Four Strategies For Boosting Your Business’ Online Presence

It can be quite a daunting challenge to create exactly the kind of powerful online presence you want for your company, but there are few things more important than this for telling the world about your business, and reaching the kind of target audience that will help your business to grow. As challenging as it is, it's certainly worth the effort, because if you do achieve the kind of online presence which accomplishes your advertising and marketing strategies, your business can take off and mushroom into a bigger enterprise than even your most optimistic expectations. There are several tactics you can use to help accomplish this, and if you make a concerted effort to build your online presence, you will almost certainly reap the rewards eventually.

Take advantage of social media

One of the first places to look in terms of boosting your online presence is the social media. The enormous potential of social media is something you simply have to take advantage of, if for no other reason than the fact that billions of people around the world sign on daily to at least one social platform. It's a good bet that most of the customers you want to reach, also sign on to the social media, which means you have to be there too.It's a little different maintaining your business social media page than it would be for a personal page, but once armed with some helpful knowledge and some determination, you can make it work for you. Before you dive right into social media usage, it's worth your while to take a little time and figure out which of the social media would be of most value to you.For instance, if you're targeting a younger audience, you may want to have a greater presence on Instagram and other platforms which cater to millennials and the younger set. If you're seeking to reach an older audience, Facebook should be one of the platforms that you establish a solid presence on. Whichever platforms you settle on however, you need to make a commitment to stay active on them, so that you demonstrate to your followers that you're an involved and engaged business person. You should also make a point of responding to any of your followers who communicate with you, or who like and comment on content that you've posted.

Hire an SEO expert

If you're not SEO expert yourself, it would be a good idea to hire one. This is especially important today, because the big search engines like Google change their algorithms annually in an effort to ensure that they are presenting search results of value to users. The days of stuffing keywords into your text content are over as a means of attracting users, and in fact Google will actually penalize you for this kind of strategy.It's definitely to your advantage to have an expert on hand who knows what the search engines value most highly, so that you can get your website among the top rankings, and have it returned on the first page of results to users. In fact, it's a good idea to establish an ongoing relationship with an SEO expert, so that you can have tweaks or tuneups performed on your site content, that will keep you in line with what the search engines attach greatest value to.

Create high-value content

Once you've decided on which social media you should be active on, and you have a good website design, the next critical phase for boosting your online presence is to create useful content which will have great value to users. The tone of all your content should be similar, and it should all reflect the kind of core values represented by your brand. Beyond that, it's extremely important to make regular posts, to show that you're an active and involved company, rather than some silent corporation.The type of content you provide is of critical importance as well. It's a good practice to post content that in some way is useful to your target audience, informing, instructing, or entertaining them, so they want to come back for more. Things to avoid in your content are sales pitches and appeals for product purchases, because these are universally considered turnoffs by readers. It's much more important that you gain the trust of your followers, and that you provide them with content that is of value to them. That will make them much more likely to want to purchase from you in the future.

Email is alive and well

Anyone who has told you that email is dead as a marketing strategy, has ignored the statistics badly. The truth is, email can still provide terrific value to your business, especially when related to the kind of investment you have to put into it. According to Constant Contact, every dollar spent in email marketing returns approximately $38 in value, and if this is even close to the truth, there are very few strategies which can boast of that kind of ROI. This is not to say that you'll immediately see that kind of return, because anything takes a while to build up in a marketing strategy, but with commitment and clever email campaigns, there is no reason why you can't achieve an ROI similar to that.Your email campaigns can refer leads and prospects to your website, or to your social media accounts, where your planned content can be seen more readily. One of the great things about email campaigns is that they are so easy to orchestrate these days. There are a number of software programs like MailChimp and others, which can help you prepare email blasts that can be disseminated to a very wide audience. You can also have these email messages scheduled regularly, so that no personal intervention is necessary after you've created the original text of the email.Sending regular emails should be considered a solid component of your online presence, because it can be very successful at directing leads and prospects to your important online content. Once these leads and prospects have a chance to learn more about your business and its products or services, it becomes that much more likely that they will progress along the purchasing cycle.With all these avenues available to you, the challenge of achieving the kind of online presence you really want, becomes more a factor of how willing you are to put in all the work and commitment that will get you there.