Around the world, e-commerce is a huge industry. According to a report by Australia Post, we spent a huge $27.5 billion on online shopping in 2018. The global opportunities are amazing, too: Americans spent $11.6 billion on Black Friday 2019 alone.
Whether you want to strengthen your digital presence to boost sales, attract more attention to your site, or increase customer loyalty, we can help you.
We’re experts in all aspects of digital marketing and know how you can make your online presence more effective. Whether you need help with SEO, social media, blog posts, e-commerce or anything else, our services can help you.
In this article, we’ve pulled together a list of expert tips that can help your business grow its digital presence. Ready to find out more? Then keep reading!
Take SEO Seriously
If you’re starting to figure out how to start a business online, it’s easy to think of search engine optimization as an extraneous expense. Yet it’s not something that you can do without.
Search engine optimization is all about helping your website appear further up the list of search results. Sites on the second page of a Google search only get a fraction of the clicks as those on the first page. If you’re not on the first page, you’re missing out on a huge amount of business.
So how can you optimize your SEO to build your digital presence?
Carry Out Keyword Research
Your site should target certain keywords and include them in your content. For instance, if you want to market your repair shop in Melbourne, you could target “repair shop in Melbourne” as a keyword. By using it in your post and your page titles, you can appear higher up the search results.
It’s important to know what keywords to target, too. Some terms are too heavily saturated for you to have a hope at ranking with them.
Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Google’s mobile-first indexing means that how your site performs on mobile is more important than on desktop. No more can you neglect your mobile site: it has to be your priority.
Speed Up Your Site
Site speed is a huge SEO criterion. You should reduce image sizes, disable scripting, and choose a good hosting solution to make your site faster than other competitors. A slow site can frustrate users and make them use your competitors instead, damaging your SEO.
Take Advantage of Email Marketing to Build a Digital Presence
Communication with your customers and clients is a priority. One of the best ways to increase your digital presence is to make an email list that you can use to communicate with your customers.
For instance, you can create guides or a newsletter that users have to signup to, should they want to see it. This kind of gated content is common online: how many times have you seen sites offering free e-books in exchange for your email address? Another easy way to gather email addresses is by running contests.
Once you’ve gathered the email addresses, you can start putting email marketing into practice. For instance, you can start sending out promotional offers to customers and promoting new products or services.
Write Fantastic Content
If you’ve not got good content on your site, you won’t get visitors to your site. Content is still king and you need to have content that is thought-provoking, engaging, and sharable.
Write about how your product or service, no one else’s, can solve the problems that your visitors are having. You can write about any of your services and any of your products like this.
The most important part of any post is the introduction. Most readers won’t read any further than the introduction. You need to make a compelling case for reading all of your content.
To do this, use a copywriting formula known as the AIDA formula. This breaks the introduction down into four components: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.
The Attention bit is all about hooking your readers in. Give them a statistic that they find interesting or pose a question to them.
Interest is the section where you stoke interest in the types of products or services that you’re selling.
Desire is where you make your customers want to use your products or services. Show them how they can solve the issues that they’re having or otherwise improve their life.
Action means ending your post with a call to action. One common example is the one we used way back in the introduction to this post: tell your readers to keep reading the post.
Maintain an Active Online Presence
There are two kinds of online presence used by companies. Let’s think of them as buildings: the first is an imposing building that looks impressive but doesn’t seem human, you may never see anyone enter or leave. The second is an attractive storefront with chatty staff and a very obvious, bustling presence.
Which one will be more attractive to you? It’s the second one, isn’t it?
Your firm should be friendly and reply to anyone who messages and post engaging content that generates likes, shares, and comments. There’s a careful line to tread between being friendly but maintaining professionalism. One fantastic example is Denny’s twitter account, while some egregious examples have been created by DiGiorno’s, Wendy’s and Kitchenaid.
Find Out Where Your Audience Is
Who are you targeting? The average age range of your customers should dictate where you direct most of your advertising efforts. For instance, having a presence on Instagram is not great if you’re hoping to target those over the age of 50.
As a rule of thumb, targeting young people is best achieved through Instagram and Twitter, targeting older people is best achieved through Facebook. Go where your audience congregates if you want to build an active and engaging online presence.
Use Images and Videos to Grab Viewers
Is a picture worth a thousand words? That ratio might be a bit off, but a good picture or video can grab attention a lot more than words alone. Your social media content shouldn’t be limited to linking to blog posts.
To build your digital presence, Post images that tell a story or are inspiring, post entertaining video content that viewers will want to share with their friends. This kind of content sells itself, so long as you can make a viewer laugh, feel inspired, or feel engaged. A funny video might not be as directly marketing-oriented as a blog post about why your products or services work well, but they can get more eyes on your brand and your site.
A good header image for your blog posts is essential, too. Don’t ever post a blog post that doesn’t have an image. People are visual and are more likely to click on a post if the image is engaging.
Update Your Site Regularly
Your site should post new content regularly. If you don’t post stuff for six months, no one is going to be drawn to your website. It’s as simple as that.
Keeping your site updated is part of having a strong digital presence and should not be neglected. You should also never consider your site to be “done”, as such. There are always improvements that you can make to your site and you should always seek to optimize it for the user.
Design Your Site According to Your Needs
Your business has unique goals and needs that are unlike any other business. Your website should reflect those goals, not copy another website that’s meant to serve a different purpose.
Sit down and think about what your goals are. If you’re a store it may be to get more sales, if you’re a computer repair company, it may be to get more clients. Whatever your goal is, your website needs to be designed to reflect that.
The end goal should feature prominently on your site. For instance, if you’re trying to drive sales, list your products front and centre, don’t hide the catalogue away.
Build Relationships Online
Do you want to feature your content on others’ sites, using techniques like guest-posting to market your brand to their audience? Would you like to take advantage of influencer’s huge followings to get the word out about your brand to tens of thousands of people at once?
You can take advantage of preexisting followings, if you’re smart, with low costs. For instance, you could offer your products or services to influencers for free, in exchange for featuring on their feed. You could craft fantastic content for others’ sites with a backlink to your site.
Building relationships lets you jumpstart your digital presence.
How We Can Help You
If you’d like to build a digital presence fast, we can help you. As experts in digital marketing, we can help you with just about every aspect of boosting your online presence.
To learn more about our services, take a look at our marketing technology page! If you’ve got any questions about us or our services, please get in touch with us. We’d be very happy to hear from you.
