I go no matter what, but anyhoo, I can but try! I’ll be starting up my website without much experience in website construction, and whilst I’d love to learn how to manage my own website and learn css html and whatever it is I need to learn – I need to get online sooner rather than later and I want to control content/structure – so I need to use one of those user-friendly web tools for now. I’m wary of your comment to avoid flash websites though – do you know, is the godaddy website builder in that category? Thanks! Bana.
Hi Bana, thanks for the comment and especially about this question of finding the right tool to build a website since it could bring added value to other readers who are just about to launch their businesses live! As for Go Daddy- it’ s not flash, however it’s not a free website builder. As I know, they have released a new improved version, mainly with better designs and templates, but I haven’t tried it personally yet and I can only express opinion on the previous one which was kind of outdated. As written in my Bio, I’m workimg for http://puzl.com/, a 100% free website builder which seems to be exactly what you are looking for. You don’t need to have any knowledge of coding. It is still in beta but it is already a very good website building tool and its capabilities will soon be multiplied as work on the next version began six months ago. Feel free to contact Puzl at info@puzl.com for more information. Customer support will respond to all your questions within 24h.
Great and simple post. SEO and online marketing has such a mythology about it, but it really is just common sense! Thanks for pointing that out 🙂
Thanks, Nicole. Appreciate your positive feedback!
I definitely think that this should be well thought out and done in a smart way, it is important to get out there and market your business.
This is a great information and examples, thanks for sharing!
Hi! I Hope you are good. Such an informative article. But after reading this article and like more my observation is that designing the right digital marketing strategy is essential for all businesses, but it can be difficult to know exactly how to do it. There are many digital marketing platforms and all platforms are not created equally when it’s come to different types of content.
I liked that you pointed out that you should use social media to help you market your business. It seems like a good thing to get an expert to help you do marketing. After all, hitting your target audience could be really difficult.
Thanks a lot for this topic.. awesome post!
Great article! Couldn’t agree more with your points! Look forward to the upcoming posts 🙂
You have mentioned some reasonable points here. Especially, the first one, Your website acts as a business card, it helps in networking and presenting your business to your audience. Now, many people are even making their resumes in the form of a website, which truly seems interesting and impressive to me.