The Importance of Digital Presence Management
Every business needs to be online, and that probably goes without saying. As far as most consumers are concerned, whether you’re a local pizza shop or an eCommerce store, if you’re not online, you’re not in business.
Luckily, you can take some easy steps to improve your business’s online presence and even build a visual brand identity.
Let’s talk about the importance of digital presence management and what it can do for your business!
What Is Digital Presence?
Digital presence is pretty self-explanatory. It’s how your brand is displayed on the internet across all different aspects where it appears. It’s how you market your brand in any online space. It’s so important when you’re building a brand for one apparent reason: everybody is online.
Okay, not everybody, but probably everybody you know! Nearly 5 billion people on the planet use the internet frequently, so that’s where you’ll find the widest audience.
Regardless of your product or service, you’ll undoubtedly be able to reach your target audience somewhere online, which is incredibly important for gaining new customers, building brand awareness, and building brand loyalty. However, that all starts with building a brand.
To build a brand, you need to be instantly recognizable to your target audience. Let’s take a company with a vast target audience to use as an example. Imagine a light blue square with rounded corners, and in the middle, there’s a white letter “F”. What brand comes to mind? Well, that brand is so instantly recognizable that you don’t even need to see the logo to know we’re talking about Facebook.
How do they do this? By having such a solid digital presence that they’re the third-most viewed website on the internet! The good news for your brand is that there are ways to follow in their footsteps.
Social Media
Social media is your brand’s best friend. Every single platform offers countless opportunities to display your brand and connect with your target audience. So not only can you build brand identity through pictures, color schemes, videos, and other tools, you can build it in your interactions!
Social media has an advantage over other online spaces for building a brand. It gives you a direct line of communication with your audience. If done correctly, this builds trust and loyalty among consumers who like your products.
This is true across every platform. You don’t have to post a viral video every day to build followers on TikTok. Posting entertaining comments on relevant viral videos will have a similar effect and make your brand seem more relatable and trustworthy. A funny comment shows humanity and not just another “bot” account.
For example, your brand is a pet supply store. You’re in luck because I guarantee viral animal content to be uniform across every platform. Engage with the community, and you’ll see results!
Make sure you optimize your account first! Seriously, open a business account, use the right profile picture (that matches your brand), and have a short but sweet bio. Be sure to use hashtags and post at peak times!
Website
Your website is your home base. This is central to your entire online presence. Where are your ads directing customers to? What link is in your social media bio? Where do you direct customers who have questions?
That means that this needs to be taken seriously. All the traffic you get in your entire online sphere will ideally be brought to your website, with the one exception of smartphone apps (apps should still have a website). Even Amazon affiliates want to sell stuff on their sites.
Even if this isn’t the end goal, your website needs to be easy to use, easy to understand, and it needs to not only match your brand but make your brand.
Everything else online should be modeled after your home base.
You want an easy-to-navigate homepage, a “mission” or “about us” page, a contact page, and most importantly, a blog! This gives you the most opportunities to be visible on Google searches and provides a way of putting out helpful information that you can link to on your social media and ad campaigns.
Don’t neglect page speed either. Not only is it important for Google to recognize you, but the average person only waits 3 seconds for a page to load before exiting!
Along with websites, there are a couple of other essential online tools you can use with them.
SEO
What shows a more substantial digital presence, having a funny TikTok video or ranking ahead of The Wall Street Journal on a Google search? Search engine optimization is optimizing your web content to rank higher on search engines like Google.
If you own a shoe store, you can have blog posts that relate to shoes. “What are the best shoes for flat feet?”, “Can I run a marathon with pronated feet?” or “Are hiking shoes worth the money?”
These are a few examples of blog posts you could use to draw traffic to your website and rank higher on Google searches. From there, you need to make sure you are using the proper keywords, that your website runs at optimal speeds and is mobile-friendly, and that you’re using the right visual imagery, word counts, and more.
Think you can simply overlook SEO and it’ll be okay? The truth is, if you’re not competing for the top spots on Google, you’re not even in the game. Showing up on the first page of Google could easily be the difference between a business sinking or swimming.
To be competitive, you need to be in the top 3. Believe it or not, the top 3 spots get the most clicks in a search, and that’s on every page combined. This makes proper SEO practices essential to your marketing strategy.
Email Marketing
Your website should have email chain prompts. Use these to your advantage. They’re an excellent way to remind your customers why your business is so great and to build brand loyalty. These emails should also match your brand’s aesthetics and draw people back to your website.
If you’re not doing this already, email marketing is excellent for building a network of repeat customers. But, getting customers is part of the battle; keeping them is the next.
Advertisements
Ads are a big part of your brand’s digital presence. If you run ad campaigns on Google, YouTube, social media, or anywhere else, you need to make sure that the ad’s content matches your brand, that the ad campaign is performing well, and that the landing page works and is easy to use.
Why Is Digital Presence Management Important?
After reading that last section, you may be a little overwhelmed. A digital presence covers a wide variety of bases, and there is no denying that.
However, if you’re running a small business, you probably don’t have the time to interact with the public every day on social media, monitor and adjust your ad campaigns, and add content to your blog.
Luckily, all of that responsibility doesn’t have to fall directly on you!
With digital presence management (DPM), there are ways you can delegate your online presence management.
Marketing Automation
You can use technology to manage some of your marketing needs in the online world. Of course, this technology isn’t advanced enough to handle everything for your brand’s needs, and nothing compares with trained marketing experts, but it is useful.
It can handle some of your more repetitive and tedious tasks with your ad campaigns and other marketing strategies and collect important data for you. While it can’t run your social media for you, marketing automation has some beneficial uses!
Digital Presence Management Firm
If you find the right DPM firm, they can handle all of your brand’s needs for your online presence. They’ll help you run ads, rank higher on Google, manage your social media accounts, and more.
This takes so much stress off your back when you’re trying to grow your business, and it all comes in one convenient package, putting all the accountability in one place for you.
They can even offer marketing automation tools for you while still providing email marketing services, web analytics, SEO, SEM, and more!
Don’t Do It All Alone!
With digital presence management, there are so many moving parts you need to stay on top of at all times.
The biggest mistake you could make is taking it all on yourself and hoping it’ll be enough.
Instead, give yourself time to run your business, stay up to date with our latest marketing news, and give me a shout to let me know how I can help you!
Thanks for reading,
AJ