With over 5.45 billion Internet users as of July 2024, businesses have seen fit to leverage the power of the Internet to get their brand’s message out to the masses. From driving engagement with social media to crafting tailor-made advertisements to attract new customers, building your brand’s online presence has never been so much easier, especially with the multitude of tools and services to help you achieve your marketing goals.
Even so, given the breadth of the Internet, knowing where to start and how you can drive your brand presence forward can feel overwhelming. Feeling a little lost? Rest assured, we have you covered with this handy beginner’s guide to building your online presence and making a name for your business.
Set Up a Professional Website
The first thing you should start with is a professional-looking website, which you can consider your “brand ambassador” that introduces your target audience to your brand. The website is not solely your primary business hub, but it is a point of connection to the wider world that enables you to share relevant information about your brand and provide opportunities to build rapport with future clients and business partners.
To achieve that, regularly updating your website content is essential to driving your business’ growth. However, your website should not focus solely on content alone; a good website should be appealing and accessible to visitors, primarily through the strategic use of eye-catching designs, clever web elements, and optimisations for performance on mobile devices and computers. Nothing drives a potential customer away faster than a poorly optimised site with a confusing site structure and a lot of ads.
You could also end up chasing away potential leads by having the following elements:
- Webpages take a long time to load.
- Webpages have plenty of broken or outdated links.
- Intrusive autoplay videos that get in the way of content.
- Your choice of wording is unclear.
- You have too many requirements to access content or join your programs.
Pay close attention to your website and its overall health: keep it updated as often as necessary and ensure you design it with your customers’ interests in mind. The better the user experience (including your content delivery), the more likely they will stick around and potentially convert into a loyal customer who will happily support your steady growth.
Leverage Social Media
With how widespread social media has become since it first started a few years ago, it comes as no surprise that businesses are going all-in to draw upon the medium’s audience to boost their online branding. The rapid interconnectivity of social media allows people to get information nearly instantaneously, allowing businesses to constantly engage with their new and existing customers at their convenience, promoting one-time deals, articles of interest, and more.
If you plan on making the most of social media for your online presence, your first task is to understand where your core audience is located. In most cases, it is common for people to have more than one social media account on various platforms; it may be beneficial to have multiple accounts across different platforms as well, especially if you plan on growing your presence and gaining the attention of potential customers.
Once your business accounts are set up, you will need to diligently post content for each account, but you need to keep your activity balanced. If you post too often, you could drown out other relevant posts or bore your audience; post too irregularly, and you could end up losing your audience’s attention. It will take some experimenting to find a posting frequency that works for your branding, let alone crafting noteworthy posts for your potential customers.
Engaging with your audience takes considerable work to retain their long-term interest, but it will be well worth the effort. You will be able to address customer concerns, create opportunities for conversions, and continue to add value with informative (and sometimes fun) posts that capture an interested audience. The better your engagement, the more likely people will flock to your social media to learn more about your offer.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Have you ever thought about how websites are ranked whenever you search for a random topic online? What criteria determine whether a website appears on the very first page of the search results? It is definitely not rocket science: search engine optimisation (SEO) is the essential ingredient that is vital for any website to thrive in a highly competitive environment.
In a nutshell, SEO is all about optimising your website and its content to help it rank higher on search engines. As a rule of thumb, the higher your search ranking, the more people will find and view your content; in turn, the more people who can easily find your content, the better your chances are at further building your online presence. Electing to ignore SEO is the easiest way to lose any chance of building your online presence in any meaningful way; SEO drives Internet users to websites that provide the answers they are looking for.
For an SEO strategy to succeed, you must plan your approach based on what you want from your website: are you seeking to direct website traffic to you? Are you looking to establish your brand as a subject matter expert? Are you primarily looking at conversions or other key metrics? Whatever your approach is, you will need to continuously refine and optimise your content to keep pace with the ever-changing SEO landscape.
The subject of SEO is complex, but the results are ultimately rewarding if you can employ a robust SEO strategy. Thankfully, there are plenty of free resources to help you understand how to leverage SEO to its fullest and further establish your online presence.
Advertise Online
Beyond social media advertising, web advertising in all its other forms can also play a crucial role in getting your branding to a broader audience. Even with a small online advertising budget, you can still see substantial gains from its results. As always, knowing your audience is a vital part of creating a solid advertising plan; a market analysis can give you a clear picture of the wants and needs of your target audience, allowing you to come up with specific solutions that your audience will be interested in.
