Increasing Online Presence: 10 Effective Strategies That Help Your Business Grow and Attract More Customers
“Presence is more than just being there.”
- Malcolm S. Forbes
Introduction:
Businesses can use online content as a valuable weapon. It may develop your brand's online presence while boosting conversions, traffic, and brand equity. To differentiate your small business from the competition, you need to create an online presence and leave a digital footprint. Since 97% of customers look for local businesses online, you might as well not exist if they continue to look for you.
You must focus on three crucial areas if you want to establish a small business web presence: your behaviour and the information you provide, your standing with search engines, and how people view your brand online. Given how difficult it is to boost your internet visibility, this guide will offer practical advice for how to get started.
Benefits of Improving Web Presence for Your Small Business
Making your presence known online should be the first in priorities for small business owners like yourself, but it also needs to translate into high-quality experiences. To attract new customers and establish yourself as the most recognisable name in your neighbourhood, your business requires more than just exposure.
You must be familiar with social media, SEO, and building social proof. Making it happen requires patience, time and money. However, most of these revolve around your website, so getting it right can help you benefit from the following:
Getting Noticed: 35% of internet users conduct repeated weekly searches for nearby businesses. So improving the online presence for your brand enables your target market to discover your business.
Increase Your Credibility: Consumers explore their options before making a purchase. Nearly 83% of customers make their decision to visit a store or pay for a service based on what they see online. You are missing out on the majority of your potential revenue if you do not have a web presence or even do not bother much about it.
Always Be Marketing: People browse the internet anytime they can, so you cannot afford to be away. If you have a strong web presence, your marketing campaigns run constantly, even when you are sleeping.
Maximise Your Investment: According to one survey, 46% of small businesses had no online presence in 2018, which suggests that these businesses may have been losing money. Online marketing is the least expensive method of brand promotion since it provides access to real-time measurements and cost-efficient marketing strategies.
Convert More Visitors into Customers: The Rule of Seven states that a lead must have seven interactions with you before they convert into a customer in normal situations. The more possibilities there are for these relationships to be made, the more conversions there will be for your business.
Making Friends with Google: When deciding your business ranking, Google will examine both your website and the rest of your assets. Over time, Google can send you ~30% of all clicks if you satisfy all necessary Local SEO pre-requisites.
Enhance Your Buyer's Journey: The path a lead takes from learning about your brand to buying your goods or services is depicted in the buyer's journey. Making your internet presence your first focus makes sense given that 63% of today's journeys start online.
The main advantages for businesses investing in online exposure are the advantages of developing a web presence for a small business. Be aware that there are no short cuts to success before launching your campaign to raise your web presence.
It calls for endurance, reliability, and a readiness to change. Let us talk about how your small business might start creating its web profile with that in mind.
How to Increase the Online Visibility of Your Business
The first step in creating a business presence online is to assess your current situation. Are you starting a new business or planning to grow the one you already have?
Read this article for ideas on how to strengthen your brand. Savils Media provides a number of tools to assist you with your local small business internet marketing efforts.
1. Create a Persuasive Website
Your website serves as your online shop front or billboard. Your business might as well not exist if you do not have a website because it serves as your main source of leads.
Choose a straightforward click-and-drag web design builder like the Savils Media website builder if you do not want to spend thousands of ££ on a web developer or learn WordPress.
In just a few hours, you can create a straightforward, tidy, and expert-looking website for your small business, complete with an SEO-ready structure and mobile compatibility.
2. Focus on Local SEO
Google has always given local business listings the highest priority. The first step is to confirm that all of the information, including your address, phone number, and operating hours, is accurate and consistent everywhere.
Instead of wasting your time on Google Business Profile and other business directory websites, we can help you ease the process as we partner with Yext to include your company's information in the relevant directories.
3. Gather More Online Reviews
Online reviews are an important source of social proof for your products, services, and experiences of others when dealing with your business. Customers today rely on these reviews to guide their purchases, with ~60-70% of them reading four or more reviews before making a purchase.
Obtaining reviews online is much easier said than done. While a customer who had a bad experience would not need a reminder, it is easy for a satisfied customer to forget to leave a review.
