The importance of having an online presence in today’s competitive market cannot be overemphasised. This is because an online presence can make or break your business, especially for small to mid-sized business owners.
Most customers nowadays look for a product or service on the internet first before making a decision to buy. Therefore, if your business is not visible online, you might lose potential customers to your competitors.
While it’s true that many startups and small businesses do not have an abundance of resources to build an online presence like the big authority sites, having a custom web design will ensure that your design is unique and personalised to fit your business. Compared to website templates that tend to be less search engine friendly, custom web design is more search engine friendly, which is just what you need to bring many visitors to your website.
(Top 5) Best Steps to Creating an Online Presence for Your Brand
The key to creating a powerful online presence is knowing where to start. Here are 5 steps to creating an online presence for your brand.
1. Set Your Goal
The first thing you need to do is to come up with a plan. How do you intend to grow your brand? Prioritise your goals, objectives, and aims carefully. Break down your objectives into smaller and achievable bits. For example, your most important objective for the year could be; to make your blog among the top 10 most viewed health and fitness blogs in 2019.
Strategies carefully on how you intend to make this happen. By prioritising your goals, you will be able to build your business to a level that will be the envy of your competitors.
2. Get Your Company Website Right
Build a website that is both functional and attractive. Remember, customers want to visit a website that is easy to navigate and find what they are looking for. If your budget allows it, you could always hire a professional web design company to do it for you.
3. Incorporate Social Media
Social media can complement your business website, make your business easy to find and build a stronger brand. Social media will also help you with reputation management. This is because, if you are on social media, you will be able to know what your customers are saying and if they have a complaint or a negative customer experience, you can be able to address it immediately before it taints your reputation.
There are numerous social media sites available in the market today. If you are just starting, it is always a good idea to keep it simple. Start by creating a Facebook profile for your business. You can also create a Twitter and a LinkedIn account. Once in a while, you can post useful tips and tricks and engage your audience to comment.
4. Keep Track
In order to know if your efforts are paying off, you will need to keep track of your strategy and see if things are falling into place. Take time to look at your social media pages every day and see if the number of likes is increasing. Check which social media sites are performing better and work on improving the one that is not.
5. Be Patient
When building an online presence for your brand, remember that there is no hard and fast rule to doing things. Be patient enough and avoid setting unrealistic expectations.