You have a website and a Facebook page, but you feel like you’re grasping at straws. Having an online presence means having to keep up with the latest changes in the search engine algorithms or the aggressive marketing of your competitors. How to invest in the right online marketing that will yield the best results? You’re not alone. That is the question most businesses struggle with when it comes to balancing the budget for digital enterprises.
What if you didn’t have to spend too much money and still get measurable and meaningful results? Here are our 5 ways to strengthen your web presence and make the most of the digital world.
1. Find your brand voice and stick with it
Let’s start with pointing out a mistake many businesses make when it comes to defining their brand: they underestimate the importance of defining a brand.
A brand is like a symbol. It exists independently and grows organically without your intervention. Out there, your brand is the only thing that speaks for you to prospects you haven’t yet convinced, that’s why it’s crucial to define it and give it a voice.
Your brand voice is defined by your audience. Who is your audience and how should you engage with it? You won’t talk to consumers the way you talk to other businesses, for instance. What platform would be best to amplify your brand voice and have it reach as many people as possible? If your audience doesn’t spend time on Instagram, why pour efforts and money into this platform?
Most companies aim blindly at the wrong target and do so without a solid strategy. Branding is the foundation of any marketing and advertising strategy and is the glue that holds everything in place online. As such, it should be well defined, understood by all of your employees, and used efficiently across all of your online platforms.
It determines how you’re going to engage with your customer and start a dialogue.
2. Engage your customer properly
Your customers have the power to tarnish your brand voice or make it shine. The worst thing you can do is to close the dialogue with your customers if they are being critical. People spend just as much time reading product or service reviews than they do look at the product you are selling. The thing is, people tend to be very forgiving of a company that made a mistake, as long as the company establishes a dialogue with the wronged customer and tries whole-heartedly to right their wrongs.
This means replying to comments, acknowledging that a mistake has been made, and being genuinely solution-oriented online.
Scouring the web daily for comments to reply to seems like a daunting task, but you don’t need to make it a chore. Focus on one platform at a time and remember that one good reply goes a long way in showing your customers that you care. A solid brand identity paired with a good content strategy will make engaging in a dialogue a piece of cake.
3. Have a solid content strategy
Your company is continually scrutinized by your audience when it comes to the value it provides. After all, you started your company to address an unsolved problem and propose a solution to it. The day you stop providing a solution to this issue is the day your company sinks.
The only way you can convince your audience of your value is through a solid content strategy.
This means choosing the right platform to get the word out, crafting content that reflects your brand, seeking partnerships with other companies to get more reach, and spending your marketing budget efficiently.
Keeping the customer dialogue alive is one of the hardest things to achieve, whether it be because you can’t afford to hire a community manager or because you don’t have time to dedicate to your web strategy. However, having a solid content strategy, and staying active online is one of the best ways to attract new prospects, convert them, and make them brand advocates.
See it as an investment. One that will prove very fruitful in the long run.
4. Be found when your customer needs you to be
No matter how good your content strategy is and no matter how well your brand is established, this serves no purpose if your voice can’t even reach the targeted ears. Brand awareness is just as crucial as the rest when it comes to achieving an efficient online presence. To achieve this, you need an optimized website and a good presence on search engines.
You need a good SEO strategy.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of optimizing web content through the use of keywords in order to rank higher in Google searches that are relevant to your field of expertise. Since nearly 93% of traffic comes through search engines, it’s crucial to invest time and money into ranking higher on search engines and driving more potential prospects to your website.
SEO practices vary widely and all play a role in making your business notorious online. Whether it be through content optimization on your website, meta titles and descriptions, backlinks, or social media posts, SEO is what makes a difference between a brand that succeeds and one that will ultimately get outrun by its competitors.
However, getting the word out to the most people never suffices. For instance, a restaurant that hands out flyers will surely attract new customers by making itself known to them, but to have a customer stay, it also needs to serve good food and provide a memorable positive experience.
This is where user experience comes in handy.
5. Eliminate friction
Imagine opening up your art gallery. You worked for months to get the trendiest paintings, you invested in making your art gallery look fabulous, in spreading the word, and even get media coverage for your grand opening. On the big day, many people come in to get their hands on the best pieces of art only to find themselves queuing up to purchase a painting because you only hired one cashier. The quality of the paintings won’t make up for the bad experience people get at checkout and people will surely feel the same if they get on your website and can’t find what they’re looking for and worse yet, if they can’t purchase what they want easily.
UX stands for user experience. Just like when it comes to choose a restaurant, most people will consider the ambiance and the good service they get online too. There is a science behind user experience online and it’s all oriented towards offering a frictionless experience to your customer.
This starts with web design, as well as user flow. No website can be built without an actionable plan and without thinking of the user journey. Just like roads, user journeys must be planned and made as straightforward as possible.
Customers that browse your website are not all ready to purchase. Some of them might be ready to add a product to the cart and checkout, but others might need a little more information before they commit to the act of purchase. Your website needs to provide and address both of these customers’ concerns. That is why planning the customer journey is so important when making your website. It determines how good your company is to get its audience and provide a frictionless online experience.
How to get started?
Navigating through all of this seems like a big thing to tackle. You don’t need to go all out and implement a massive web strategy that includes social media presence, colossal digital marketing budgets, and exhaustive brand guidelines, but every little investment counts towards establishing a meaningful customer dialogue.
Our web development experts can get you started on your journey towards engaging with your customers in simple yet efficient ways that will yield visible results. Whether it be to help you find your voice or reduce friction in user experience, or even to help you plan a content strategy, we can set you up for success and make your voice heard by the right people.
Caroline is our in-house digital marketing and web strategy expert. She has been working in the web industry for many years as project and community manager, web designer and developer, and e-commerce specialist for startups and established businesses in North America. Currently living in Montreal, Canada, she is an aspiring author as well as a cat enthusiast.
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