You want your target audience, patients, or clients to know who you are, right? Here is how to improve your online presence and awareness of your digital brand.
Make Your Presence Present
Whether you are well on your way to creating the best digital brand presence you can, or just starting out, there are countless ways to up your online presence.
There are many tools, strategies, and marketing resources that are available. So, savvy digital branders often make use of them to make sure that their business gets noticed by the right people.
Let’s take a look.
SEE ALSO: 6 Branding Tools to Effectively Establish Your Digital Brand
1. Keep Your Ears Open
The first step you need to take in order to improve your online presence is to listen carefully. Know if people are talking about your brand or not and how they are talking about it. Also, always keep on top of the buzz surrounding your brand.
Also, it is important to not only be focused on you but other things that are happening in your industry. Know what other people are doing and how it’s working for them.
Helpful Tools To Keep You In The Know
- Google Alerts: You can use this tool for you, your brand, your competition, clients, and more.
- A Feedly Account: Once you make an account, set up 10-15 industry blogs to follow.
- Clearbit Connect: Add this to your email. It is a chrome extension that allows you to see the details of whoever you are emailing.
- Buffer: This allows you to monitor and post to social accounts.
- Stencil: For creating social media images in a snap.
2. Optimize Your Online Content
Many businesses and brands are found through search. However, you are only found through search if you write content that your potential clients are looking for. So, this content must then be optimized to be found for those search results.
This can be very intense and complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are some helpful SEO basics to get you started.
Focus on Keywords
- Ask at least 10 customers what they would Google to find a business like yours for keyword inspiration
- Additionally, have a look through any of your old emails where clients asked you questions
- Base an FAQ page off of those questions
- Develop a list of keywords to use by using a tool like KW Finder.
Blog Power
If you don’t already have a blog, starting one can do major work for your online presence. So get started!
Post on it at least once a month. This post should focus on the five themes you want to be found for in searches. This is so that the right people see it.
Many businesses set up their blogs on WordPress.
SEE ALSO: 5 Ways to Make Your Blog Visually Appealing
Use Social Media
Share your posts on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook using Buffer.com.
Create a network of links across multiple platforms surrounding your digital brand and sharing your content.
3. Claim Your Digital Brand
In order to improve your online presence, you have to go and mark your online real estate. It is very important for your SEO and social media marketing strategies that you claim your name or brand name.
Take the time to make strong profiles, descriptions, and links back to your website on these sites. This is so that when someone Googles your name or company, these are what will pop up first.
Here are some ways you can start:
- First, b
uild social media profiles and a blog - Next, add plugins to your blog and web pages that make all of your content able to be shared on social media
- Share two of your blog posts to your social media networks using Buffer.com a day
- Join social media groups that are relevant to your target audience
- Claim your Google My Business Listing
- Then put your business location on Foursquare, Yelp, and Facebook
4. Send The Right Emails
All of this social media strategy, promotion, profiles, and content is so that potential clients can find and start to build trust with you. You want them to know of your digital brand and have a positive image of it. Weekly emails can also play a big role in this process.
Here is one approach you can take to using emails the right way:
- Choose an email service provider that has an autoresponder option. Getresponse is an example of one.
- Have a lead magnet. This is a reason someone would want to give you their email. For example, it can be a helpful e-book, offer, or something else.
- Make an email form and popups on your site. Many people don’t like popups, but they are quite effective.
- Once you have emails, connect your RSS feed from your website to your email service provider. This means that every time you make a blog post, your list will get emailed.
- If you really want to automate things, you can set an autoresponder campaign up for weeks, months, or even longer. It might take a while to set this up, but once you do you won’t have to do any more work for the length of the campaign.
5.The Reviews Are In
Reviews are one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to grow your digital brand. So, pick 1-3 sites and focus on getting as many reviews as possible through them.
The top review sites are Yelp, Facebook, and Google My Business. However, u
Also, sending a personal note card to clients or customers after you meet for the first time can be one way to remind them to review. You can even include the URL or QR code to your personal review website on your business cards.
SEE ALSO: 5 Online Review Myths You Should Know
Start To Improve Your Online Presence Today
Starting, building, and maintaining a digital brand and presence requires a lot of work, planning, and strategy. There are many moving parts. There are also so many tools, tricks, and ideas that digital branders can implement.
Ultimately, if you want to improve your online presence, it is not something that can happen overnight. Moreover, it involves knowing your target audience, how to reach them, and how to keep that relationship going strong.
With strategic content, social media campaigns, longterm SEO planning, and email campaigns, you can make sure that people know about your digital brand. Additionally, you can also make sure that they think about it in the best possible light.
Which of these steps do you think is most important for building and improving an online presence? Comment below…
