Establishing an online presence for your small business takes time and intentional work. Are you investing your energy into building your virtual presence in ways that count? Consider the following strategies for enhancing the way your company appears to the e-crowd.
Attractive Website
The first key to building a solid digital appearance for your business is creating a clean, well-made website. Templates make this easy for the ambitious DIYer, but investing in a professionally designed site will often allow for a more polished appearance. Keep your website looking fresh by ensuring it is maintained and updated regularly. If your website has been established for a while, consider scheduling an occasional revamp to ensure that your style feels contemporary and reflects current best practices for design, accessibility, and the like.
Regular Blog Posts
Once your site is established, you can build credibility, drive traffic to your site, and serve your audience by investing in weekly or monthly blog writing. This gives you a space to find your business’ voice while giving clients a reason to stay in touch through your site. Consider adding an email capture to your website so your audience for the dual benefit of allowing them to easily subscribe to your posts and enable you to stay in contact with them. A downloadable freebie can make the email subscription even more appealing, ensuring you connect with the maximum number of ideal clients.
Active Social Media
People increasingly seek to connect with old favorite businesses or discover new ones through social media. Maintaining active social media accounts will pay huge dividends in making your business appear relevant, allowing you to curate a portfolio of your work, and providing opportunities to connect directly with your audience. Delivering valuable content on a regular basis will help you cultivate an active, healthy following; to achieve this, consider posting daily (or even multiple times per day) on a variety of accounts at the ideal times for maximum impact. In addition to keeping in touch with your audience, social media is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website, build buzz around new products, and even host special events such as giveaways or collaborations. This has an enormous influence on the way your business appears to customers of all ages.
Virtual Events
Virtual events can be a way to make your business appear more lively and fun to your audience, draw in new customers and even help your clients build community with your employees and one another. A live discussion panel, video watch party, virtual tour, or engaging workshop are all excellent opportunities to make this happen. Even if you’re having a live event, consider hosting an online live stream to allow audiences from farther away to participate or encourage people to share the event with their friends on a broader level.
Relevant Advertising
To reach more of your ideal audience, it’s worth investing in some advertising, even if your budget is limited. Word of mouth can only do so much for your business in its early phases, so consider choosing a relevant advertising channel that will best suit your needs for building brand awareness.
Targeted SEO
Precise search engine optimization goes a long way in driving the right kind of traffic to your website. There are many ways to accomplish this, but a few places to start are posting regular content, writing rich meta descriptions, and making an engaging site that keeps users engaged.
Your small business should be represented just as well online as it is in person. By focusing your energy on these key areas, you can ensure that your digital presence is always ready for its close-up.