First off, whether it is Yelp, Google Reviews, or your Facebook page, you should always ask each customer to leave a review on their preferred site. To increase your conversion rate and save time, Savils Media Automated Reviews help you automate this process and get better at your reviews and rankings.
If creating your review cache takes some time, do not give up. Only 5–10% of clients will eventually leave a review irrespective of their experience.
4. Create Engaging Content
The concept of content marketing is as old as the Internet itself. Great content helps promote your business by:
Establishing your authority
Increasing your SEO score
Giving customers something of value
Every web metric you can think of for your business will increase with effective content marketing, including traffic, time on page, and conversion rates. Because of this, 72% of B2B and 70% of B2C marketers actively use content marketing.
However, what exactly is "content"?
Content is relevant and useful information that educates and provides value to your readers, who might find it beneficial and gain value from it. A thorough blog post or a YouTube video could both serve these purposes. The important thing is that you are enticing your audience by providing something worthwhile without charge.
5. Be Active on Social Media
Being active on Social Media is essential in the current business environment, for the simple reason that almost all your customers are. You can reach half of the world's population, who are active on social media platforms.
Social networking is without a doubt one of the most effective tools for both large and local businesses alike. These platforms are where your customers are since they are where they spend an average of 147 minutes every day.
How can one be successful on social media?
Post top-notch visual content and concentrate on branding initiatives
Benefit from popular topics in your niche
Engage with your audience
Use paid ads
6. Cross-Promote Your Content
Sharing comparable content from one channel to another is known as cross-promotion. It also entails requesting that your current supporters find you on additional platforms. For instance, you might provide a discount valid just on Instagram and advertise it on Facebook.
Cross-promotion uses your existing and prior customers to gain momentum across all of your channels. But avoid just copying and pasting from one channel to another. Your clients must have multiple reasons to stick with you.
7. Create Engagement with User-Generated Content
Converting your customers into fans will help your business as they can help promote your brand in addition to your efforts. Your clients are engaged with your brand if they frequently leave comments on your social posts. The algorithms take notice of this as well.
Gaining this engagement involves work and frequently does not occur naturally. As a result, publishing user-generated content is a common strategy employed by companies to improve brand visibility online.
Your brand is trustworthy if it is created by actual people. Once more, it will not happen on its own, therefore you might need to develop surveys, contests, and other rewards to plant the first seeds of participation.
8. Optimise Your Website for Success
You can create websites using the Savils Media app, but this isn’t enough. You must experiment until you perfect your user experience.
As your business’s online home, everything a visitor sees on your website reflects who you are. But how do you know if your site gives your users what they want? Here are some essential questions to ask:
How many website visitors convert into paying customers?
Are people using the contact form?
Which pages do visitors spend the most time on?
What's the bounce rate? (i.e. visitors quitting your site fairly soon after landing on it)
Is it easier or harder for my customers to purchase on my site than my competitors?
Google Analytics provides some of these insights, but there’s no reason for not asking your customers for an honest opinion about your website. That can happen online chat, surveys, via reviews, or by asking your customers in person.
9. Understand & Invest in Paid Social Ads
Paid ad options are a great way of acquiring new leads and increasing your revenue. Boosting social posts aren't like paid ads and not quite effective in most cases. Take utmost care to ensure your ad campaigns stay within your budget - so always know what you’re doing.
Whether you use search engine ads or social media ads, start with a small budget and don’t be afraid to invest in professional help to reach the right people.
10. Collaborate with Other Businesses
Working with other brands is a great approach to take use of our collective strength. Instead of direct competitors, these collaborative efforts will often involve companies from similar but unrelated industries.
Collaboration in business gives you access to more market segments without having to worry about losing your current clientele. Make sure the customers of other companies are relevant to you and share your values and objectives before contacting them.
Increase Your Online Visibility with Savils Media
Understanding how to have an online presence is essential for marketing and branding your business, but the idea of online marketing for small businesses can feel quite overwhelming.
That's where we can help. Savils Media's Lead Connector (ios / android) is a comprehensive app that enables business owners like you to set the groundwork for your wholistic marketing plan for your business. This straightforward tool is sure to be impactful and boost your business regardless of your goals — whether you want to create a website, smash google rankings through local SEO, obtain more online reviews or anything else.
