Seven Ways to Improve Your Brand's Digital Presence

Did you know that 97 percent of customers search for information about a brand online before making their buying decision? It's important to have a digital presence so that your business can cater to this large online market and make it easy for prospective customers to find you, learn about what you offer, and connect and build trust with you.

Your digital presence is how your brand appears online. It is the result of all the effort that you put in to bridge the gap between you and your customer online. You can use various online tools to do this including websites, social media, blogs, digital ads, and more.

Building a strong digital presence for your business can take time, work, and careful strategies, but when it is done right, you can reap the benefits of enhanced brand visibility and more conversions.

Here are some tips for how to build an effective digital presence for your brand and make your voice heard in the crowded online world.

1. Create valuable content

The content that you create and share online is the voice of your brand. It's what potential customers identify you with and how they form their impression of your business. Make sure the content you present is simple, clear, and valuable to customers. You can add images to make your content informative and attention-grabbing.

The best content is effectively focused around the needs of your audience, says Phyllis Davidson, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester. Compelling stories focusing on your customers' requirements and how your product or service adds value to their lives are what will inspire your audience, drive engagement, and promote adoption.

A good first step in creating compelling content is to define your goals and determine your target audience. You can then build your buyer persona based on your target audience's online behavior and create an effective content strategy to convey all your key points.

2. Search engine optimization

An important aspect of achieving enhanced brand visibility is to get the maximum number of people to view your content. Search engine optimization helps you do that.

Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website's ranking on search engines by implementing a range of strategies and best practices. Let's say you run a bakery and have decided to publish a series of blog posts on baking, sharing tips and tricks from choosing the right ingredients to techniques. The search engines that you list your site on, like Google and Bing, use factors such as usage of relevant keywords, site loading time, ease of navigation, and the number of backlinks to your webpage to index and rank your page so that when a prospective customer searches for "baking", your page will be included in the search results.

Here are some benefits of SEO:

• Improves visibility: An SEO-friendly website improves the visibility of your digital brand and gathers quality traffic to your site that is more likely to convert and spread positive word of mouth about your business.

• Builds trust: Quality SEO results in a higher page ranking which enhances the trustworthiness of your business and builds brand authority.

• It's affordable: With SEO, you don't have to pay for ads to improve your website's visibility. For small businesses that means they can compete with other brands without having to splurge on promotions.

Since search engines like Google keep updating their algorithms, there isn't one surefire SEO strategy that promises a high page ranking. However, there are some popular practices that you can keep in mind, including: creating good content with a strong focus on keywords, optimizing your page for mobile, using relevant meta-tags, and promoting your page through influencer marketing and social media mentions.

3. Optimize your website

Say you have a visually appealing website for your business that displays relevant information about your product or service, with responsive call-to-action buttons and links to your landing pages. Your webpage is indexed on Google, Bing, and other search engines perfectly, and you run multiple campaigns to promote the page. Potential customers are visiting your website, and it's all coming together. But wait: your website conversation rate paints a completely different picture. You aren't converting the incoming visitors. What could have gone wrong? That's where website optimization comes in.

Website optimization can help you measure the performance of your website in terms of visits, engagement, and page reach and act on it in real time. You'll be able to:

• Monitor how visitors interact with your website. Understanding your visitors' website behavior can help optimize your site for better performance. Know what grabs your visitor's attention, what they click on, and how far they scroll.

• Run A/B tests. Improve website engagement by running A/B tests between the original and alternate versions of your website. Check which changes resonate better with your audience and result in more conversions.

• Create personalized website experiences. You can tailor your website content based on the visitor's demographics, previous interactions, and browsing pattern to provide personalized experiences.

4. Create multichannel visibility online

Potential customers are everywhere. Most customers consider a brand's website to be the most important factor in deciding whether to make a purchase. Many customers also want you to be available on their favorite social media platform and others expect personalized emails from your business.

Multi-channel visibility for your business can help you cater to different customer segments and keep everyone engaged at the same time. Focus on building an active brand presence across different online platforms. You can start with the most important platforms like website, email, and popular social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube and then expand to others like surveys, SMS, and more.

Creating multi-channel visibility online makes it easier for customers to discover your business and your unique brand, interact with you, and develop a lasting relationship.

5. Bring your teams together

Teamwork is an essential part of online success. As the number of marketing channels you use grows with your company, it's important that your teams join forces and put their best foot forward to achieve business goals.

A unified marketing platform can help create a cohesive environment for instant collaboration and team work. You can discuss ideas over web meetings, assign focused roles and responsibilities to the right marketers, and follow up on tasks in real-time to keep team productivity high.

When your teams work together, you eliminate the risk of communication gaps, build a supportive work culture, and accomplish tasks as a group.

6. Maintain a consistent brand experience

Providing consistent brand experience in terms of visual and verbal elements across your website, email, social media, and all other online and offline marketing channels is what's going to differentiate your business from the competition and make customers remember you.

Choose the right colors, font, and other visual components that reflect your brand's personality when you publish any content. And pay careful attention to visual impact when designing your brand's logo—it's going to be printed everywhere, so make sure it's distinct. Add relevant, high-quality images to support your content wherever needed. You can use both free and paid stock photography.

For your brand voice, create a particular writing style that conveys the heart of your business. Focus on creating a consistent tone and mood across all your messaging. Developing a style guide can help you achieve this while giving your teams a clear direction.

A consistent brand experience makes your brand feel more genuine and improves the trust factor among your customers.

7. Analyze campaign performance

As the saying goes, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." That's true when it comes to online brand visibility. It's important to make sense of your digital marketing data, whether it's a prospect's signup information, their interaction with your brand, or how they engage with your content. Every piece of data that you collect can be used to improve your marketing efforts and provide a personalized experience to customers.

Analytics makes it easier to assess your marketing progress. From how your campaigns are performing and what's working, what isn't to discovering hidden marketing insights, analytics gives you a clear picture of the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

It's a good idea to implement an analytics tool for your business. Analytics tools help you stay on top of marketing efforts that are spread across different platforms. You can track critical email metrics such as click rate, open rate, and bounce rate. You can monitor how your social media campaigns are faring using factors like demographics, reach and impressions, and engagement factor. These tools also help you track important metrics around your marketing ROI so that you know which campaigns are gaining you visitors and can optimize your marketing spend accordingly.

Build a strong digital presence

Building a strong digital presence for your business cannot happen overnight, but with an effective digital strategy that has a strong focus on content, SEO, website, teamwork, multi-channel visibility, brand consistency, and analytics, you can achieve it without too much time and effort.

We hope these tips will help you improve the digital presence of your brand. If you have any questions or think we have missed something, you can reach out to us in the comments below.