Top 5 Tips to Establish Your Brand’s Online Presence
Digital marketing is a must for almost every brand.
This is an obvious statement to anyone under the age of 35 or so, who has spent most or all of their lives in a world dominated by the internet. For people who have been running businesses or managing brands since phone book ads were a good investment, it bears repeating that digital marketing is no longer optional.
A brand might continue to market through traditional channels like television ads, but an online presence is now essential to success. Online search is one of the main ways consumers find businesses these days.
A significant number of consumers reportedly say that they will not patronize a business with no online presence.
This article offers tips on building an online presence. It starts with the basic building blocks of marketing, like a brand name and a logo, followed by how to maintain an online presence over time.
Chapters
Prepare Your Brand Identity
Before you can begin planning how to establish an online presence, you need to create your brand and begin developing a brand identity. This involves answering some rather broad questions about the product or service you will be marketing, such as:
- What goal(s) do you hope to achieve with your business and your brand?
- What value do you, your product, or your service offer to consumers?
- How do you want the public to perceive your brand?
- What values do you hope to promote with your brand? This could be something as general as “honesty” or as specific as “finding a forever home for every dog in my city.”
- Who is your target market?
- Who is your ideal customer or client?
A brand identity consists of much more than just a brand name and a logo. It also includes the values that you will instill in your company and the culture that you will build there. Your brand identity will set the tone for how you present yourself and your business to consumers. If that seems like a tall order, it is. You can start with a brand name and logo.
The brand name will be the main way consumers can identify your product or service and distinguish it from whatever your competitors are offering. The logo provides a visual shorthand for your product or service. You can hire a marketing specialist to help you develop these elements. You can also try making a logo on your own by using a logo maker tool.
Establish Your Online Presence, Strategically
The central component of a brand’s online presence is its website. The goal behind nearly every digital marketing activity is to get people to visit your website and become customers. There are about 200 million active websites on the internet as of early 2023, plus another 900 million that are just sitting there. You have to make your website stand out.
Your website needs to be able to handle whatever users can throw at it. Studies show that consumers are quick to form opinions about a business based on their experience with its website, and that they are not forgiving of delays or other problems. Factors like how long it takes a website to load and whether it is optimized for mobile devices can have a greater impact on customers’ perceptions than the actual content of the site. Consumers may not stay on a site that takes more than a few seconds to load or fails to load properly on a smartphone or tablet.
Consider Which Types of Digital Marketing Work Best for You
You do not have to sit back and wait for customers to come to your site. You have many options for ways to bring in traffic. Search engine optimization (SEO), as discussed further below, is one of the most important methods. You might also consider channels like email or social media platforms.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is a major area of digital marketing, with some platforms helping to bring in billions of dollars in revenue for businesses that know how to use them. As of October 2023, seven social media platforms had at least 1 billion monthly active users:
Each of these platforms offer marketing opportunities. Some allow brands to reach broad audiences, while others only allow more targeted communications. The best platforms for marketers are not necessarily the most popular overall. Which platforms work best for you will depend on your marketing goals.
Email Marketing
Unlike many forms of digital marketing, email marketing has been around for a while. Businesses began exploring ways to use email to connect with consumers back in the 1990s. It remains a very effective method for many brands. Various tools are available that allow you to start building an email list.
Content Marketing
Content marketing relies heavily on SEO to draw consumers to your website or social media channels in order to obtain useful information. It works best when you keep a steady supply of content coming. This could include blog posts, long-form articles, white papers, or ebooks. Over time, you may develop a reputation as an authority on a particular subject, which will keep people coming back to your site or channel.
Mobile Marketing
People spend more and more time on their phones. Digital marketing has adapted to this by meeting consumers where they are. Brands might use text messages for mobile marketing, or they could develop their own mobile apps for even greater engagement with consumers.
Influencer Marketing
People who have particularly large online followings are known as “influencers.” The biggest influencers have followers numbering in the hundreds of thousands or millions. A brand might partner with an influencer who can easily reach its target market. This might resemble a celebrity endorsement, or it might consist of a much longer-term relationship.
Stay on Top of SEO
No one will visit your website if they can’t find it. Most people find websites through search engines, with Google accounting for the vast majority of search traffic. SEO is the process of improving your website’s ranking in search results.
Google’s search algorithm is proprietary, but the company has released guidelines for how websites can rank higher. Experienced SEO consultants also keep track of metrics that show what does and does not work. SEO has two main components:
- On-site SEO: Google tends to prefer sites with high-quality, trustworthy information that fits into a brand’s keyword categories.
- Off-site SEO: Sites that run smoothly tend to rank higher, which makes features like quick loading time and simple URLs very important.
Effective SEO is an ongoing process. You cannot set up a website, optimize it for Google, and then leave it alone. Without attention to the features that can affect SEO, other sites will quickly overtake your site’s place in the rankings.
Make It Personal
You can have the most technologically proficient website and active social media channels in the world, but it won’t help your brand if you aren’t providing consumers with something valuable. Online tools like social media give brands unprecedented opportunities to connect directly with consumers. To do so, you have to provide something your customers want or need. What this is depends on what your brand does and who your customers are. Meeting their needs could involve informative blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, or interactive Q&A sessions, to name only a few possibilities.
Keep the Content Coming
As mentioned above, SEO is an ongoing process. Whatever you are doing to drive traffic to your website or engage with consumers on social media, you have to keep doing it. If you update the company’s blog or post a new video twice a week, stick to that schedule no matter what. If your customers have gotten used to interacting with you on social media, don’t disappear on them without warning.
The internet is fickle. If you drop off of its radar, you might be surprised how quickly it moves on without you. You can catch back up again, but it often takes far greater effort and expense to do that than to keep your content pipeline going.
Follow the Data
When you start building your online presence, not everything you do is going to get results. Keeping track of how different tactics are doing can help you determine what is and is not working. Google and various social media platforms provide a wealth of data showing details like how many people visit your site, how long they stay there, and what search terms they used to get there.
This should be a regular task just like keeping your content updated. The counterpoint to #6 above is that if you find out something isn’t producing a return on investment, you should stop doing it and find something that does work.
Learn More About Establishing Your Brand Online
To survive and thrive in the 21st century, a brand needs to keep consumers engaged with its online presence. This might mean maintaining regular content updates, staying active on social media, and adapting to technological and cultural changes. As a business owner, you may be able to handle many of these tasks on your own, but you might not have started your business just so you could spend your time keeping your brand’s Instagram up to date. Professional digital marketing help can let you focus on doing what you love the most.
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