In the era of digital transformation, your digital presence on the Internet makes you visible to potential clients and generates business opportunities, authority, promotes interaction and creates long-lasting relationships.
From social media posts to the search results available on Google, digital presence provides a great opportunity to ensure that you’re conveying the right impressions of your business. So, being on the Internet and having a presence in digital media is essential to gain credibility. But, the question is, how do you create a digital presence that makes you a lead-generating machine? It’s not that easy but we’ll explain to you how to consolidate your place on the Internet.
What is digital presence definition?
Digital presence refers to the space that your brand has on the Internet. This space includes all the channels of your brand. To give you an idea, the digital presence of your brand is your website, store, blog, accounts on social networks, downloadable publications, content and materials, social media ads, among others. Digital presence is the way to get your business found through digital media, showing you as a relevant and trustworthy brand to potential customers.
As you can see, you have at your disposal a wide set of possibilities to build and enhance your digital presence.
Why is it important to take care of the digital brand presence?
It is crucial to work on your digital visibility, don't you think? Think for a moment that you are an user interested in hiring a tourist package for your next vacation. What would you do? You would probably pull the phone out of your pocket, run a Google search, and immediately, review your options - a bunch of agencies shows up to compete for your attention.
Of course, the first results are more likely to close a sale, since users don’t have time (or interest) to go beyond the first page of results and, on the other hand, Google rewards with these positions those who better respond to search intent. As a result, a solid digital presence with a robust positioning in search engines and a good reputation means more clients and more revenues.
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6 essential factors to have a strong digital presence
How can you strengthen your digital presence? Here, we explain 8 essential factors that can help you boost your digital strategy to obtain real results.
1. Document your strategy
An essential first step is to establish a written roadmap. Your strategy should start with defining the following aspects:
● Your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictitious profile based on real customer data. It is the personification of the ideal customer of your company and the basis of the entire digital marketing strategy and content production. Unlike generic target audiences, the buyer persona has specific characteristics.
The creation of a buyer persona helped companies to plan more precise digital marketing strategies, aligned with the profile, interests and day of the clients. To create the buyer persona, it is necessary to research: who your customers are, what their jobs are, what they do during the day, their needs, etc.
Therefore, buyer personas come from the data you collect, not from the assumptions of the marketing team.
● Your value proposition. A value proposition is a resource we use to convey directly the advantages that our company brings to customers. The value proposition relates to the most outstanding aspects of your company and positions it among its consumers, which improves its ability to solve the problems they have. Defining a good value proposition is the first step for showing how your company can satisfy your customers efficiently and accurately.
However, few people know how to develop this positioning in the right way. There is a specific standard that allows a more precise result and with better chances of attracting more customers.
● KPIs and metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your actions. Do you know what successful strategies have in common? All of them constantly monitor their actions. This monitoring allows you to determine what is working and what is not working. Basically, it is the best way to analyze results. Once you are clear about this, you will have a compass that guides all your efforts.
2. Build a website
Of all your digital channels, your website is the most important. 94% of users make the first impression of your brand through your site’s design. As it is your own channel, you will have at your disposal many tools to develop your content, visibility and reputation. Your website is your cover letter and with it, you can:
- Increase the engagement of your users through a memorable user experience
- Generate more conversions by creating pages linked to the different stages of the sales funnel
- Create marketing automation processes
- Communicate your identity and what makes you different
- And more.
Once you have a clear goal in mind, choosing the right website builder and hosting platform will be a lot easier.
3. Create a blog
With a blog, you educate your audience and position yourself as an authority. A blog is for developing your brand and providing valuable content.
In fact, marketers who manage blogs are 13 times more likely to have a positive ROI on their efforts according to Hubspot. And 50% of the top 200 Fortune 500 companies have a blog (Daily Infographic). Likewise, businesses with blogs get an average of 67% more leads compared to businesses without blogs (DemandMetric).
With this panorama, it’s clear that having a blog is necessary. It's worth taking the time to create a content experience that attracts users and helps them navigate the buying journey. Few things are more effective in incentivizing a purchase than providing a remarkable experience to your users.
You can offer value to your users, educate them and create a lasting bond with them; consolidate your leadership in an industry through mentions and backlinks; and attract quality organic traffic permanently from SEO techniques, which increase search engine rankings, etc. Of course, the success of corporate blogging lies in the design of a content marketing strategy aligned with your business objectives and the needs of your buyer personas.
Definitely, content marketing is one of the best strategies to generate trust in users. This is because quality content is a tool that companies have to position themselves as an authority in their niche, delivering relevant and valuable information to users. In this sense, it is worth exploring all the possibilities, formats and themes that digital content offers: blog posts, podcasts, infographics, and videos are always a safe bet.
In recent years, interactive content has taken off because of its results in promoting the active participation of users, which improves engagement and, consequently, positively affects conversions. By the way, visual elements increase the desire to read content by 80%, and 75% of website credibility comes from design.
Videos are the future of the Internet and you can use them to promote your brand and create a digital presence. On any website and social networks, there are resources to host videos. Some go further and include in them the options to add subtitles, live polls, forms to capture leads and live broadcast, among others.
4. Amplify your content through social networks
According to Oberlo, 54% of users turn to social media to research products before buying and to strengthen your digital presence it is essential to be on social networks where your customers are. That's why so many entrepreneurs dedicate a large amount of their time to social networks. They represent a great opportunity to expand the reach of your brand online.
However, keep in mind that while they are excellent tools for building communities, social media alone is not enough to create a complete digital strategy because they are not your own channels. In the end, what you post on social media is no longer yours. But, you use them as sources to attract quality traffic to your website.
5. Optimize your organic positioning
Now that you know that it’s better to focus all your efforts on your own channels such as your website or your blog, you must make sure that you are visible on the Internet. To achieve these results, SEO is your best ally. You can start conducting an SEO audit to determine the health of your digital assets. From the results, start the On-Page and Off-Page optimizations.
The possibilities of search engine optimization are enormous. For example, if you have a physical store, you can work on your local SEO and let your customers come to you when they find you on the Google Maps pages.
6. Work on your corporate identity
Associating your brand with a series of values in the minds of your customers is the task of corporate identity. The corporate identity of a company is the set of characteristics, values and beliefs that brands use to set themselves apart from other brands like their history, ethics, work philosophy, values, daily culture, and norms.
It is, ultimately, its personality, which makes it unique and different from other brands. A company forges its own identity based on what it believes and thinks about itself. You can make your customers fall in love by sharing your company culture and how you are making the world a better place. The essence of your brand strengthens your digital presence.
Finally, any Digital Marketing strategy must monitor certain metrics to determine if you met your goals With tools like Google Analytics you can track some of these metrics.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Number of unique visitors
- Number of subscribers
- Number of followers in social networks
- Scope of publications
- Engagement
- Etc.
Don’t stop chasing rainbows
Building a strong presence on the Internet is key for being visible to your users and ensuring the sustainability of your business. Focus your efforts on your own channels: your website and the blog. Those platforms are the ones that will give you the best tools to create a remarkable experience for your users with which you can convince them to take the next step.
But, in the end. They are only a tool, the foundation of your digital success is not on selling and getting more customers. You will only achieve more revenues in the long term if you really care about your customers instead of stuffing them with offers and promotions. If your business focuses on helping the public and delivering good quality content, selling is easier.
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