From there, you can draft a comprehensive advertising plan that lists what you want from your ads: are you looking to increase website traffic, or are you keener on turning curious clicks into committed conversions? Set a clear set of goals and an advertising budget to help you maximise your efforts without losing value.
Creating your ads will require a creative edge to help you develop unique and engaging ads that can quickly grab the attention of your target audience. A combination of eye-popping graphical elements and catchy or thoughtful messages can produce impressive results, but it will take some refining before your efforts start to bear fruit. You can employ various online advertising tools to help you analyse the effectiveness of your ads, see where you can improve, and make adjustments on the fly at any time.
Develop Meaningful Content
When you are writing content for your website or even your other channels, you should always keep in mind that you are not writing simply to drive traffic or conversions for the good of your business. Instead, you should be putting out well-thought-out content that is not only engaging to read but also provides essential context to your readers about the topic you are discussing. Doing that can quickly put you on the map as a trusted and reputable source of knowledge about your industry, further cementing your reputation and increasing your outreach and legitimacy.
Think of how else you can brand yourself as a trusted source: are there topics gaining ground but no one has written about it yet? That is the perfect opportunity to write targeted content, especially if you happen to be a subject matter expert keeping up with the topic’s growing interest. Are there any knowledge gaps in existing content that you can fill? That is yet another opportunity not to be missed, as you address these gaps with accurate information that benefits everyone who reads it.
Equally important is that by establishing your reputation as a subject matter expert, you are also helping to strengthen your SEO strategy: backlinks are one of a few critical elements that can help improve your rankings, and with your growing trustworthiness, other websites will be more than happy to link your content on their content pages, further helping to cement your online presence to an even wider audience.
Track Your Online Progress
Solely posting content without getting a glimpse at its impact on your viewers (and your wider audience) will not tell you exactly how much it has impacted your online presence. Are you doing better than before? Has your number of impressions increased significantly? How about your conversion rate? With so many online analytic tools available, tracking your online presence has never been easier.
Conversion rates are not the sole indicator you should analyse; crucial as they are to your business, your analytics reports give you plenty of other helpful information you should put to good use. Of particular importance is getting a better understanding of your online audience, especially their preferences, wants and needs. You can better tailor your content to adapt to changing preferences or employ surveys and look up reviews to understand your audience better and find out what they expect from your company.
It helps to set your objectives before you start using analytics, so it is essential to know what you want from your branding efforts—building an audience or establishing your expertise, among other things—and align your analytics to those objectives. Doing so allows you to choose the right metrics to track and gives you a clear picture of what to improve upon (e.g., optimising your ads) and what to double down on (e.g., leveraging new interest in a new topic) as time passes.
Register for a Virtual Office
Even if you are primarily driven by remote work, there may be occasions when you may need to speak to business partners in person or have a roundtable with colleagues to discuss your online branding initiatives. In times like these, signing up for a virtual office package can provide plenty of benefits you might not otherwise have thought about.
Firstly, having a virtual office in a prime location, such as the heart of the financial district or in an affluent part of the city, can do wonders to improve how your potential clients view your company. You can establish a sense of legitimacy and professionalism simply by headquartering yourself in an excellent location, and you do not even have to pay a hefty sum in rent just to afford a virtual office’s handy services.
A virtual office does not offer an actual physical space beyond a meeting room for the occasional in-person meetings, but that is still a space you can use from time to time for only a nominal monthly or annual fee. Not only that, you can also enjoy several additional complementary services to help take care of your correspondence needs and even redirect callers to you at any time. That means less time fussing over mail collection and more time handling critical business operations that require your constant attention.
You can also use virtual offices as a cost-effective way to expand into new markets without worrying about renting an entire office space for a costly amount. It can be beneficial if you are looking to give one of your teams a collaborative space of their own or when you intend to test the waters in a brand new market in a different geographical location.
Take Advantage of My Office’s Virtual Solutions
A virtual office can significantly benefit your branding, even if you are a startup or small business looking to make a big impression in time. At My Office, we firmly believe a strategic virtual office location can help you attract potential clients. Take your business to the next level by renting a virtual office in a prestigious business location at a minimal cost.
We can help you embrace a convenient and robust virtual office solution and unlock the potential of a more agile and flexible business model. Contact us today to discuss your needs and explore our virtual office solutions!