What Is Digital Presence?
Simply put, digital presence is how your business appears online. It includes everything people find when searching for you on the web: your website, blog, social media accounts, email marketing campaigns, search and paid advertising as well as things like reviews of your business that cannot be controlled.
How Important is Digital Presence?
In today’s digital world, it is vital to connect with customers online. According to a Salesforce survey, 85% of shoppers conduct research before making an online purchase – 74% using websites and 38% on social media channels. As such, businesses must create an effective digital strategy. Crafting your digital presence gives customers a chance to know who you as a brand while building credibility; if potential buyers cannot locate you when searching for you on Google or other search engines, then de-legitimizes your brand image.
What Makes an Impactful Digital Presence?
A successful digital presence is defined by quality over quantity. A great starting point is having a user-friendly website with original content, as well as maintaining an informative blog that shares news about your brand or industry-related insights. The next step in building an effective digital presence involves using News Company analytics and tactics to boost the visibility of your website in search results, thus increasing traffic to it.
Finally, your digital presence relies on social media engagement to foster a closer connection with your target audience. To maximize effectiveness on these platforms, identify which ones they use and establish an online presence there. Likewise, monitor what people are saying about you on these networks so that you can shape the narrative that unfolds around you.
How Much Will You Charge for Digital Presence Services?
On average, News Company services cost between $1,500-$5,000 per month. Content marketing costs anywhere from $2,000-$10,000 monthly while social media advertising runs anywhere from $900-2,000 monthly. Email marketing typically runs between $300-500 each month while pay-per-click (PPC) advertising averages anywhere from $9000-$10,000 monthly.
Here are 10 ways to improve your digital presence in 2022:
- Be active on social media – replying to all comments, tags and mentions as well as commenting on followers’ content as well as other brands’. Doing this will foster relationships. Check in regularly; it may even be worth hiring a team member for managing your accounts.
- Locate Your Audience in the Digital Space – Discover where your customers are spending their time online. Are they on LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tik Tok or Quora? By focusing on platforms where you know your target customers are active, you can more effectively utilize the resources at hand. Try cultivating followings where these individuals spend most of their online time.You can uncover this data through user research – questionnaires, A/B testing and surveys – which has the added advantage of helping you better understand your customer and creating content that resonates with them.
- Create Valuable Content – Craft content your target audience will find beneficial and captivating, such as a well-written blog post. Once created, share it on multiple platforms like YouTube, Tik Tok and Instagram – 30% of marketing budgets go towards content production yet less than 40% have an organized strategy for doing so.
- Create a Google My Business profile – Many people turn to Google when looking for a company’s website or phone number, so having your own profile makes it easier to be seen by more people. Be sure to regularly update your Google Business profile with pictures and changes so that it stands out among competitors. Ensure all online directories contain accurate, up-to-date information such as business hours and contact info.
- Incorporate visual content – Now that you’ve built a clean, aesthetically-pleasing website, it is time to post multimedia content like pictures and videos. Highly shareable, visual content can help consumers get a clear idea of your brand, mission, ideals and message. Good visuals including your brand imagery, logo and color scheme can help grow a consistent digital presence that will build trust in the consumer’s eyes.
Examples of video content that will engage consumers: how-to videos, meet-the-team interviews and product demonstrations. Also consider publishing testimonial review videos. While written testimonials are easy to fake, video testimonials can be more convincing and engaging.
- Always be willing to switch things up – customer trends and search engine algorithms are ever-changing, so your brand strategy should be ever-evolving. Keep abreast with UX trends and with what your competitors are doing.
One way in which search engines are getting smarter is with BERT or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Google’s BERT algorithm, put simply, combines machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to better identify the context of search queries, especially voice searches. It will benefit you as a business to become familiar with how BERT works. An increased number of voice searches often means users are using more filler words that have to be accounted for with longtail keywords and more fleshed-out keyword strings.
What’s the best way to figure out how to update your strategies? Take a look at the analytics. Social media platforms offer analytic tools, as does Google. You can also use third-party apps.
- Hire an expert – an expert will provide invaluable expertise and an outside perspective on how to reach customers more effectively. Modern digital marketing requires SEO optimization, a field that constantly changes as algorithms are being updated. SEO experts can implement the newest rules to ensure the highest ranking on search engine results pages (SERPS).
Experts can guide you through important things like making sure your website is mobile-friendly.
- Begin with your owned media – your digital presence starts with media you own, including your blog, newsletter and social media accounts. If your content is of high value (see step 3), your content will be shared, generating essentially free marketing. You will also be rewarded by Google in the form of a higher ranking on search results pages.
Most importantly, owned media content can increase your brand’s authority. As you connect more deeply with your audience, your audience can come to rely on you as a trusted source. When you consistently provide relevant, valuable content, your brand authority naturally grows. This idea of authority is invaluable when it comes to SEO optimization.
You might also want to consider email marketing. In contrast to spam emails, send your customers emails they will actually want to read. You can accomplish this by hiring an engaging and creative copywriter. Customers receive a deluge of emails every day, so your email will have to stand out and provide valuable information.
- Build relationships – loyal customers will write good reviews for your business; writers can generate high-value content; cultivating good relationships with vendors can help spread word-of-mouth. Build relationships with influencers who can feature you on their platform and reporters who can give you exposure in the media. For a new brand, it might be more cost-effective to connect with micro-influencers.
- Be human – show your personality in your social media and on your website. This authenticity will allow you to build relationships (see step 9) and will be more engaging for consumers. Part of growing a digital presence is developing a voice that allows the audience to connect with your brand. You should be human and relatable.
Online Tools You Can Use to Improve Your Digital Presence in 2022
- Hubspot – Hubspot provides customer relationship management (CRM) software as well as tools to craft effective landing pages.
- ActiveCampaign – ActiveCampaign is another CRM platform that assists businesses in automating their emails and crafting targeted campaigns.
- Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a free web analytics program that will assist in compiling statistics for SEO purposes.
- ManyChat – ManyChat is a free tool that allows you to create bots to answer customer queries and market your product through Facebook Messenger.
- Buzzsumo – Buzzsumo is a cloud-based platform that scans billions of articles and posts on the internet to help you discover the best engagement, content and outreach opportunities in any niche.
- Serpstat – Serpstat is an SEO toolkit that can help you find new keywords to target, track backlinks, and perform a site audit.
- Pingdom – Pingdom is a tool that allows you to monitor your web speed, to ensure that your site is user-friendly.
- Buffer – Buffer allows users to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, LinkedIn and Pinterest and offers comprehensive analytics.
- Sprout Social – Sprout Social is a social media management tool that can help improve engagement and increase customer satisfaction by allowing you to manage all your social media profiles from a single profile, while also providing analytics.
- Creatopy — Creatopy helps you create aesthetically-pleasing online ads without requiring you to have any coding or design skills.
